Consumers’ Right to Know (Country of Origin of Food) Bill

Thank you, Madam Chair. Who would have ever thought, some 18 months later, that we would be speaking in the final committee stage of this masterful piece of legislation. I want to congratulate the member in the chair, Gareth Hughes, for actually picking up something that was quite an array of excitement, I suppose, and putting it into some form. In fact, when this bill entered the House, you could have been forgiven for using one of Sir Walter Scott’s sayings, which was “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When we first practise to”—and I change the “deceive” to “conceive”, because I wouldn’t accuse Steffan of deceiving. But he did get this conceived, and I think it’s pretty fascinating that we’ve got to the point with this bill—which was a member’s bill with good intent and actually had a large degree of support.

The problem with this bill is it was hugely complex to instigate in the form it was designed. The interesting thing about it is that it’s turned up as a one-pager at the end of it—or a two-pager, to be fair to the proponents of the bill and also to the Primary Production Committee, because they did an awful lot of work over the last 18 months. In fact, I would have thought this was one of the most complex pieces of stuff that’s gone through a select committee and come out in such a simple form. I think it’s really quite interesting, so congratulations to all of them on the work they did in getting it to this point.

There are some interesting factors in this bill, and a number of the issues that I was kind of interested in were particularly around pork, because how you get a piece of cured pork that turns out as a single-ingredient food takes some imagination. In fact, when you read the recipes for curing pork or whatever, you can find them with almost twice the amount of ingredients put into the curing process as there is actual pork in the process. So that’s an interesting sort of a challenge for—well, I guess—the Minister, at the end of the day, to establish where that gets to.

I think the other thing that many of you will know, and I don’t want to take the pork industry in vain at all, but when you pop a piece of bacon in the frying pan, quite often you end up with something coming out about a third of the size it went in. So that, for a single ingredient bit of product, is sort of interesting.

But I think, on the whole, this type of legislation around the world is probably interesting. It’s probably necessary. I wouldn’t say it is necessary, but it certainly gives consumers the ability to understand where things come from. I think it’s really important. You can go to numerous countries around the world where products are sold by country of origin, basically, rather than you might go into a supermarket and you will find numerous countries of origin. Take a vegetable, for example. In some parts of Asia, you might find they come from five or six different countries and they’ll be sold on racks according to country. So it is a pretty important thing for those people who are interested in the origins of their food.

I think that for the select committee to have worked through the process and got from a point where the original proponent of the bill was very keen to put it into Parliament as a separate bill and in its own entity—it’s now been picked up under the Fair Trading Act, and I think that’s a very appropriate place for it. It’s got a whole lot of products listed. The Minister has the opportunity to, from time to time, add to that and extend the list of products that come under the rules of the country-of-origin labelling, which I think is hugely appropriate. I think, on the whole, this process has really worked out pretty well. For those who sat on the select committee for the first 12 months that this bill was in the House, you would never have imagined it would get to the point that it’s got to now, so I think that’s a great credit to all those people involved in it.

Of course, the bill itself was put in process initially, I think, around the idea of market places, of farmers markets—all those sorts of processes—or little markets that were selling food. It’s now been standardised and it’s much easier to follow how it should work, and it won’t apply to little country fairs, to school gala days, and things like that necessarily. There is an opportunity for that to happen if it wants to, and people who sell things of course are always able to list their own product and the country of origin it comes from. So I think it’s a pretty good solution.

I think that the way this legislation is managed, I suppose, from a penalty point of view will be interesting, because the policing of all of this stuff takes some time and is a bit of a challenge. But I want to congratulate the member who introduced it—Steffan Browning—and I also want to congratulate Gareth Hughes on getting this bill through the process. I think it’s very well done and, for the select committee, they’ve done a great job with it too. So that’s my little contribution.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. It is a great pleasure to stand here in the committee of the whole House stage in support of the Consumers’ Right to Know (Country of Origin of Food) Bill. Just like my colleague Ian McKelvie, I’d like to congratulate—

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): His full name, please.

I thought I did say his full name, Madam Chair.

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Sorry, I thought you just said the surname.

No, no. But you’re dead right, Madam Chair. He is a gentleman and should be known as Mr Ian McKelvie, such is the esteem that he is held in in this House—on this side anyway.

The member who sponsored this bill after taking it on from Steffan Browning, Gareth Hughes, has done a marvellous job. It is a difficult issue—this—around ensuring that consumers do have the right to know the country of origin of single-product food. Of course, it did create some issues, coming to the Primary Production Committee, around where we draw the line. It was a good process. I just want to say, fundamentally, right from the outset, that the Labour Party does agree with this. We have supported a mandatory labelling system of food for quite some time. But where that line is drawn took up a lot of the time at the select committee stage, in particular around how we might go about this.

I note that we focused on the Fair Trading Act and how this bill might be able to enable the Minister in charge—at the moment that of course is the Hon Kris Faafoi—who will be able to, over time, review what other foods could be included under this regime. The issue around cured pork has been mentioned. There are a vast number of other foods that consumers in this country would benefit from knowing the source of those products. And so it is a great pleasure to stand here and speak in support of this.

The member in charge might be able to assist the committee in adding further context and detail into a few particular things. There is a definition here around what food applies. I mean, there’s a few—vegetables and fruit, obviously, meat, seafood, nuts, grain, seeds, and oil. What other foods, those other foods that have been excluded at this point—I’d be interested to know what actually could indeed come under future inclusion under the regulations that this enables the Minister to be able to do.

Also, I’m interested in the fines. This bill, essentially, creates offences for false and misleading labelling on packaged food or displays. Of course, that is a relevant issue. Whenever you’re bringing in a mandatory system that requires people to label something, there is potentially the chance that they may avoid that in order to declare to consumers where the original source of this food product is. I note that the fines are up to $10,000 for individuals and $50,000 for organisations. I think it would benefit the committee if the member was to provide a wee bit more context on that, as to how those figures were come by and where they link to other similar offences.

Of course, looking at what the Minister in charge, under the Fair Trading Act, can do, particularly in order to enable and assist the New Zealand pork industry—this is a particularly important bill for them. They are an industry that has struggled over time because of cheap importing of similar products. I think New Zealand consumers on the whole would be quite surprised to know that their bacon and ham is often made from products that are imported from overseas. They might be processed here. They might be processed in New Zealand, but the original source of that product comes particularly from places like Canada, North America, and the Scandinavian countries as well. It’s certainly not suggesting that those products are inferior, but what this bill does is it ensures that the consumers know exactly where their products are coming from, not just where they might be manufactured.

It is of great importance not just to the pork industry but also the fishing industry as well. I note that when fish can easily be caught all around the world, perhaps processed here, it’s still only right that consumers know where that product comes from.

So, just a brief introductory comment there. I probably will take a few calls on this, such is the importance of the bill.

💬 Hon Members: Ha, ha!

That’s right. I’m delighted to hear that my colleagues on the other side of the Chamber are looking forward towards those contributions. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Well, it’s quite interesting that the Government members have found their voices in the committee of the whole House. It’s quite unusual; so they won’t be quite used to that.

This Consumers’ Right to Know (Country of Origin of Food) Bill is a very important bill, and I have sent a text to Steffan Browning, and I hope he’s at home listening. He never gives up. He said, “Maybe we should put an SOP in for grains and nuts and oils to be included.”

💬 Kieran McAnulty: It’s not too late.

Well, it’s not too late, but I’m not going to put one in.

On the Primary Production Committee, as has been said, we spent a lot of time going through this, and as Mr McKelvie said, the bill is significantly different from where we started. It was really interesting working with the officials to see how things changed as we went through this process. It’s quite simple, you would think, to say “Look, we want all the food on the shelves that we buy to have their country of origin.” But once you start to get down and try and get a legal definition of what a country of origin is, when you start adding things, when the food is processed in some way or has other products added to it—salt, for example; did the salt actually come from the same country that the base food did?—that’s where the real rub came, in terms of drafting the legislation. We seemed to spend quite a bit of time going in circles trying to find a way through this.

Eventually, of course, we went for a fairly simple single-ingredient food option in the bill, but we included bacon in it. So there are some tough areas to deal with along the way. But, of course, we’ve found out very late in the piece that the Minister could do this by regulation and therefore we didn’t need to knock ourselves out trying to draft the perfect bill, particularly given that it was a member’s bill and the member didn’t have the backup of a cast of thousands of officials to help draft the bill. It was very complicated for quite a simple process.

The bill is in Gareth Hughes’ name, and he’s done a fine job taking over from Steffan. I know Steffan’s a great supporter of home-grown foods and particularly a great supporter of the local farmers’ markets, and I think that is where all the consumers who will be interested in this—it will spread out much wider than that, of course. But if you went along to a farmers’ market, people are there because they want to buy and connect with the grower of that food. They want to know that that food has been grown carefully in their region somewhere nearby, that they can look the person in the eye that has dealt with that food and know and have some confidence that there has been a lot of hard effort gone into that and that they are not being sold something that won’t meet their expectations in terms of quality and provenance.

I think that has been forgotten a lot in our fast-moving consumer goods world. I think the supermarkets, while they’ve been such a massive change in the way that we consume—you go back from when they were first introduced, I think it was in the 1970s in New Zealand. It was a massive change from the local greengrocer and butcher and so on. Now we tend to buy most of our food from one outlet, but there is a massive move for people to get back to buying food locally and to having that connection with the consumer.

This is another extension to allow food to be labelled with the country of origin, and it’s not a foreign thing. As I mentioned in my second reading speech, it’s of course par for the course in terms of the wine industry—so Burgundy and Bordeaux and Champagne, I gave as examples. They’re quite famous names in the wine industry, which are all regions in France. Champagne, of course, is what you would associate with sparkling wine. We call it sparkling wine because we’re not allowed to call it champagne. That’s the law. It’s the law to sell wine into the EU. It has to have, if you want to give it an origin, the region it’s grown in as well as the country that it’s grown in. So it’s well known. It hasn’t done the wine industry any harm.

We can think of gouda cheese, for example. There are others cheeses like Saint-Marcellin, Livarot, and other cheeses which all go back to the particular region that they are grown in. So this bill builds on that. It has a great history for it. I think well done to Steffan for introducing it, well done to Gareth Hughes for taking it over. It’s with pleasure that I commend it.

Oh, thank you, Madam Chair. I’m very pleased to speak at the committee stage of this bill. I, too, would like to acknowledge Mr Hughes for shepherding this bill through our Primary Production Committee and now through the remaining stages, and, likewise, I acknowledge Mr Browning, who originally introduced this bill.

The key to this bill—and it has been elegantly drafted, I must say. We received some excellent advice from the advisers in our consideration of this bill, but I am pleased to say that I’m quite proud of the work that the committee has achieved through finding an elegant solution which is not overly prescriptive, which provides flexibility through the promulgation of regulations but ultimately achieves the outcome which we want to achieve through this bill, which is to inform consumers of the country of origin of the food products they will be purchasing. The crux of this legislation is that the detail will be created by regulation, as I’ve said, and that will be done by the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs recommending “the making of regulations … prescribing”—and this is the key term—“a consumer information standard for the disclosure of a regulated food’s country or place of origin.”

I just have a question to the member in the chair, Gareth Hughes, and that’s in relation to—I’ve been thinking about the bill, and the intent is to inform the consumer of the country or place of origin. It will be interesting, when the regulations are being drafted, how they will be able to require enough information which is informative to the consumer and not actually redundant, I guess. How do you differentiate between a country or place, because if a place is used, well, unless you know intimately the geography of the actual country which is the source of the food, it will be very, very difficult to actually know the actual place? So I don’t actually see much merit, necessarily, in the actual use of a place name. A country of origin, definitely, I think, will be able to better inform the consumer.

However, I think there may be an issue, for instance, when—I’m thinking of an example when, say, a fish product is caught in international waters. So it’s actually not part of any country of origin, but the place in which it is caught, as well, is quite ill-defined. It could be a seamount somewhere out in the ocean. How would that food be described? What would be the consumer information standard for that particular food product? So I think these are all quite technical but necessary questions that will need to be closely considered by the Minister and his ministry in the development of the regulations to ensure that—yes, we want to ensure that there is enough information available to the consumer, but we want to make sure that that information is actually meaningful to the consumer, as well. So those are just some initial thoughts around country and place.

The other matter that I had was how we are going to disclose the country of origin of food. It is deliberately broad. It’s not actually a label now; it’s actually what is appropriate, I guess, for the food product in question. But in thinking about that, yes, it may be—I believe a big sign would be sufficient for a big bin of apples or whatever fruit it is—grapes—to adequately meet the relevant regulation requirement. But there may be instances where—is it a positive obligation that, for instance, if that signage was not prominent enough, would that lead to a conviction of a person, a retailer, perhaps, if there is no labelling on the product and the actual generic signage or whatever is imposed by the regulations is not sufficient to adequately inform the consumer? Thank you.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. This bill is a start. It’s not where I would’ve liked to have seen things go, but it is a start. I grew up, actually—you come home from school, you drink a pint of milk, you have a sandwich with Eta peanut butter on it, and you go out and play. Eta peanut butter, right? Made in New Zealand, isn’t it—isn’t it? Eta peanut butter is made in China. Who knew it was made in China—a staple brand of New Zealand is made in China. Sanitarium peanut butter—where’s that made?

💬 Kieran McAnulty: That’s New Zealand, surely.

No—well, it could be made in the Chinese factory or it could be made in the Australian factory. Sanitarium—isn’t that a great New Zealand brand? No, it isn’t.

💬 Hon Phil Twyford: What about Pic’s?

Pic’s is made in New Zealand. Now, how do we know that? Because it has got “Made in New Zealand” on it. If it’s not made in New Zealand, often it doesn’t have “Made in New Zealand”, because we make an assumption. Now, the assumption’s often wrong—the assumption is often wrong—and this is what our global brand stands for. This is what we go to the market with: a brand that has strength, that has efficacy, and that is worth a hell of a lot of money, and yet in our own country—in our own country—until now, we have not required brands to say where they’re coming from, and I think that is really bad. I think it’s a little—I won’t say dishonest; I think it’s disingenuous, because I think there are a number of foodstuffs that have purported to be from New Zealand, that have led us to believe they’re from New Zealand so we purchase them, and then we find out that Eta peanut butter is made in China, that Sanitarium peanut butter is made in China. We go, “Goodness me! Why didn’t I know this?” Why didn’t we know this? Well, the reason we didn’t know it is because it’s not mandatory to have that labelling on that jar of peanut butter.

But with this bill, I don’t actually see that that is going to change, and that really concerns me. It says here—and I quote—“The regulated food must include food that … is no more than minimally processed”. Why have we stopped at “no more than minimally processed”, and what does “minimally processed” mean? Does it mean that fish—filleted, you’ve got to have it on, but if it’s battered or crumbed, you don’t have to have the country labelling on? We should’ve gone a lot further. My understanding is Steffan wanted to go a lot further than this, but, in fact, the National Opposition, in the Primary Production Committee, blocked taking this bill a whole lot further. We need to be a lot further for two reasons—first of all, Brand New Zealand. I buy stuff because it’s from New Zealand because I want to support New Zealand industry. If I’m buying stuff thinking it’s from New Zealand, if I buy fish—it’s fresh; sure, it’s from New Zealand—and then I find out it’s from Indonesia or somewhere else, I don’t think that is honest. I think, in all our supermarkets, in all our retail stores, wherever we buy fresh fish, fresh food, or frozen, or wherever, it should be mandatory all the way down the chain.

When it says here that the Minister can actually have an exception to this if it is unduly onerous, what does that mean? What does “unduly onerous” mean? I would’ve thought that, you know, if it’s an apple, you put a little “Made in New Zealand” sign on it—or from China or California or Australia or wherever. Let’s be honest. Let’s allow the consumers to make the choices about where the food they are eating is coming from. If you want to buy only New Zealand made, then at least give us the option to do that. If you want to buy peanut butter from China, fine—no one’s stopping you buying peanut butter from China—but at least tell Kiwis where that peanut butter is from, and don’t let them believe it is from New Zealand.

💬 Angie Warren-Clark: What about Marmite?

Well, Marmite is made in New Zealand, actually. Vegemite’s made in Australia; everyone knows that. But the thing is, let’s be honest about our food and let’s not just stop at food that is minimally processed, because that does not let consumers make the full choice when they are filling their trolley on their weekly or daily or whenever shopping excursion.

Take it all the way forward. Make sure we label food that is processed from China or India or America or Australia. Let’s just be honest about this. There’s one thing I will say, and that is that I think as consumers become more educated, more engaged, they want to know where their food is coming from. They want to know that it is from a country that believes in the ethical raising of animals. They want to know that the food is not processed by countries using child labour. Label all food with country of origin.

Thank you, Madam Chair. It’s a pleasure to get up and speak at this committee stage of the Consumers’ Right to Know (Country of Origin of Food) Bill. New Zealand First has been a strong supporter of this bill right the way through. Although, just picking up from the previous speaker, the Hon Stuart Nash, we also were one of the handbrakes on expanding this bill wider. So it wasn’t just the National Party, as much as we like to throw them under the bus as much as possible.

But, in this case, I had very clear direction from our caucus to keep it simple, because, as we saw through the select committee process, it does get complex very quickly. Going to your Marmite example: it may be manufactured in New Zealand but where were those components—goodness knows what’s in Marmite actually, but where were those components? So it does get quite complex, but that is the intent of where we’re seeking to go. I think the member in the chair, Gareth Hughes, might like to allude to that further.

But we’re well behind the game here. In 2005, Australia brought their country of origin food labelling in. Fifty-five countries throughout the world have these standards already; their consumers know where their food comes from. But we took the view in New Zealand First that this is very much foundation legislation. It gives the single-component foods in the first instance so we can keep it simple, get the systems up and running, and, as we can prove it fit for purpose and get our systems going, then we can expand on that and bring in the Marmites and the like. And I think we would all like to go there.

Consumers have expressed a very strong interest for this. I think it was Horticulture New Zealand that did a survey: 71 percent of consumers said that they wanted country of origin labelling on their food. And it’s already mandatory on things like footwear and clothing and the like, so surely it should be for food that we’re putting in our bodies. Only 9 percent, I think, in that survey said that they weren’t interested. We certainly, at home, always buy New Zealand made where we can, but who knows?

Just going to the pork carve-out that we got and we debated greatly through the select committee process—60 percent of pork is imported. But also with the cured products—which was the carve-out to allow bacon and ham to come in—80 percent of bacon and ham is imported. And, Mr McKelvie, that is probably why it’s shrinking in the pan. You’ve got some of that foreign stuff. You’ll be able to know where the New Zealand stuff is shortly and be able to consume accordingly.

Importantly, actually, within that—and I’d be interested in the member’s view on this—85 percent of the 60 percent, so roughly half of all the pork coming in, is from countries that do not meet our animal welfare standards. And I note the member Mr Hughes is the great champion now of the pork industry, having got that carve-out through. He’s probably the only vegetarian in the world who has been championing the pork industry, but it shows the overall concept is bigger than individual taste. So that 85 percent—and we did ask some questions of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade when they came in: can we—and I know the answer is no now, with the trade deals that we have; as an exporting country we have to be very careful of the legislation that we pass in this House, that it doesn’t come across as a non-tariff barrier. But we are talking now about modern trade deals, and I just wonder whether it is something that we should be looking to in our modern trade deals that are coming up—the EU, the UK—to have those animal welfare standards incorporated in that, because I think that’s something that consumers also really want to know.

We’re putting more and more regulation on our farmers and producers and growers. We should know, as consumers, actually, that (a) we want confidence in our New Zealand producers but also, if we are going to consume an imported product, it would be handy to know that. So maybe our trade deals can upgrade to reflect that in the future.

So we look forward to progressing this through the committee stage. There are a number of details that I think we need to delve into at further stages but, at this point, we’re very happy to have this piece of legislation in the House. Thank you.

Kia ora, ngā mihi nui kia koutou, kia ora. I thank all members for their contributions in the Chamber. It’s my birthday today, so it’s the best present I could get, with all the kind words and, more importantly, the votes.

If you’ll indulge me, I’ll use a birthday cake analogy in terms of this legislation. When it came out of the oven—the original bill of Steffan Browning—it was kind of like the cakes that I bake for my kids. They need to be patched up a bit; they need a bit of icing to cover the cracks. And this is what we’ve done. I remember when David Bennett approached me when we’d agreed to work on this bill at his committee, which he ably chaired, it needed a bit of panel-beating, and it kind of needed that icing and a bit of covering.

So I think it has been improved. What we eventually got out of the committee was something more flexible, more pragmatic, and I think also more inclusive in terms of the ingredients. So, in terms of the flexibility, it’s kind of like instead of building a whole new kitchen to bake a cake, milling the grain yourself and growing all the ingredients, we had an existing kitchen, existing recipe, existing regime under the Fair Trading Act. So instead of building a bespoke country of origin food-labelling regime, the officials—whom I’d like to take this opportunity to commend—recommended that we use the existing section 27 of the Fair Trading Act 1986. Now, this makes a lot of sense.

I heard a question from a member around why the fines were set at that level: $10,000 for an individual, $50,000 for an organisation. The benefit of incorporating the Fair Trading Act regime means that they can be consistent and use the existing enforcement and offences regime. It’s more pragmatic, the way that it’s come out of the committee, because takeaways, for example, are explicitly excluded. It deals with issues such as online retailing.

In terms of the inclusion, this is something the member Stuart Nash touched on, and I really want to highlight the work of Mark Patterson on the committee. It has been panel-beaten; it has been improved. Why the line was drawn where it was, and the line had to be drawn somewhere, was that the committee—and I guess I’d like to acknowledge the fact that it was a committee which was a split committee between Government and Opposition members—had to reach consensus to progress it, to improve it, to panel-beat it. They wanted something which was the simplest to implement, with the least cost, to avoid confusion around definitions.

This is why I was so glad to get pork in, because here was a clear case of where there was a consumer expectation, given the high-profile nature and the widespread confusion. I recall being on telly and taking a whole bunch of different pork brands into the studio and not being able to work out which pork brand actually came from New Zealand. And we know, as Mark Patterson talked about, the vast majority of pork that comes into New Zealand is from countries with lower animal welfare standards. So getting that at the eleventh-hour—that’s where I’d like to acknowledge the National Party members. It was their support that was instrumental in getting pork back in.

To Stuart Nash’s point that he would have liked to have gone further, I wish I’d had a chance to talk to him about that earlier, because we wanted it to go further. Originally, Steffan’s bill dealt with all single-component foods. But I guess, kind of like a recipe, kind of like a soup, what we do have is a great base. Those peanut butter examples, for example: take Pic’s in New Zealand, a great high-quality brand that trades on the New Zealand nature of it. There’s nothing stopping them from promoting the fact, but the line had to be drawn somewhere. And what the committee wanted was something which was easily understandable.

So, sure, questions might be asked about why tomatoes are in but tinned tomatoes out. Why is fruit in but nuts are out? Why are cucumbers in but pickles are out? It’s because of the different ingredients that go into it. Take pickles: the oil and the spices. In the future, I think New Zealand will get closer to the Australian regime, which is a lot more comprehensive. There they, literally, have speedo indicator lines that indicate the percentage to 76 percent of Australian-grown ingredients. So I cede to the member Stuart Nash, this is like a base recipe. It’s the great foundation that empowers a robust system where the Minister in future Governments can make regulations and build upon it.

Ultimately, it’s something which is more flexible, more pragmatic, more inclusive, but most importantly, Kiwi consumers are getting the same rights that 55 other nations have, which Kiwis currently have when it comes to footwear, under our footwear and clothing regulations of 1992. Kiwis will get the right to know where their food comes from so they can be informed consumers and actually exercise their consumer choice. I’d like to thank members for their support.

As we’ve been sort of starting to talk about this bill, I’ve been reflecting—I mean, obviously on the food to which this bill is supposed to apply, but also reflecting on the different sites at which food is sold, actually, in my own electorate of New Lynn. In particular, I’ve thought of three different types of sites. I mean, there are obviously the supermarkets. There are—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I apologise to the member. I’m sorry. It’s time for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.

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

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Members, the committee has resumed. Prior to the dinner break, we were debating the Consumers’ Right to Know (Country of Origin of Food) Bill, and Dr Deborah Russell had the call and has four minutes and 33 seconds remaining should she wish to take it.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I wish to take every second available to me. Before the dinner break, I was reflecting on the different places in my electorate of New Lynn where you could buy food, where people could buy food.

💬 Angie Warren-Clark: You were hungry?

Yeah, there’s the obvious—perhaps I was hungry. The obvious places are the supermarkets. There are several fine supermarkets in the electorate. But then I was thinking about the Titirangi markets—the Sunday markets that run on Titirangi once a month—and the Avondale markets, which run every Sunday. Now, the Titirangi markets really don’t have fruit and vege there, but they do have cheese, locally produced cheese. It’s a craft market and a farmers market. As is the usual thing with the farmers market rules, or craft market rules in this particular market, the person who is selling the product must be the person who has actually made it in the first place. So there’s not too much of a worry about where the food that’s sold at the Titirangi market comes from; it’s fairly clearly made in New Zealand.

But the Avondale markets are a different matter. They are run at the racecourse on Sundays, and they are huge—possibly not as huge as some of the markets out in South Auckland, but they are huge. There are many, many vendors there, and lots and lots of fruit and vege vendors, and often pretty hard-working immigrant families who come in, grow food, and sell it. At that market, I think people would be safe in assuming that the food had come from New Zealand, perhaps, but I’m not entirely sure about that. For example, from time to time there are pineapples for sale there. Now, to my knowledge, we don’t grow pineapples in New Zealand. So I was thinking about the labelling requirements for what is, essentially, a growers’ market, or perhaps the vendors at the market go and buy stuff from wholesalers and then they sell it the next day. They are often on-selling slightly less fresh food. Often it’s grown in their own market gardens and it’s kind of the excess, the stuff that couldn’t be sold to supermarkets because it’s not good enough, but it’s perfectly good food.

So I’m wondering about the labelling requirements at the Avondale markets as opposed to a supermarket. I see there is a clause that food can be excluded from being a regulated food if requiring the food to comply with the standard would be unduly onerous or wouldn’t help consumers to make informed decisions about purchasing the food. That’s in clause 5(4). So that’s interesting there, but this is not really to do with the food itself per se; it’s to do with where it’s being sold and the type of market it’s being sold at. To my mind, it’s not going to be quite as easy for the vendors, for the sellers at the Avondale markets, to label the food, to be able to display where it has come from, in quite the same way that it would be, I think, comparatively easy for the vendor at a supermarket to be able to label the fresh fruit and vege that’s being sold there, and, of course, in the Titirangi markets, given the nature of the farmers market, that makes a difference.

Now, look, I see that in some of the discussion around this bill, there was some consideration given to roadside vendors, people who have stall on the side of the road—you know, lemons for sale, with an honesty box perhaps—

💬 Dr Duncan Webb: Free-range eggs.

—free-range eggs for sale, those sorts of things which are just there. Of course, as you are driving by and you stop at one of these roadside stalls to buy—or perhaps cycling, walking, scootering by, whatever happens to be the way that you’re choosing to transport yourself. That’s quite easy to make the assumption that that is where, in fact, the food was produced, but somehow the possible disconnection between the food produced on farmland but sold at the Avondale markets—that’s exercising my mind. I’m rather hoping that I can get some clarification, perhaps some report-back from what the Primary Production Committee discussed on this point—because I’m sure the committee would have discussed it; it’s quite an interesting point around food production and sale—and what resolution they came to with it. That would help me to understand, in particular, how it’s going to affect people in my electorate who sell food. It’s something I very much want to know about.

Madam Chair, I appreciate being able to take a call this evening on this bill, the Consumers’ Right to Know (Country of Origin of Food) Bill. Before I commence my remarks, I want to wish the member Gareth Hughes happy birthday, and I hope that this is a fantastic birthday present for you.

This evening, I really only want to traverse four questions. I think, look, if we take the members’ bill that was introduced by Steffan Browning—and there have been a range of quite substantive amendments from that bill. Whilst I’m now a member on the Primary Production Committee, I wasn’t there for some of the previous discussions that you had had since this parliamentary term commenced and since the member picked this bill up, so I’ve got a couple of questions across a range of different issues.

If we turn to clause 5(3), there’s a discussion there that “regulated foods must include”—and the question I have is around the frozen foods. I know that there is an exception. There are a couple of questions I had about frozen foods. So, one, they are included in the regulated foods, but I saw that they are not going to be included until 18 months after the commencement. I guess I’m just wanting to understand the rationale there and why the delay. Two, in the original, when this bill was introduced by the member Steffan Browning, there was a whole range of single-component foods that were intended to be included—fruit, vegetable, meat, seafood, nut, grain, seed, oil, and others—and I know that not all of these foods have been included. It would be helpful to understand why, because you’ve obviously received some advice or there have been some issues flagged with them, but particularly around things such as seeds, and, actually, the honourable member Stuart Nash earlier raised some questions around nuts. Yeah, it would be really useful just to understand the policy rationale for not including those specific foods in the definition of the regulated foods.

I think it is—where is it—in clause 5(4). It’s an oddly worded provision perhaps—and I appreciate the work that has gone in by the officials to help us understand these particular provisions—but it says here: “However, the consumer information standard may exclude any food from being a regulated food if the Minister considers that requiring the food to comply with the standard— (a) would be unduly onerous; or (b) …” wouldn’t be helpful, basically, to consumers. I’m interested in the threshold for “unduly onerous” and what would be considered “unhelpful”.

In the commentary on the bill, I saw that there was a reference to, sort of, roadside stalls. If that’s an example, I would be interested in others. My question there would be: why don’t we just have an express exemption? It does seem that these are relatively undefined terms. “Unduly onerous”—is that for the small stallholder or others? Yeah, it would be good to understand a little bit further there if, particularly, this issue ever did get down to the courts where they were considering imposing a penalty of between $10,000 to $50,000 and it turned on the articulation in that provision, “unduly onerous”. It would be good to understand what the intent of Parliament was for those that are seeking to interpret it.

In clause 8—oh yeah, right, sorry—I think I covered that off. That was around the nuts and other foods and why they haven’t been included at this—sorry, not nuts. It’s seeds, isn’t it—seeds? Yeah, the range of foods I’ve already mentioned. I won’t get into that.

Thank you, Madam Chair, kia ora. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou, kia ora. I want to pick up on some of the points we’ve heard in the debate, and I want to start with the last comment by Kiritapu Allan, which was around the courts and how some of these tricky questions of definition—where the line is drawn, what’s in and what’s out—are dealt with. Now, this goes back to the original point, which is why it’s such a pragmatic step to use the Fair Trading Act as the model or the template and using the existing infrastructure, offences, and regulation-making powers, rather than a bespoke system. This is something that was proposed in the original bill, and you would have had to decide the specific exemptions, a specific regime, and how you’d deal with those different issues.

The member Dr Deborah Russell talked about the Avondale market, and my message to those people who go to the Avondale market is that this bill isn’t going to require each fruit and each food product sold at that market to have an individual label. What we worked through with the officials was that, as quite commonly frequently happens—say you’ve got a big crate full of fruit sold at the market. You can just put on the side of the crate “Product of Gisborne, New Zealand.”, for example, for mandarins or oranges. So that would be sufficient to provide greater certainty.

This is where clause 5(4) comes in, around trying to make it a pragmatic, workable regime that isn’t onerous, because what we don’t want to do is put a whole bunch of costs on to retailers or food providers which ultimately, of course, are simply going to flow through to consumers. So we’ve canvassed the very specific example of a roadside stall. It’s pretty apparent where the food’s coming from when you see the farm or the orchard literally as you pull up in the car and buy the food.

I would point out a protection, though, which is that if that vendor is fraudulently selling produce from other countries and pretending that it’s from New Zealand, existing complaint provisions under the Fair Trading Act could apply. Another example where foods may be considered more onerous is coffee. Here, you regularly see beans from multiple countries imported in New Zealand, dried together, and sold as a product. They’re medium or dark roast, for example, and it’s not actually listed as to whether they’re from Mexico or Ghana or Nicaragua. This was a very clear example that was canvassed in the select committee and that I imagine the Minister would make in regulations; one of those foods which is excluded.

Now, why it’s important to have foods in, of course, is that consumers at the Avondale market might want to know why they’re buying products. It could be for worker rules in that country, or because of their genetic engineering policy. It could be because of their policy on antibiotics or the environment. There are multiple reasons why consumers need that information. At a roadside stall, less so, but if you’re talking about the Avondale market or if you’re talking about a Countdown or a Foodstuffs, it’s quite important that consumers can actually have the power and the information so that they can exercise it.

We heard a question from the member Kieran McAnulty about frozen foods—why is there a differential time? Now, why the committee agreed for a greater length of period for frozen foods to come into this regime—18 months—is because of the packaging rules. It simply takes a lot longer to change the packaging on frozen foods, which can sit in a supermarket or other store freezer for an awfully long time. We wanted to find a pragmatic, workable solution that gave them more than enough time to work with this regime.

This touches on the issue of cost, which I know some National members on the committee were concerned about. Now, we had two rounds of submissions, and on the second round we specifically asked some retailers about the issue of costs of foods. What we heard was actually two very divergent estimates from some of our largest retailers in New Zealand. On one side, there was the argument that large IT infrastructure costs would flow through in the order of millions of dollars, and on the other side, there was virtually zero cost, because with existing IT infrastructure and labelling rules in supermarkets—noting that many supermarkets already do try and encourage country-of-origin labelling as much as possible—there would be zero cost at all.

Even at that greatest cost estimate, which I think was—well, I know the member Stuart Smith on the committee picked this up, with his background with wine and other food retailing. It was probably a little bit on the overgenerous side. Still, in terms of the average consumer in New Zealand, we’re talking literally cents on the impact. What they gain, of course, is the consumer power to exercise that power, which they couldn’t have if they didn’t have the information. So that’s the answer as to why frozen food has a differential time period—we were trying to make it more workable.

Thirdly, when it comes to the issue of nuts, grains, and seeds, this is something that would have been covered under Steffan Browning’s original proposal as a clearly single-component food, but, actually, it’s a lot more complicated than that because, obviously, nuts are roasted, they’re blanched, and often seasonings or other products are put on nuts. So the question is—and National members didn’t want to see this included in the bill, because the Minister, through regulation-making powers under section 27 of the Fair Trading Act, can actually have a much more involved consultation with food providers or retailers than was possible for a member and the Primary Production Committee.

So we may see nuts in this regime. The issue, of course, with, say, wheat—which is another example very similar—is that often wheats grown in various countries are milled together, so it’s very difficult to find the actual origin for it. So if we simply exclude it at this point, it doesn’t exclude it at the end product, but it does give the country more time to consult and actually hear from people so that we can find this workable regime.

Pork, though, was the key standout, and I’m very pleased that all parties supported its inclusion back in. Here was a clear case where consumers were demanding information. We—

💬 Hon Christopher Finlayson: I’m kosher, so it’s irrelevant to me.

Ah, we have a kosher member in the committee, but do you know where your pork comes from, the Hon Chris Finlayson, because when I look at the label—

💬 Rt Hon David Carter: It’s probably come from a pig.

“From a pig”, David Carter says. But you wouldn’t know if that pig came from Mexico or Scandinavia or the Wairarapa, and for those consumers that want to know where their pig products came from, they will actually get that choice. So thank you very much for the questions. I’m glad I was able to talk about them.

I did touch on penalties in an earlier call, but for clarification’s sake, the penalties—$10,000 for an individual and $50,000 for a corporate offence—are similar to the existing Fair Trading Act provisions. What we didn’t want was something far out of whack with the existing rules. This way, all consumers and all retailers can have certainty that a fair regime will apply to them. I’m not anticipating we’re going to see great offences. I think we have a very honest retailing sector in New Zealand. But where we do see egregious breaches—and I hope we don’t see them—we do have a clear penalty, a clear offence, that can make sure that this regime actually has teeth.

It’s with, obviously, some trepidation that I stand up to speak on a food bill. But this is important stuff, and as someone who’s treated his body as a temple—a very large temple, with a lot of space to fill over the years—it’s something that I do have some degree of concern about, and I quite seriously do believe that this bill is something that consumers want.

But I am a little perplexed. In fact, I had a numbing moment when the member Gareth Hughes was speaking before, as many in the Chamber did, when I looked around, and it suddenly struck me, when you were talking about the difficulty of frozen foods and various other things like that—so I’ve got a very simple question for the member in the chair: has he got an organic recipe for an ink that will dry on the frozen food package and not smudge as it defrosts?

The problem is that people open those plastic packets—firstly, should they be plastic? Should they be plastic? As they open those packets, you end up with that ink smudge all over your fingers. It doesn’t matter how many times you run off to the hand sanitiser and the paper towel, when you come back to try and get the product out—they might be your peas, right? If they were green peas one minute, next minute they’re black peas, because of the ink that’s got all over them. So I think that’s an aspect of this bill that could be enhanced, and I would hope that the member has thought about this and has some Supplementary Order Paper that would mean that you have to have a stable—a stable—organic ink on the frozen food package, particularly when you’re putting date stamps on, and things like that, as the member was mentioning before.

I commend him, though, for the bill. I hope that he’s not going to prolong its passing, because there are thousands of consumers, tens of thousands of consumers, hundreds of thousands of consumers out there who are waiting for the surety that they can get as a result of this bill passing through the House, knowing that their food will actually have reasonable labelling on it. That part I’m very, very serious about, but I am equally concerned about the poisons that are being put into the freezer in that small little bit of ink that causes such a problem for so many people.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Can I just ask the honourable member to maybe take 20 spaces into the next hall where there’s quite literally tonight a demonstration of all the sustainable alternatives to plastics and oils we have in this country, so he won’t get ink on his hands in the future.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m delighted to stand tonight and have a few questions of the member Gareth Hughes. Now I just would like to wish you happy birthday. Did I say Gareth Hughes? I did say “Gareth Hughes”. Happy birthday. Now that was not my best start; anyway we will continue onwards.

I’m really delighted to talk tonight. I’m not on Primary Production Committee, but however I am on the Health Committee and the Environment Committee and this bill really segues nicely—really segues nicely—into the two areas that I sit on. In particular, in the Environment Committee we are initiating a briefing on food rescue and one of the things that—

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): Order! I do just want to bring the member—we’ve traversed this bill for some time now, so can we come to the specifics of the bill.

It was just around the labelling, sorry. So the reality is that with our labelling of our food what is going to happen, particularly with our international food—

💬 Hon Gerry Brownlee: Inky fingers.

ANGIE WARREN-CLARK:—yes, and sticky fingers—is that we are actually going to know where it comes from, and then, at that point, this food may not be as popular as the food that is from country of origin. So I just raise that point.

And on that note, I want to specifically talk to clause 5(3) which says regulated food must include food that “(a) is either—(i) only 1 type of fruit, vegetable, meat, fish, or seafood that—(A) is fresh (even if previously frozen) or frozen”—and this is the point that I want to ask the member about. It excludes food that is, for example, dried, cured, or pickled. So I’m really interested in the fact—because when we look at food that is dried, or cured, or pickled, generally speaking, you know, it’s more than 50 percent, which the bill makes reference to. So I’m a little bit confused about how that works and I’d like an explanation please.

And then I’d also like to know—the further part to that is “(B) is no more than minimally processed (for example, by being cut, minced, filleted, or surface treated);”. So I’m just confused around the two definitions. One is cured; one is pickled. One is filleted, minced, or surface treated—not quite sure what that is; I didn’t get a chance to google that. So what is surface treated food? And I noticed the carve-out and I’d like the member’s comment around the carve-out of pork. I noticed that and I have seen quite a bit in the—

💬 Dr Duncan Webb: Well scored.

Yes, I thought it was quite witty. So I have noted that. But in particular, we have cured included elsewhere but, of course, cured pork—are we actually referring to bacon? Is this what we are referring to—bacon? So I’d like that clarified.

Finally, I’d like to talk about clause 5(3)(c)(i), which talks about food “for immediate consumption: a restaurant, cafeteria, takeaway shop, canteen, or similar place, or a caterer;”. They don’t need to record this and I do understand the fact that that’s because there’s lots of ingredients. But what I was interested in is at a fundraising event. So the fundraising event was excluded. Now, we all get the jar of pickles for sale, right? But why is—say if I wanted to sell a pile of lemons at a fundraising event, why would that be excluded or would it not be excluded? So it’s just a question in regards to that.

💬 Hon Gerry Brownlee: Would the member buy lemons because the pickles weren’t sour enough for her?

Oh, how mean!

So really, it was really some questions specifically about those: how you got to those words and also, finally, just to reply to Rino Tirikatene’s question around fish and country of origin. My understanding is country of origin is the boat that it was caught on and I wanted to just confirm with the member that that was a case—so fish that might be caught in our international waters but caught on, for example, you know a Korean boat or something, that fish becomes the product of Korea.

I move, That the question be now put.

We might take one more.

💬 Dr Duncan Webb: It must be my turn, Madam Chair.

CHAIRPERSON (Poto Williams): I call Dr Duncan Webb.

Thank you, Madam Chair. For a moment there, I thought I was invisible, but I thank you for seeing me there.

I have a question for the member in respect of clause 6. My colleagues here have been entertaining us or enlightening us with some questions about food, but mine’s much more technical. It’s around the repeal of the Act, because it’s quite unusual. It’s quite an unusual clause, member Hughes, that you’ve got there—that the Act is repealed 18 months after its commencement. I wonder if advice was taken on this because the effect of repeal on delegated legislation is something we need to think very carefully about, and it doesn’t actually provide in this bill that any delegated legislation made in pursuance of it remains in effect notwithstanding the repeal of what appears to be empowering legislation. So that’s my first point.

I do have a related point because the options are either it remains in place, but traditionally when the empowering legislation disappears, that’s the foundation upon which the delegated legislation is built and the rest of it all crumbles away. Now, I am aware that this is a slightly unusual piece of legislation because in a sense it’s saying: here’s the obligation to make this delegated legislation but it’s to be made under section 27 of the Fair Trading Act—and that’s clause 5(1). So you’ve got this unusual situation where you’ve got section 6 repealing the Act, but it may or may not be called empowering legislation.

In that sense, in, say, clause 5(1), my concern is that whilst it directs the Minister to make a recommendation, there’s a danger in there, isn’t there, member, that the Minister may change his mind that the recommendation—

💬 Hon Member: Or her.

—or her. At the current time I think it’s Mr Faafoi, but the Minister may make that recommendation and then may either change that recommendation, revoke that recommendation, or even, once the regulations are in place, could simply say—and I’m sure the current Minister wouldn’t do this, but a future one might—“Oh that was a bad idea. I’ve decided that for whatever reason such and such goods which we’ve got in this bill, you know, dried fruit, cured pork are going to be excluded from it,” and it seems to be absolutely no fetter on the Minister having a change of heart in that regard.

So I’m wondering, member, if any thought was given to that, because whilst it’s a good direction to the Minister to make that recommendation, it seems to be somewhat weak in its future enforcement of it. So really my questions are about the way this works both in terms of the regulations themselves, which are of course regulations, which as member Brownlee will know, will go before the Regulations Review Committee and may be disallowed, for whatever reason, but, also, what happens on repeal and what will be the case if the Minister changes his mind. Clearly, it would be a real concern, but it strikes me that there’s no ability for this House to use any powers under this piece of legislation to revisit it.

So the member might want to think about amending clause 6 to make it clear that the regulations survive any repeal, and, secondly, give this House some power to take, essentially, an enforcement action against a Minister who doesn’t make the recommendation or who changes their mind on the recommendation or who, in fact, having made a recommendation and the regulations having been passed, then changes the regulations in a way that would have been inconsistent with this legislation. Of course, the legislation may then have been repealed, which leads us into another conundrum.

Having said that, Mr Hughes, I do absolutely congratulate you on this piece of legislation. It’s a huge leap forward, and much needed, a piece of legislation that we’ve all been waiting for, and you’ve shown the patience of a saint in working through it, seeing the massive changes and negotiating your way through a very difficult piece of legislation. So I congratulate you on that.

Kia ora. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou, kia ora. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to the members for their, I think, very thoughtful and reasonable questions—except the one who said “Can the member explain dried, cured, and pickled?” You’re asking a vegetarian! I’m the last person in this House who should answer, but I do know that those processes involve adding additional materials in the process of drying or curing or pickling—for example, oil with pickles. So there was the line that was drawn by the Primary Production Committee, by all parties, which was that it didn’t have to have additional ingredients. Now, other ways that the line could have been drawn was “Does the primary product constitute 50 percent of the final product?”—say, you know, a bag of frozen vegetables, for example. Would that be included if it was a three-way mix of carrots, corn, and peas? So the committee thought that the most practical, workable, and least costly or cheapest alternative was simply to have those products—so meat that has been cut and sliced but then crumbed wouldn’t be in.

The issue of surface treatment is quite an interesting one and shows how modified our food actually is. Often, modern foods are surface treated—this is adding either a liquid or a powder on to the food. Probably the best example I can give is grated cheese. Here you’ve got a material—a powder, I understand—for anti-caking, which is applied to the shredded or grated cheese to stop it sticking together and easier to disperse. So that’s why surface treatment was listed.

When it comes to the issue of trade barriers, this was a previous concern of different Governments of both colours, in previous years, over the debates around country of food origin being raised. Some submitters, such as Beef and Lamb New Zealand, did raise concern around barriers. It was very useful to have Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade officials come and advise the committee that it was possible to design this bill in such a way and that it was possible to implement it in such a way that it wouldn’t be breaching the technical barriers for trade under the World Trade Organization—basically, because this legislation enshrines principles of non-discrimination. Now, I believe it would be a breach of international trade rules if we only required, let’s say, hypothetical country X to label their products but no other country, or a whole bunch of countries but not New Zealand. This legislation will apply evenly to food provided in all countries. So it was reassuring to get that advice. It has been a red herring that has been used by different public commentators for many, many years as a barrier. The thing that I point out, of course, is that 55 other countries around the world have this exact rule to greater or lesser degrees, and in most countries to greater degrees, so it clearly hasn’t been a barrier to trade in other countries.

When it comes to clause 6, though, I guess you could call it a suicide clause, Dr Webb, which is the idea that this legislation—this bill—actually won’t exist in the future. Now, this is simply because the committee decided the most workable solution was using the existing legislation, not creating standalone legislation. The hypothetical scenario was posed that what if a Minister in the future decides to weaken our labelling laws. Now, I don’t have any concerns on that. Here we see Parliament passing and, I hope, continuing it unanimously, and what we see around the world is a greater desire by consumers and a greater responsibility provided by Governments to those consumers to provide labelling information. So, in Australia, I’ve talked about the much more comprehensive regime they have presently. I think we’re only going in one direction—that’s towards greater labelling information.

My vision of the future is of course that consumers can have much more information on the history of their products: the provision of where the product was grown or raised. That’s where the issue of fish comes in. Now, this is an issue where we have to do much more detailed work with Government officials and the regulation-making powers. Different jurisdictions apply different rules. In Europe, I understand, it’s where the fish was caught, for example. In New Zealand, we’ve lost a lot of our fish-processing capability and we do see a great deal of fish actually processed offshore. So the question of whether a fish is caught in, say, international waters, processed in the territorial sea but landed in New Zealand and sold here—how would that apply? We really do need to do more detailed work because of the complexities involved with the modern global economy.

I think this will be my last call. I’ve tried to respond to all questions. I think we’ve seen a very good debate. What we do see, ultimately, though, is legislation which is giving consumers more power and more information. It is going to be a workable system, as we talked about with Stuart Nash’s contribution earlier. I also believe it’s a foundation that we can build on and move closer to the Australian regime, but I do thank all members for their well wishes and their support.

I move, That the question be now put.

Motion agreed to.

Clauses 1 to 6 agreed to.

Bill to be reported without amendment presently.