Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill

I move, That the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill be now read a third time. I want to begin this third reading debate by acknowledging again the work of the Primary Production Committee on this technical but important bill. The Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill will extend, expand, and clarify data protection in the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Act 1997 and the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act 1996.

Data protection is how Government agencies use and safeguard the data that is supplied to them as part of applications to register agricultural compounds and veterinary medicines. Data protection rules prevent agencies from using the data provided by a previous applicant to assess subsequent applications to register similar products for the duration of a protected period. This is achieved, however, without stopping third parties from generating their own data and registering a competing product.

In bringing this bill to the House my objective is to support primary industries’ productivity and international competitiveness by encouraging the registration in New Zealand of new agricultural compounds and veterinary medicines (ACVM) products and new uses for existing products. However, I want to ensure that this is done in such a way that we do not inhibit competition in our ACVM product markets.

The revised bill before you is very different from the version introduced. The Primary Production Committee recommended a number of changes to the bill in response to submissions by users and suppliers of agricultural compounds. As I said in the second reading speech, the revised bill is a balanced approach. It is balancing the issues raised by submitters, and I thank the members of the committee for their diligence. The changes definitely improve the bill. The bill will make a number of revisions to the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Act, and for innovative products, including new uses, the bill is going to extend the data protection to 10 years and simplify how the data protection is actually applied. For non-innovative products, including reformulations and new uses, the bill is introducing data protection of 5 years. For data supplied as part of reassessments the bill introduces 5 years’ data protection.

The bill also clarifies and expands what qualifies as a new use. Under the bill, applications would qualify for data protection if they result in a product being used on an additional species of plant or animal, or a new pest or disease, or if they allow different application rates, methods, or withholding periods. Although those changes seem pretty technical in nature they are very important to our primary industries. Data protection provides time for suppliers of agricultural compounds to recoup the cost of developing the data to support the registration application.

In terms of the benefits, the bill creates the right incentives for suppliers of agricultural compounds to invest in developing the data. This data is required by the regulators, as well as the data needed to support any reassessments. I am confident that suppliers will respond positively and that we will see more of the innovative products being brought to our market. We will also see good products stay on the market after reassessments, and products that will be registered for a wider range or broader array of uses to help our smaller sectors.

The benefits of this for users of agricultural compounds are going to be higher investment in research and development, and increased primary industry productivity and international competitiveness. This is particularly important for the smaller sectors. There will also be better pest and disease management, and lower pesticide and antimicrobial resistance. There will be reduced risk to the environment, food safety, trade, animal welfare, and workers as we aim to phase out unsuitable products. Finally, there will be stronger supply side competition as substitute products are introduced to the market over time to compete with the registered products.

I would like to thank the Primary Production Committee again, and also the submitters who took time to submit on the bill. I think this is an improved piece of legislation that will deliver benefits to our primary industries and, in doing so, to New Zealand. I commend the bill to the House.

I was talking briefly to a constituent tonight, just before I came down, and he said: “Go down and give the Government heaps.” It is going to be difficult, because we do agree with the Government on this piece of legislation, and it nice to see Minister Goodhew acknowledge the good work that the Primary Production Committee did to improve a bill.

I have said before in speeches in the House that this is a bill to protect New Zealand farmers and primary industry producers from ourselves. It is about innovation, and we are very, very good at that. So what has happened over the years is that we have had agricultural chemicals and compounds, they have been designed and developed for a certain purpose, and then, in the good old Kiwi way, farmers have taken that product and said “Well, that might be good somewhere else.”, and they have applied it. But, in the new world of traceability and of maximum residue levels and accountability and registration, that is simply not good enough.

The Minister has said that this bill is designed to do a couple of things—not to inhibit competition. The Government still believes that competition delivers nirvana to everything and everyone. It does wake up occasionally to the fact that, actually—through some good regulation and good law—when we have controlled competition and robust commercial activity, we often get a far better outcome.

The bill is a balanced piece of legislation that does allow for the protection of data—of course, people may be confused: it is basically information that is gathered to show that a chemical works and is not harmful when it is applied to a particular crop or use and is not harmful to the crop or the animal and does not hang around to be harmful to anyone in the food that might be consumed from that. So companies put a lot of money into that science and into the information that then gets provided to Agcarm for registration of the product to say what it is used for, what the rates that should be applied are, and that, if done correctly, it will offer no harm to the environment or to the animal or to the crop or to the consumers of the products.

We, as a country, must uphold those core principles absolutely. There should be no doubt that any food produced in this country is indeed the safest, best, and purest food that people can consume around the world. The premium that we should be getting for that should enable farmers to maintain their viability into the future.

This piece of legislation is timely. I have got here a report done by Covec—you know, another one of the consultancy agencies that the Government is often happy to throw money at. It was done in February 2009, and, in fact, it has taken a long, long time now—2016; it is almost the end of it—for the Government to get off its butt and get around to actually implementing the recommendations here.

A lot of people in the chemical industry and the industry supplying goods for the agricultural sector have probably been frustrated. They will be pleased to see the third reading of this bill go through the House, and I am certainly not going to delay that any longer than necessary. Mr Assistant Speaker, you will be pleased to hear that.

Can I just say that we support the Government bringing the bill to the House, finally. The select committee has done the best job we possibly can. It is a balanced bill between protecting the information supplied by companies, but leaving the door open for innovation and for the development of new products. So I think this will be a good bill for agribusiness moving forward, and I hope that it is implemented, used wisely, and does, indeed, protect New Zealand’s reputation as the producer of the finest food and fibre for the most discerning customers in the wider world. Thank you.

It gives me a great deal of pleasure to speak in the third reading of the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill. As has already been said tonight, it is a bill that has been a little while in the making, but it is a very important bill for New Zealand agriculture because it gives us the opportunity, I guess, to become more innovative than we have been and to get access to some modern and innovative products that have not been available on the New Zealand market to date. It also gives companies the opportunity to protect those products for a little longer, and that is the reason they will be available in the market place. As well as that, it also gives us the opportunity to use products for different uses than we have to date. This legislation enables companies to protect that data for a little longer as they change the use of those products from one use to another.

So it is a pretty important bill for agriculture in New Zealand, and it gives us a really good opportunity, I think, to rid the country of a large number of chemicals that are well out of date. The reason it gives us the opportunity to rid the country of those chemicals is that there are much better, newer, and more innovative animal remedies and what we would know, I suppose, as chemicals, primarily around weed control and things like that—there are all sorts of pest controls—on the market in other parts of the world than there are in New Zealand, and this bill will enable those to come to New Zealand. So I think it is quite exciting for New Zealand. It gives us the opportunity, as I said, to become more innovative, and it will clean up a lot of the old chemicals around.

For quite some years now companies have been stating that the amount of protection they get on bringing a new chemical into the country is not adequate to enable them to go through the cost structure. So the cost structure is too high for the short-term time frame they can protect that data, and, consequently, because our market is so small, it is not really economic for them to bring that product to New Zealand to make it available to our farmers.

The Primary Production Committee had some interesting debates on this and, as often happens on our select committee, we ventured into discussion on all sorts of other things, from food safety, to food labelling, to country of origin, to Monsanto, which is one of our favourite topics, actually. Fortunately, our select committee staff are very tolerant of us, and they do put up with some quite wide-ranging discussions on these topics that we have in the course of the select committee meetings. But out of that discussion comes some interesting stuff, and I think it really just emphasises the fact that we need to create opportunities for new and modern, innovative products to come to New Zealand in order to eliminate some of the older ones we have.

So—like the previous speaker, Damien O’Connor—I am not going to take too long on this contribution, but I do want to congratulate the Minister, Jo Goodhew, on bringing this bill to the House. I think, as I said, it is a necessary bill and it will do a great job. We did have great discussion on the select committee. We did not reach full agreement, and the Greens have inserted what I would consider to be an extraordinary minority view, appended to the bill, which is almost bigger than the report itself. But, none the less, that is how we live in our select committee and it works pretty well for us.

So it gives me pleasure to support this bill as it goes forward. I think we have had adequate discussion, both in the select committee and in the House, on where this bill is going to take us and where it is going to take agriculture in the future. It will improve our opportunity, I guess, to get rid of some historic chemicals, and it will also improve farmers’ opportunities to make a great deal of progress using new generation products. So I have got no problem commending this bill to the House and thanking the select committee for the hard work it did on the discussion on it. Thank you.

Kia ora, Mr Assistant Speaker. I am pleased to speak at the third reading of this bill, the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill. Yes, this is a technical bill, but the essence of it is that we have listened to all of the submitters, who unanimously encouraged the Primary Production Committee to extend the data-protection periods. We listened carefully to those submitters and, acting as a committee, we implemented those changes, and I think we have come to a bill that is going to be welcomed by our agricultural and horticultural sectors, and also the suppliers of agricultural compounds, agrichemicals, and veterinary medicines alike.

This is an example of the select committee working together and crafting the piece of legislation and improving it. I believe that what we have done is strike a balance. I believe we have struck a better balance, because, clearly, the data-protection periods from the incumbent piece of legislation and even the initial bill that was proposed were inadequate. They were inadequate and, therefore, the industries were asking our committee and asking Parliament to give greater consideration and more extension to those periods. So we have done that.

We have done that, and why have we done that? We want to make sure that those companies get an extended period of protection that allows them to recover their upfront investments into research and supplying highly technical, confidential information that they have to supply with their applications for registration of these products. The changes enable them to recoup that investment that they make. But also we are not into creating monopolies. We do not want this protection to be unlimited, but we have set a fair duration for all the different categories of applications that are provided under the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Act.

We have struck that balance, and why do we want to do that? We want to ensure that there are opportunities and incentives for the suppliers of these products to actually submit new registrations, new uses, and new reformulations to other parts of our agricultural industries. So this bill will encourage those registrations to, hopefully, be flooding in thick and fast so we can help broaden and deepen our productive sectors, our primary sectors, and grow the wealth and grow the productivity of our beautiful country and our export sectors. This is, I believe—and as previous speakers have said—about us striking the right balance.

We do want to see those new products come into the market and come into the registration process. That will benefit new fledgling industries, particularly in our smaller niche product areas. Many—in fact, the vast majority—of the products that are registered have a very, very small customer base, and so there is a lot of upfront investment required in the business case. Without that protection, it is hard for those suppliers to make that business case work. So with this bill we do want to encourage a greater variety of new products to be coming forth, provide more protection for our plants and more treatments for animals, and to increase the productivity of our primary sectors, primarily.

This is a big market that we are talking about too. Although we are a major producer in Aotearoa, we are talking about over half a billion dollars’ worth of agricultural products and veterinary medicines. That is not an insubstantial number—over half a billion dollars—and as for our sheep and beef farmers and the on-farm costs, Mr McKelvie would be well aware of the costs that are involved as a percentage of the on-farm costs that these products create. There are a lot of these products, but only a small amount of them have very large turnover, large sales. The vast majority of them are very small niche products and, therefore, they do need that extra protection, and also the encouragement of new applications and new registrations to come through so we can meet the needs of our horticultural and agricultural sectors.

So, with that, I will not prolong my contribution, but I do commend the work that we have done as a committee. We have crafted a fine piece of legislation here, and I am sure it will be to the benefit of our farmers and our horticultural producers right throughout the country, and I commend it to the House.

The question is—

💬 Steffan Browning: I thought we were having another National Party one.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Is the member calling?

💬 Steffan Browning: Yes, I am, Mr Assistant Speaker.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Steffan Browning.

I would like to speak on the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill. I am very disappointed that a bit more rigour has not been put to the bill by the Government and some of the other Opposition parties as well. This bill is openly aiming to encourage more pesticides into New Zealand and with double the length of secrecy around those compounds. I call it a Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPPA) bill, and the reason I do that is that this bill started off extending the data protection from 5 years, year on year on year—in three stages—for new uses, up to 8 years. When that was announced last year, I thought “Mmm, that sounds like the Pharmac issue around the TPPA.”, and I looked at that and identified it as that. But it got worse.

When the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was agreed and signed, effectively, earlier in the year, it had made a 10-year period of data protection for agricultural compounds and veterinary medicines (ACVM). We identified that with the officials. They fudged for a bit and said “No, no, we’re not sure what’s in the TPPA.”—it was very straightforward, it was very easy—and then, sure enough, it has come through to 10 years’ data protection.

That is 10 years where civil society, interested parties in the community, people who really care about the health of New Zealanders and the environment cannot get the information about the formulations in these compounds—10 years. How many of those will need to be reassessed and withdrawn, even in that time—or should have been? We cannot rely on our Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI). It is interested in production; it does not care about the tool. It does not care, it seems, whether people are being exposed to endocrine disrupters that are affecting our children’s hormonal development. It does not seem to care about the rising cancer rates that are so prevalent throughout New Zealand, particularly in the horticultural and agricultural areas. We have our own universities doing research and showing the prevalence and the increased rate of these sorts of diseases amongst the workers, particularly women, in horticulture, where they appear to be exposed to these pesticides.

But what is happening? We cover it up. We say: “Bring in more and tell us less.” Eleven hundred new ACVM compounds were registered since 2008, since this Government has been in, and only 239 were cancelled or expired. I am holding the fine print—these are the thousands of pesticides and agricultural compounds and veterinary medicines are already registered. What do we need more for? Do we need a plethora of more things when we are not even managing what is out there?

Other countries, progressive countries, are doing pesticide reduction strategies. They are not cranking up. They are not trying to find ways to bring in more and then to hide what the hell is in them. I did an amendment to this, but, of course, it got voted down. It was to make sure that all applications for new or altered compounds be assessed in the full formulation as used—as used; as the community, the farmer, the worker, the animals, and the environment are exposed to. So many of these are not assessed. They are generally assessed with industry science, which you could assume is partially biased or at least edited, and not the full formulation as it should be tested—actually tested and not just fiddled about with—“Look at this compound maybe, or that.”

I did bring up in a previous speech that one of the main additives in many of the glyphosate products—it is in 69 of the 91 registered—is banned in Europe. The European Commission has banned it, and we cannot even find out, because of this sort of damned law, which one it is. Someone who may even think that glyphosate-based herbicides are OK cannot find out which ones have got polyoxyethylene tallow amine in them, which has been found to be even more toxic than the base ingredient, glyphosate. They cannot find that out because of this bill.

Unfortunately, most of this House, apart from the Greens and the Māori Party, are ticking it through. It is appalling. Can we rely on MPI? No, we cannot. Can we rely on the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA)? No, we cannot. I use a primary example with the EPA. Because of the pressure on glyphosate and the issues that are going, especially through Europe—and we should be very cognisant of that, as an exporting country that relies on clean, unadulterated food, and what consumers want—they do not want to have those traces in their food. The Environmental Protection Authority commissioned a paper to look at what the World Health Organization’s (WHO) international agency for research on cancer had found—that glyphosate was a probable carcinogen. [Interruption] Seventeen world-class toxicologists—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Sorry—[Interruption] Order! I just ask the member to take a seat, and I am going to ask Mr Barclay to cease interjecting for the rest of this speech.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. So this international agency, with highly reputable scientists, people who really, really know that subject, went through a multitude of papers, not just the industry papers. They looked at papers with full formulation, not just the ones with a sole ingredient, and they said it is a probable carcinogen. It should be off the shelves on that basis, but, of course, it does not suit us here in New Zealand.

So what happens? The EPA commissions someone to reassess it. It gets one individual to reassess it, and then, of course, it edits it. We have looked at some of that editing, and we have also looked at what the Ministry of Health said about it. The Ministry of Health said: “What are you doing? What are you going down that strategy for, because even if you find it is different from the WHO, does that mean we cannot use all WHO stuff anymore?”. The Ministry of Health and the Minister should take good note of that. The ministry warned the EPA, but the EPA still went down this track.

That paper for the EPA discounted full-formulation science, invariably. It discounted more independent science, and it came to the conclusion that it probably was not a carcinogen—this one retired toxicologist from New Zealand against the 17, with all the influences from MPI and EPA to make sure he got the damn words right. Is that the sort of stuff we want for New Zealand—to come out with something that has no credibility in terms of science just so that we can do business as usual in New Zealand? It is appalling.

The purpose of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act is “to protect the environment, and the health and safety of people and communities, by preventing or managing the adverse effects of hazardous substances and new organisms.” This bill does nothing of the sort. It leads us further down the track in this pathetic approach to pesticides in New Zealand. This pioneering country, in the old colonial style of rip, tear, and bust, and do whatever—with no precaution or care, it seems, for the health and safety of people and communities—will allow 10 years’ data protection to meet the TPP agreement’s requirements. That is what has happened here.

The literature out there says that that particular herbicide—which I go on about so much, because it is a classic example—should be off shelves, and it certainly should be off the streets and parks of New Zealand. The Greens are certainly opposing this bill. Thank you.

I am pleased to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to take a final call in this third reading of the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill. New Zealand First supports this bill.

There has been, and there continues to be, a degree of misunderstanding about what this bill actually is and what it does. What this bill does not deal with is patents or trademarks. It does not address the ownership of patented compounds or, indeed, the nature of those compounds. What this bill deals with is the data that is generated in the pursuit of the development of those compounds, not with the compounds themselves. It is not about patents; it is about the research that goes into creating patentable products. Products themselves can still be protected via the legislation, providing that the researcher or the developer—whoever it is who has created the compound or discovered the use for it—has the wherewithal to fund that patenting and trademarking process on an international scale.

Nothing in this bill actually stands in the way of a third party doing their own research and recreating a particular compound. It does, however, prevent that third party from gaining access to the data that was used or generated in the development of the compound, or in the development of the innovative use for the compound, by the original inventor. Or, more to the point, it extends the protections that already exist from 5 years to 10 years, against the original change that the officials proposed, which was to go to 8 years.

People have talked about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and how this bill will be affected by it. The way that this bill is structured falls short of what the TPP would require, if, in fact, the TPP was going to happen—which, as we now know, it probably is not, certainly in its current form or time frame, depending on the outcome of the United States election. The bill’s proposed 10-year protection is still conditional on new and innovative uses being registered for any given compound, rather than it being a blanket protection, as applies in Australia and some other parts of the world, and, indeed, as the TPP would require. So the advantage to New Zealand in extending the research protection is that it provides an additional incentive for companies to do their high-tech R & D here, rather than anywhere else.

My colleague Steffan Browning from the Greens raised the concern—well, he has raised it tonight, but he also raised it in the Primary Production Committee—that by passing this bill we are helping the likes of Monsanto and other evil empires to tighten their grip on the free peoples of the world, and, really, that is not the case. My point in response—and I will reiterate it here—is that there is a large and growing thrust in the world’s wealthy and discerning markets towards organics and other foods that are produced without GE, without GM, and without the excessive use of kinds of agrichemicals, as we have come to consider them. Producing those foods, which is something that New Zealand does particularly well and which we are developing a reputation for—if we are going to do that on a large commercial scale, it will still require specialty compounds in order to maximise safe and efficient production. This bill will, in fact, make it easier for companies to develop such compounds, so you will have the likes of better compost-starter enzymes, better fatty acid herbicides, better Bacillus thuringiensis - carrier solutions, better soap-based fungicides, and all those sorts of things. It is not just a bill that protects chemical companies as we know them; it is a bill that gives additional protection to all manner of further ongoing agrichemical research, including into organics and GE-free.

In extending the protections, it gives companies that are doing that sort of work an additional incentive to build their research labs here and carry out that work here—the research and the manufacturing—rather than doing it in California or Switzerland or somewhere else. I do not think it is going to be a bill that will enable evil corporations to give us three-eyed sheep, two-headed chickens, asparagus that glows in the dark, or anything else that we do not want.

💬 Hon Michael Woodhouse: I love asparagus that glows in the dark.

Ha, ha! I have never seen asparagus that glows in the dark, Mr Woodhouse. I have seen a report about some pigs that glow in the dark—they were created in Japan. But that is a whole different story.

When those companies do elect to do that research and manufacturing here in New Zealand, it is this country and our economy that benefit. We benefit through job creation, and that is everything from the construction sector—as it builds new labs and new factories—to attracting more of our best and brightest to universities to study the biological and physical sciences that are involved in the manufacture, the research, and the development of agricultural compounds and veterinary medicines. We keep more of those people here in New Zealand, because they can get the good, well-paying, career-advancing jobs that their qualifications then call for here in New Zealand, rather than having to go overseas to find that work.

Small companies are also advantaged by these sorts of additional protections because they are the ones that are least able to gain additional protections through other means—they do not necessarily have the funding and the wherewithal behind them to go into international legal processes to get trademarks, patents, and so forth. This legislation is another mechanism by which we can extend those protections to them. It is a shot in the arm for the Kiwi inventor, the innovator, Kiwi ingenuity—No. 8 fencing wire—the guy working away quietly in his shed, and the independent researcher working away quietly in a lab somewhere who comes up with a brilliant idea. It is all part of the New Zealand story. It is those smaller operators who will benefit most from this kind of legislation.

As things stand, when existing protections expire—we do have existing protections, and this bill is about extending them, rather than creating them—all the information that was discovered, and the data that was created that went along with the application to register it, becomes available to all and sundry. That means that, say, the “XYZ Company” from the United States or Germany or China or wherever has then got access to that data and can then use it to, essentially, duplicate the work that the original inventor did. They might come up with a slight change and come up with a different product. They themselves then have the wherewithal, in terms of scale, to manufacture larger quantities, to market globally, and, essentially, to pull the rug out from under the person in New Zealand who had the bright idea to start with.

If somebody is in a position where they are doing that sort of research, be they an independent operator or a small company, they are much less likely to put that kind of time, effort, money, and resource into developing a new compound or into researching a new use for it if they know that, 5 years down the track, all the protection for that research that they have done—the blood, sweat, and tears that they have put into their hard toil; perhaps they mortgaged their house to fund it—can potentially be pulled away from them by some large corporation that has just been sitting and waiting for the protections to expire.

At the same time, as other members have mentioned—I think Mr McKelvie mentioned it—companies based in other countries that have, in a similar manner, created new compounds or developed new uses for them will be able to bring their products to New Zealand knowing that they will have a similar, comparable degree of protection for that data here as they would have anywhere else. It means that by passing this bill, we give some surety to New Zealand farmers—to livestock farmers, to growers, and so forth—that they will be able to get access to the newest, latest, most cutting-edge, innovative products that are available overseas, because there is no disincentive for the foreign-based companies that create and manufacture these compounds to bring them here, as they know that they will have the same degree of protection.

In closing, I would like to reiterate that, in some ways, we do not believe this bill goes far enough. It could have gone further, but it went at least as far as the majority of submitters from the industry asked for. That aside, we agree with the intentions of the bill. We believe that it is necessary and that it will bring advantages to this country. New Zealand First supports it, and I commend it to the House. Thank you.

It is not an area of expertise that I particularly hold—the primary industries area. However, I have had the opportunity to speak on this bill in several passages through the House. It has amazed me, actually, as a townie, to be part of the conversation and to actually understand the level of science and discussion that sits behind our farming industry. I think that members of the House should take the opportunity to engage in conversations across other areas where they may not necessarily have a high level of expertise.

I was fascinated by this particular bill and the fact that the data can be used by those researchers to find new and different ways of using their products, whether it is around different species that can benefit from their products, or whether it is finding completely innovative ways to use these compounds or to add something to the formulations, which means that you can use these compounds in new and creative ways. It has been fascinating to be part of the discussion.

As the previous speaker has said, we are a country of inventors. We take the No. 8 wire approach to many things. I think that really stands us in good stead. When we go overseas as members of Parliament and look at the ways that other countries’ primary industries are structured and the types of data that they use to inform them and to support the work they do, we can see that as a small nation at the bottom of the world we do incredibly well. I guess part of it is the fact that our isolation has forced us to really look at different ways of working, different ways of using our research, and different ways of using the technology that we already have for a broader base of opportunities.

I do want to comment too on what Richard Prosser said about data management. I know that we have some very strong tertiary education in terms of being able to use that data management and those processes in some incredibly diverse ways. I do not have the strength to be able to talk about this in any real depth. I do not actually have the knowledge that other members of the House have of the practical implications or the practical applications of this work. But it has fascinated me that we can take a formulation, we can recreate that for use across a range of species, or across a range of applications, and, with this piece of legislation, we can provide some protections for those people who actually create the information and the knowledge, so that they have some benefit from that. I know that I have got prime-time viewing but I will not hold up the passage of this bill. I commend it to the House. Thank you.

This will be a short call on the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill. The Green Party wants the primary sector to have access to the latest technology, both for plant protection and for animal health. But we are opposing this bill because we think it is weighted too heavily towards industry rather than the protection of the public. We want a New Zealand where there is greater use of integrated pest management, greater use of organics, and where there is greater public knowledge about the compounds that are being used to control pests and weeds. This bill, by extending the data protection, actually mitigates against that.

Although Mr Prosser and others have talked a lot about the benefits of extending the secrecy around the compounds that are used in these products, because we do not have a robust assessment of pesticide use in New Zealand, by either the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) or the Environmental Protection Authority, we think there needs to be much greater transparency about what chemicals are being used. I also think that if you read the regulatory impact statement from the Ministry for Primary Industries, a lot of the claims that have been made about the commercial benefits of extending data protection are on somewhat shaky ground. The ministry made it very clear in the regulatory impact statement that there was no detailed information by which it could establish the extent to which the current regime and the current 5-year term for keeping information about the composition of these compounds secret resulted in new products or new uses not being registered, or the extent to which it inhibited the development of new products, using existing chemistry.

When you have had MPI saying that a precise determination of the net economic impact of any changes is not possible, how can all these assertions be made that it will have significant economic benefits? We do not think it is appropriate that we have got legislation going through that will make the current regime less transparent by extending the periods for data protection, extending the non-disclosure periods, when you have got only some anecdotal information where the industry claims that the current rules have discouraged a product from being registered. It is interesting that the provisions in the current legislation go back to our obligations under the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. So, again, it seems to be where these big chemical companies, using international agreements, have influenced New Zealand legislation.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 10 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Thursday)