Food Safety Law Reform Bill

I will continue, briefly, with the call that was interrupted. I believe I was in full flight speaking about country-of-origin labelling when the break came at the last opportunity to speak on this bill. I want to revisit that because it is an extremely important issue to many people, including many in the sector. I believe I was going to touch on the fact that we do rely heavily on certification from overseas jurisdictions—places where food imports come from. That is all well and good, because they rely on our own systems in a similar way and there has to be reciprocal trust back and forth between importing and exporting countries. But there is a saying in some parts of the world “Trust in God, but tether your camel”. It is all very well to take certificates and guarantees and so forth at face value from nations that we ostensibly trust, but there is no harm in embarking in the cheap insurance policy of checking as well—and of requiring that information to be backed up by as much additional information and detail as is possible.

I have a statement—it is a letter of sorts from Horticulture New Zealand outlining its position on the matter, and it is one with which New Zealand First concurs entirely. We have a voluntary country-of-origin labelling system for food, which is a bit of an anachronism in the world. It currently places the decisions on whether to provide country-of-origin information with the suppliers, which deprives consumers of information that they want. We have existing regulations that require mandatory country-of-origin labelling for footwear, whiteware, wine, and clothing, but we do not have it for food. That disadvantages fruit and vegetable growers as their products are identified as New Zealand - grown, and it means that our food regulations are out of step with Australia and 90 percent of our trading partners. Horticulture New Zealand answers some questions there in its statement. Is this a trade barrier? No, most countries around the world have some form of mandatory country-of-origin labelling. Will we face retaliatory action? No, again, for the same reason, because most countries with which we trade have some sort of a country-of-origin labelling system.

But there is a perception—and I think there is some validity to it—that there is a reluctance on the part of the Government to accept these quite valid criticisms from across the sector and from consumers. This is probably because there is pressure from one particular supplier, in terms of resisting having country of origin identified on some food products. I will not name the country, but I am pretty sure we all know which it is. There is a perception that because a great deal of financial support comes from that nation to the major party of Government, it is, therefore, reluctant to upset this particular nation by going down the road of country-of-origin labelling, which—as Horticulture New Zealand quite rightly pointed out—about 90 percent of the world does have.

So our position is that we feel that a Food Safety Law Reform Bill that already aims to amend the Food Act is the perfect opportunity to include country-of-origin labelling, when it was not included in the first instance. I do hope that the Government does take this opportunity to listen again to the valid concerns of people who are concerned by this and to open its mind to the opportunity of addressing them. It would be a great shame if the support of other parties across the House were to be withdrawn because the Government found itself not of a mind to be open to those sorts of concerns. All that said, I do not intend to take up too much more of the House’s time at this stage, other than to reiterate that New Zealand First will support this bill only through to the select committee at this stage, wherein we hope and trust that our concerns will be addressed, and our continued support beyond the select committee stage will be dependent on our concerns being addressed and being answered. Thank you.

It is a privilege to be able to speak in support of this bill, for a number of reasons, the first being that I am a member of the Primary Production Committee, so this bill will come to us in the not too distant future. The second is because the electorate that I represent is a significant producer of food and beverages, and is heavily reliant on a robust food safety system and the integrity of that system as seen by our exporters across the world. In terms of Southland and South Otago, dairy and meat—and wine to a lesser extent—are a significant part of our export base, so our reputation as a producing nation and as a producing region is significant to us, and this bill will help to strengthen that.

Just a reminder around the genesis of the bill: a few years back, after the whey protein concentrate contamination inquiry, there were a series of recommendations for legislative change that came out as part of that, and this bill goes toward addressing those. It includes a range of changes to strengthen our response to food safety incidents by creating a more consistent and fair approach to the enforcement of that.

There are a number of significant parts to that. I think that although members previously speaking on this bill have canvassed some of the issues that came about as part of the inquiry, I just want to reiterate that I think that the Government’s response and industry’s response as a result of the issue as it was identified need to be hugely commended. The response by the Government and industry was appropriate at the time, and this bill, as a reactive measure following on as a result of that, gives us the chance to further strengthen our provisions around food safety and to further strengthen our ability to address a food safety incident, whether or not it has substance at the specific point of time when it is initially recognised.

As I say, our reputation is heavily reliant on our having a robust and recognised food safety system. It sets us apart from many food-producing nations that we are in competition with. The Primary Production Committee is currently considering the Geographical Indications (Wine and Spirits) Registration Amendment Bill, which is another bill similar to this, which supports—

💬 Kris Faafoi: It’s a great bill.

It is a very great bill. It goes to support our wine industry by protecting the regions in which the grapes were grown—Marlborough, Martinborough, Gisborne, Central Otago—and that is incredibly important when we are in competition with other nations that see the value in the New Zealand brand and our reputation and look to take advantage of that.

I look forward to hearing submissions on this bill as it comes to our select committee, and I look forward to hearing the rest of the debate as well. Thank you.

I am not a member of the Primary Production Committee, but I do have a passing interest, I guess, in matters of quality and quality systems, so it is in that regard that I am going to make my contribution this evening. This bill is, I think, very interesting, because not only does it look to improve the food safety system through the recommendations came out of the inquiry with regard to the Fonterra botulism scare, but it actually attempts to align three particular Acts with regard to the food safety system, to ensure that we, hopefully, come out with something that will better protect human health, ensure our reputation for good food safety qualities, and ensure that we are a supplier of safe and suitable food, both here in New Zealand and overseas. With regard to that botulism scare, which did precipitate the Government inquiry from which came the recommendations that fed into the development of this particular piece of legislation, it is an important thing to note that within the explanatory note of this bill, it talks a lot about reputation.

We are a country, of course, that is heavily reliant on our ability to produce safe food in good quantities, for the world markets in particular. Our reputation is everything. We know that when there have been periods when there have been scares, such as what precipitated this particular piece of legislation, they do sit in the minds of consumers overseas—their ability to continue to trust us, as producers, to produce good, safe, quality food. We only have to look to other countries that are kind of snapping at our heels in terms of wanting to take those markets from us. So our reputation across the globe has to be everything, in that regard. With regard to reputation, there is no doubt that one of the most difficult periods for us occurred with regard to the scare around contaminated milk powder, particularly the milk formula for children in China, where we saw distressing stories of how children were getting really sick, and worse. You cannot come back easily from a dent in your reputation like that.

We know that with regard to feeding the most vulnerable, like our children, we have a situation just up in Havelock North where our water supply has been contaminated. We are very scared for not only our children but our elderly people, with regard to them being able to be well, in terms of being able to consume the water up there. I really feel for the community up there. How many—there are 3,000, I think, is the latest figure. So we are very concerned for their well-being, particularly our elderly and our children. So I can understand how easy it is for a country’s reputation to be damaged. But there are mechanisms in place, and this bill seeks to align the three Acts—the Animal Products Act, the Food Act, and the Wine Act—to ensure that we have got some consistency over our food safety process. It also gives us an opportunity to examine some of the quality systems within that.

There are four key features of this particular bill. There is the requirement for the risk-based plans to be supplied to the regulator, and for the submission for review of the relevant verification agencies. What that means is that producers need to be developing plans, and those agencies that will review those plans need to be verified by the regulator. That is great. That is the standard, quality process, I guess, across whatever industry you are in. It is good that we are taking a best-practice approach to quality intervention, in this particular regard. It also has the requirement for traceability, to ensure that when problems do happen, you can safely recall—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

Tēnā koe, Mr Deputy Speaker. Just before the dinner break, I was commenting on the four key features of this piece of legislation—primarily, the requirement for the development of risk plans and the verification of the agency that would monitor those plans. The second part is traceability, so that if there are any food safety incidents, there is an ability to recall defective products easily and also trace back to source so that any of the issues can be mitigated quite quickly. The third aspect is really about accountability, and the regulator here—this bill indicates that they hold prime accountability even though the agency’s role will be in acting to ensure verification of the various standards as developed by the regulator. The last key aspect is standardisation of compliance of the methods across all of the food safety system. So it has the bones of the development of a relatively robust quality system in those terms.

I just want to make some comments about what we might be looking to the select committee to determine and about some other aspects for it to look at. Here I want to quote my colleague the Hon Damien O’Connor when he talked about the whole debacle having occurred because food safety testing by Crown research institute AgResearch and the oversight by AsureQuality had failed and, while the mistake occurred, Fonterra was relying on advice from Government entities that were not adequately resourced.

What the Hon Damien O’Connor was also referring to was the establishment of an independent food safety authority. Here the select committee has an opportunity to really look at the viability of that, and I would strongly suggest that—particularly in cases such as the one that precipitated the development of this particular bill—the nature of independence for a food safety authority would be very useful. The cautionary tale is, of course, the cases where food safety has been quite clearly compromised. I spoke in my earlier contribution about how damaging that is to our reputation. The damage to our reputation does not go away quickly. It takes some work to rebuild trust in our food safety systems after those kinds of events.

In terms of the development of a quality system, I think the bones are very much there, but there are some questions that need to be asked at the select committee. We would certainly be looking to explore the independent nature, possibly, of a food safety authority. We would be looking at reviewing other monitoring processes either through other jurisdictions or through other sectors. There are lots of good and robust quality systems that are there that can be used as comparatives when the select committee is looking at this bill.

As I said at the beginning of my contribution, I am not a member of this select committee but have a keen interest in ensuring that we develop really good quality systems across the range of our food safety environment, because it is very important that we manage to retain our reputation as a safe food producer and it is very important for our economy going forward. Thank you. I commend the bill to the House.

It is a pleasure to take a short call on the Food Safety Law Reform Bill. I am just thinking back to the days when the whey protein concentrate contamination inquiry was happening and back to that scare that we had. I just want to share an analogy with you that I used in a speech that I did at the time. At the time, Team New Zealand was doing its boat racing, and the dairy industry was going along at its $8 or whatever it was. Team New Zealand was going along and it is 8-1 up, and we all had a huge amount of confidence in the industry. I think you can all remember that day when Team New Zealand just about tipped out of the water and it managed to recover just in time to get up and finish that race. That is pretty much the analogy I used around this whey protein concentrate scare, because, actually, it was not botulism—it did not prove to be botulism. It was not something that was actually going to sink the boat—but if that boat had tipped over and sunk it could not have continued on that race.

So it is really important that when you get into a situation like that where the wheels start to fall off—and that is probably not the best analogy for a boat—or the rudder starts to shift in an industry, then it is really important that we have all the systems and processes in place so that we can act quickly, so that we can right that boat and we can continue sailing.

It is extremely important for a country like New Zealand because it accounts for 60 percent of our food and beverage exports that we send overseas. We are an employer of 79,000 people, so it is really critical to provincial New Zealand and urban New Zealand. Even with a scare, even with something that was not ultimately proven to be botulism, there are millions and millions and millions of people in this world who are on social media, and our reputation can just go down the drain like that. So there was a lot of work and a lot of homework done in terms of recovery and the time taken to discover exactly what the problem was, and eventually we got to the point where we knew what it was not. But it is really important now that risk-based plans are put in place so that when there is a hiccup, when something is about to tip, or when there is a bit of a scare, we know exactly how to follow, we know exactly what to do, and we have got all the right schemes in place.

The ministry, under this piece of legislation, will be given a statutory role in contingency planning, and the Director-General of primary industries will have a new power to require disclosure of information held by a party that provides service to a food business.

We are putting all this legislation in place. It is too important to let things fall through the cracks, so we have got to have everybody on board and have strong contingency plans. It is no different to having a health and safety plan in your business. You have actually got to recognise your risk, work out what your risk might be, and find ways to mitigate it—so that if you do happen to have a day where it looks like the boat is going to tip over, you can straighten it up and sail on pretty quickly. Thank you.

I am pleased to speak on the first reading of the Food Safety Law Reform Bill. At the outset I would like to just extend my thoughts, as has been expressed earlier, to the good people of Havelock North. We know that they will get through this, but definitely our thoughts are with them at this time.

If we think of the predicament in Havelock North, it is not too dissimilar to the subject matter of the bill that we are debating tonight, because we are talking about contamination. We are talking about water quality. We are talking about food safety. If we look at Havelock North, certainly the questions being asked now are the same questions that were asked when the botulism scare arose. How could this happen? This is not acceptable. Where is the leadership? We need to get to the bottom of this. Questions need to be asked and answered. Obviously, our thoughts are with the people of Havelock North at this time, and I know that they will get over this, but we are talking about 2,000 people in a community. This is not an insignificant matter.

We do have to draw the analogy between what is happening in Havelock North and this bill here, which is rectifying a botch-up. We must not forget that, and listening to the speakers from the other side, it is almost like they start their speeches at the end of the inquiry—“Oh, we had this inquiry and made these recommendations and everything’s all well and good. We’re passing the law now to do the statutory tidy-up, and everything’s all well and good.” But I think we really need to backtrack and look at the whole situation that arose around the botulism scare. We must not downplay it, because our whole economy as a country was at risk.

We are talking about Fonterra. We are talking about the fourth-largest producer of dairy products in the world—7 percent of our GDP, and multibillions in turnover. It is a significant company and it committed a grave error in its processing plant in Hautapu. At that little processing plant they did not clean a pipe as they were supposed to, and that paru pipe, as we would call it—a contaminated pipe—processed 38 tonnes of whey protein concentrate. That 38 tonnes of concentrate was sold to customers around the world. It was sold around the world, mainly to food producers—producers of infant formula, sports drinks, protein drinks, and the like. So that 38 tonnes ended up in 1,000 tonnes of all of these other value-added products that were all over the world—all over the globe.

The damage that was done through that oversight at that plant could have been remedied straight away had the people responsible at the plant said: “Oh, we have a problem here. We haven’t quite followed the rules. Let’s downgrade this whey concentrate, and we will have to market it through some other channels as a downgraded product.” But no, that product was formulated and sold. This occurred around early 2012 and it was not picked up until about 12 months later, in early 2013, when Fonterra was alerted to the testing and the potential for botulism bacteria being present in a sample.

We can breathe a sigh of relief and say “Oh, well, there wasn’t botulism, so everything’s fine. There wasn’t a scare.”, but the fact of the matter is, if you read that report—and it’s 110 pages long—you will see that it details multilevel failures from Fonterra and the testing agencies, through to the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) as well. I guess what I am saying is we do need to look at the seriousness of what this piece of legislation is addressing, because what happened then was that Fonterra had it retested, and then it found out in about July 2013 that, whoa, this was serious. Fonterra had to elevate it, and that led to MPI doing a worldwide product recall. That is serious, serious damage to our dairy industry, our brand, and Fonterra.

That worldwide public recall led to importation bans by our major market in China. What I am saying is that we should not downplay the seriousness of that botulism scare. It is timely that we are now debating this food bill, which is implementing the recommendations that were made in that report, because, as I have mentioned, there were a host of blunders, failures, and errors that occurred right throughout all of the different parties involved. As I was saying, Fonterra has been deeply impacted on.

I am really surprised that the members on the other side are saying: “You know, there wasn’t botulism in there, so no damage was done.” Fonterra and our industry are still dealing with the aftermath of the damage to this day. If we look at the litigation and the damages that are being claimed by Danone, it is in the billions of dollars. That is a contingent liability that Fonterra is potentially facing for the damage that 38 tonnes of whey protein caused to Danone’s business. That is a huge potential liability that Fonterra still has to face up to. Sure, Fonterra owned up to breaches of the Animal Products Act. It copped a fine for not following its own food risk-management procedures, and I am pleased to say that in the aftermath of the report, it has definitely stepped up its game, as it most certainly had to, in terms of its crisis management and dealing with a crisis on such a grand scale.

So it certainly was a wake-up call. In no way was it a case of “no damage done”. Certainly, it may not have been botulism that was found in the whey protein concentrate, but there was bacteria found in it. So, again, this goes back to our brand, our reputation, and the impact that this has had. Confidence was shaken during the botulism scare—just as confidence has been shaken in the community of Havelock North. I do acknowledge MPI for putting through these changes that, again, will address those risk management issues.

At the time, we were concerned—and I think this is a fair point—that MPI was a superministry where forestry, fish, food safety, and everything else had been thrown into one super-organisation. To be fair, it did not respond very well to this crisis. But the ministry has learnt its lesson and we are seeing the passage of this legislation. This bill will do the legal strengthening of the processes that is required so that we can ensure that we have robust systems, so that we can build and be proud of our brand, and, more importantly, so that we can give confidence to our customers in the market. They need to be able to have confidence that we do have the systems in place so that they will not be buying contaminated products—they will not be getting a worldwide recall—and they will have, hopefully, the confidence to buy many more volumes of our world-class dairy products.

I am very pleased to stand in support of this very important piece of legislation. It does two things: firstly, it ensures that lives are protected and, secondly, it ensures that our way of life is protected.

I think that it is important to understand that the products that are shipped from this country to markets in the world have a reputation of being not only great food and beverages but also safe. We have been able to build our export markets on the reputation of having not just nutritious and good food but safe food. Our response to this inquiry is important because it is a responsible and measured response to some concerns—very serious concerns—that arose through this situation.

The World Health Organization, in its 2010 data, states that 351,000 people a year died of food poisoning in the world. So it is a major global problem. There were 22 different food-borne diseases experienced in 2010, which affected 582 million people.

One of the things about New Zealand is the quality of our food. It is highly sought after, it is of high value, and, in order to ensure that people who purchase it and partake of it remain safe, we must have legislation in place for measures that protect the development, the production, and the shipping of these products. So this bill is very important in that regard. Sixty percent of New Zealand’s merchandise sold overseas is food and beverages. As my colleague Barbara Kuriger said, 79,000 people earn a living producing food and beverages. So I am very happy to support and commend this bill, in its first reading, to the House.

Bill read a first time.

Bill referred to the Primary Production Committee.