National Animal Identification and Tracing Amendment Bill (No 2)

I move, That the National Animal Identification and Tracing Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a third time.

Look, it is indeed a good day for the farming sector, for rural New Zealand, that we can pass two quite valuable pieces of legislation. I won’t say they are absolutely necessary but they will make a huge difference to farmers on the ground. Farming is a vital part of our economy and will be for a long, long time: over $46 billion in wealth creation comes into this country to go around in our economy and pass benefits on to most New Zealanders in some way or another.

A national animal tracing system is necessary for modern farm production systems, and this system was brought in under the previous Government. It was a little slow, it was a little reluctant, and it took some time to bed in. And then, of course, in coming into Government and just prior to the last election, I guess, the previous Government had discovered that we had Mycoplasma bovis in this country. And then when we set about a programme committed to eradication, we faced the reality of a system that wasn’t operating as it should. I’m not blaming anyone in particular for that other than, I guess, we have now faced the reality and the realisation that without a proper tracing system, we can’t claim to be good farmers. That’s the reality and we certainly can’t eradicate diseases like Mycoplasma bovis or anything else that might come into this country.

The National Animal Identification and Tracing Amendment Bill (No 2) and its five accompanying regulation changes will improve traceability. It will incentivise compliance with the system and will encourage effective and efficient use of National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) data and ensure that the NAIT framework is fit for the future. I’ll focus on a few of the issues that were raised in submissions, and I know that the Primary Production Committee—and I’d like to acknowledge the select committee. As with the previous piece of legislation, I think they gave this a thorough investigation. They listened to submissions and they made some technical changes that, I think, in the most part make the legislation a whole lot better, and that’s great.

There was one issue around tagging animals. What had become, I guess, a bad habit for farmers is that they would put animals on the truck and send them to the works. They would pay a nominal fine of about $35, I think, and it would save them the effort, I guess, of tagging animals, and that habit then transferred through into the transfer of animals from one farm to another. The point is that we need to ensure that everything that can be done is done to tag animals and properly trace them when they’re moving from a farm.

There was an exemption because the reality is some animals are so big and it becomes dangerous and awkward to tag them, and so farmers would just opt to pay the $35. We accept that there will be some situations where it’s unsafe to tag animals, where a farmer could be in real danger if he or she was to attempt it. And so that has been clarified in the legislation: not just “impracticable to tag”, which was the terminology before; it now becomes “unsafe to tag”, in regulation 5(3) of the National Animal Identification and Tracing (Levies) Regulations, as set out in Part 2 of Schedule 3. So it’s a slightly higher discipline on people to try and tag animals before they’re shifted off a property.

The next issue is compliance. There have been discussions around the privacy laws and its relationship to NAIT and farmers’ rights, and the issue of being able to find out where an animal might have come from through the tag system was blocked by so-called privacy provisions. What we’ve done is made some changes to ensure that “a prospective buyer will be able to ask the seller to provide the location history of a NAIT animal” and then NAIT Ltd will make it easy for the seller to access the animal’s location history. In that way, a farmer can find out whether the animal may have come from a property that was in some way connected to a disease outbreak or some other—perhaps it was some other relationship or connection or reputational issue with a property that they didn’t want to buy animals from. That way, this issue will allow farmers who are buying stock to track them.

The third point was run around infringement fees. And what we found out is that we need to align the infringement fees with other pieces of legislation like the Biosecurity Act and Animal Products Act, because while it was seen as a minor offence not to tag an animal, if you can’t track an animal that may be diseased, then the cost implications of that could be huge. And so we’re just going to align the infringement fees with the other legislation.

The next issue—and I want to go through these—is that other penalties that can now be laid down by a judge, should a prosecution go through court, will be shifted up to a maximum of $200,000, which is a huge fee. But when we are talking about perhaps a billion-dollar cost to try and eradicate M. bovis, then we want to incentivise everyone in the system to do everything they can to have a proper animal tracing system and do their bit, and these penalties certainly will incentivise better behaviour, I would suggest.

The next issue was one of transporters, and because animals are carted not on the back of people but on the back of trucks, the question of whether truck drivers or truck companies should be liable for the shifting of animals that don’t have proper tags was canvassed and kicked around by the select committee. I think we’ve come up with a reasonable solution to that one and said if there’s a declaration saying that there is an exemption to allow those animals to go on the truck, then the truck driver is not liable for that. And I accept that in the interim; I think that’s a fair compromise. It may have to be looked at in the future when technology allows better traceability.

There was another: access to core data. We have police and other territorial authorities who might come across an animal. They want to find out who it belongs to. These authorities now will have access to information. They’ll be able to go online and find out who owns the animal—pretty logical, really.

Overall, I have to say that this will bring NAIT a huge step forward into a situation of the scheme being fit for purpose and ready for any future developments that may emerge. This is an essential part of the future of farming in this country and we need to ensure that the legislation governing NAIT does give effect to, as I say, what we want, and that’s proper animal tracing. I want to thank the select committee once again. I thank everyone who’s been involved in this and I commit the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and I think the member the Hon Damien O’Connor meant to “commend” the bill to the House rather than “commit” it, but—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): Sorry, and I should have said, “The question is that the motion be agreed to.” Thank you for that. The Hon David Bennett—resume.

Speaking of committing people to the House, we had a fine contribution today from the Rt Hon Winston Peters, who managed to miss his first speech on the racing legislation, which was the focal point of his parliamentary contribution in this three-year session. This was his chance to shine in front of the House but he managed to stuff it up and had to sit down and miss his 10-minute speech. But at least this Minister turned up tonight and got it right. I just want to congratulate this Minister because I think that his heart is in the right place—some of the time; most of the time it’s not, of course. You know, when you’ve got the emissions trading scheme, you’ve got land-use change, you’ve got taxes on farmers, you’ve got nitrogen restrictions, and the capital requirements they’re putting on banks—all those things are killing the rural sector.

But this is actually something that needs to happen, and I suggest that the Minister has done a good job on this bill. And I think that all members of the Primary Production Committee need to be congratulated for the way that they worked through this bill, because we do need to make sure that we have, fundamentally, the best system for recording our stock. And there’s no two ways about it: M. bovis was a warning for New Zealand. It was a warning that our systems weren’t up to scratch and that we needed to do more, and I think that this is a step in that direction. It’s not the full process that we need to go through—that will come in time, and future Governments will do that, but this is a good step, at this point. It was interesting in the Minister’s speech, though, that he failed to really focus on two elements of the bill. One of them, at the very end, got half a focus. I want to go through the two core elements of this bill that, actually, the Primary Production Committee dealt with.

The first was data ownership, and just for the information of those that are listening, the Minister had a process here where he discussed with those in the industry what should be in this legislation, and they came to an agreement: this is what should be in the legislation for the good of New Zealand’s primary industries. At no point during that discussion did the Minister raise the issue of the Government nationalising data ownership. Only when the bill was introduced to this House did the sector become aware that the Government intended to nationalise data ownership through this bill. Effectively, what they were doing was taking something they didn’t own—and we got a legal opinion in the committee that showed that the Minister was not on solid ground. This bill needs to be taken in context of that legal opinion, because the Government does not have rights to the data ownership. The database is held within the industry organisations; the data ownership is not in Government hands. Now, the Minister may argue differently but that is the reality, and if the Minister felt he had a secure base to go on he would have continued through his process and made sure that data ownership was part of this bill. But he didn’t; he submitted to the Opposition, and the Opposition had one of the biggest wins they will have had in the select committee process over the last term in taking data ownership out of this bill.

The second issue, which the Minister did talk about, was the transporting of stock. Although he indicated that it was something the committee came to a reasoned approach on, it was only the National members that forced the Labour and New Zealand First members to realise what this was about, because they would have put the liability on the trucking companies for the registration of those animals and the requirements around NAIT. That is particularly unfair on those transport companies. They are farmers’ animals; they are the farmers’ responsibilities, not the trucking companies. We can go through all the mechanics of how stock are loaded in the middle of the night to make that very obvious to everybody, but, at the end of the day, the Government members and New Zealand First members came to the conclusion they were wrong.

💬 Hon Tracey Martin: We are Government members.

They are members, are they, of the Government? Well, that’s unusual sometimes. But they came to the conclusion that they were wrong and submitted to the Opposition’s approach, which would have been far more reasonable and rational. We are seeing somewhat of that in this bill here tonight, even though it will have a very big compliance cost, in the sense that declaration forms will now have to be modified to accommodate that change.

So this is a bill which is needed for the New Zealand primary sector. I’d like to thank everybody that has been involved in getting this bill to this stage. I want to have on record, though, that the National Party made this bill an effective bill that came before select committee—the National Party gave data ownership back to farmers, the National Party looked after the trucking companies, the National Party made this bill workable. The National Party should be thanked for doing the right thing for New Zealand farmers, and not the Government of the day. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to speak at the final reading of this National Animal Identification and Tracing Amendment Bill (No 2). I want to congratulate Minister Damien O’Connor and our coalition Government for yet another very welcome piece of legislation which will enhance and further strengthen our biosecurity systems. This bill is a response to the Mycoplasma bovis outbreak. It’s vitally important that we have a system of tracing and identification that is workable and that is there when we need it most. So I want to congratulate the Minister.

Just to address Mr Bennett’s point: the Minister came up with a very elegant solution around the ownership of data. Effectively, no one owns the data, but the Minister does have access to all of the information that is required to ensure that the operations of the Act can run smoothly at all times, and I want to acknowledge the Minister for coming up with that elegant solution. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

This is a very sensible, logical bill. It does not reduce the likelihood of an outbreak occurring but it does limit the outbreak. In some cases, the officials estimated this could save the country, if there was a foot-and-mouth outbreak—touch wood there isn’t—between 4 and 10 percent, which is somewhere between $400 million and $1.2 billion. We all know the introduction of pests and disease can be very costly to our country. You only need to look at the stink bug, or the Queensland fruit fly, which cost about a million bucks per bug to get rid of—Mycoplasma bovis, which is going to cost the country, farmers, and Government over a billion dollars now. I’ve seen first-hand the financial, emotional, and social effects of that throughout Southland over the past 12 to 18 months.

We know we all need to work to improve the traceability and systems, and preserve our reputation of being an amazing food producer across the globe. One of our biggest value-adds as a country is the fact that we are pest-free, disease-free, in most cases. This bill is about making the necessary changes to ensure National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) is fit for purpose and working as it should be. National kicked off the review in 2016 under the leadership of the Hon Nathan Guy, and the system was found to be wanting. There were a number of recommendations, not all of which were taken up by the current Minister, but a number of those were. While I’m on the topic of the Hon Nathan Guy, I just want to acknowledge him for all his hard work for the National Party. He announced his retirement a number of months ago. He’s a hard-working MP for Ōtaki and also an excellent Minister—back in the day, originally, in food safety but also agriculture. Last year, in the middle of last year, stage 1, we saw changes made under urgency, and we supported that bill as we wanted to see NAIT being fit for purpose and working as it should be.

Just quickly about the select committee process—there were several issues the National Party raised throughout. One of those was around non-compliance. There’s a lot of non-compliance still under way, which is still a concern. However, in saying that, farmers have been frustrated with the 0800 number that has been set up for the NAIT system for enquiries, but it’s great to see that number’s available 24/7 now and over the weekend. So it’s good to see that NAIT, the industry, and the Government are working hard to ensure the system is improved. It’s also been very constructive, during select committee, with these rounds of changes.

One concern we did have was around unsafe tagging. We did manage to get in a change around an “unsafe to tag” exemption for five years. It is limited for five years, but in all cases, if you’ve got a stroppy stag, it’s quite hard to tag and it’s also quite a hefty fine for a trucking company who can get fined for. [Interruption] The members on this side of the House obviously like stags; Matt King likes a stroppy stag. We also had concerns around privacy issues and information being shared. It’s great to see those were resolved throughout the select committee process.

One concern with M. bovis in Southland was the fact of the privacy concerns. If a farmer does have M. bovis, originally, before the law was changed, neighbours nearby that property weren’t informed, in a number of cases. That was concerning for them in terms of trading. We did have another case where a farmer was in a contract to sell, I believe, $300,000 or $400,000 worth of stock, and the buyer pulled out as that seller couldn’t prove that they didn’t have M. bovis.

So it’s good to see, throughout the select committee stage, all sides of the House working together. I do want to acknowledge the Minister for Biosecurity. I believe he’s handled this well, and I just want to acknowledge all the members of the Primary Production Committee. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

It’s a pleasure to rise on behalf of New Zealand First for this national animal identification and tracing (NAIT) legislation. It’s been referenced by others earlier that this is an important bulwark against biosecurity outbreaks. Our system has been found wanting and it has needed a tidy up, and I commend Minister Damien O’Connor for having taken the action that he has.

I note that the chairman of the Primary Production Committee, David Bennett, is claiming all the credit for it, but what he doesn’t realise is that it was such a mess and it was such a shambles that the Minister needed to step in. So it’s a bit rich, him coming in here and trying to take credit for something that we were needing to tidy up.

We’re looking for better traceability here, or the ability to trace back more efficiently, and, as we say, when we got actually road-tested with the Mycoplasma bovis outbreak, our system was found wanting.

It was a credit to the select committee in the whole process that we did work well together to tidy the bill up and make sure that it was, I think, fit for purpose at the end of the day, and I think we did make some small but important changes. The PICAs—or the persons in charge of an animal—can only use a tag for a specific location now. I note the tag needs to be related to the birthplace of the actual animal, so that is a fundamental plank in how we can, obviously, trace back to source.

But with the “unsafe to tag” definition, there was a bit of a discussion around this, and I think this is an important one. We had some lack of compliance there where there may have been some laziness, I guess, or non-compliance, or “wilful non-compliance” would be the better term, where some of these animals, whether they’d be—what were they?—the stroppy stags or something, which Hamish Walker was referring to, or large steers or cows. They are heavy—you know, some of them would be 1,500 kilos—and they are quite dangerous and difficult to tag if the tags have come out, and the tags do come out. In my experience, there’s probably a good 15 percent that would come out between tagging and when an animal goes on the truck.

So this is an issue that we need to deal with, but it had become a bit lax. There were too many stock where they were using that loophole, so we have changed the “impractical to tag” definition to “unsafe to tag”, because there will be still those dangerous animals where we don’t want to put people in breach.

Compliance, ownership of the data—there was a lot of talk about that. From my perspective, I don’t know how the Government let that data go in the first place and allowed it to be controlled by an outside entity, because when push did come to shove and we did have a biosecurity response, the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) was constrained in its ability to get information at times, I understand—from information coming back from MPI. So that’s just not good enough. When we’ve got an outbreak, we’ve got to be able to act, and we don’t need any impediments to that. I don’t think the data itself was particularly sensitive, in any case, but that did exercise the minds of the select committee members for a while.

Also, with the infringements, the fees at the top end have gone up considerably. Right through the spectrum, they have, but for wilful non-compliance, it’s gone up from $10,000 to $20,000 for individual farmers—the regulation family farms—and for corporate farmers, it’s up from $100,000 to $200,000. So that’s a genuine deterrent there.

Also, the transport was referred to before. We did look at how transport could be brought into this, because it’s a comprehensive response we want. I think, once again, under real-time pressure, we have discovered that the transporters were often carting stock that did not have tags. They knew that those stock didn’t have tags, but they were still doing it. So how do you bring them under the jurisdiction of the Act and make sure that they are playing their part, whilst recognising and—through the select committee process—accepting the representations from the farmers, and from Federated Farmers, in particular? And, to their credit, Federated Farmers wanted farmers to be accepting the responsibility, not the transport operators.

So we came down on the side of, I guess, an elegant solution, where there is an exemption or a waiver that can be signed so the transport operators can, essentially, contract out. But it does not exempt them totally, and if there’s systematic non-compliance, we will be able to get back and trace it back to the transport operators, as well. But I think the level of responsibility has fallen where it should.

So, overall, this is a good bill. It’s a good tidy-up bill. Considering what we inherited, I mean, the enforcement in the previous legislation was one $150 fine for the life of the—and it’s cost us nearly a billion dollars—a billion dollars—with the—

💬 Dan Bidois: Say it again.

—Mycoplasma bovis.

💬 Matt King: Say it again—come on.

A billion dollars, a billion trees, $3 billion for the Provincial Growth Fund—there’s billions everywhere. But that was just money down the tubes, and we were asleep at the wheel with our tracing of animals through the NAIT scheme—or the previous Government was—and just that one $150 enforcement. So it just was totally missing in action in terms of how we were responding.

But this is a big step forward. I commend the Minister for bringing this forward. I commend the select committee and the officials, who worked very well together, actually, to shape this bill up into a better bill. We are now much more prepared—or we will be, when this comes into force—to respond in future to a major biosecurity outbreak. So New Zealand First commends this bill to the House. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. We get, now, to the third reading of the National Animal Identification and Tracing Amendment Bill (No 2), and, as we’ve heard, the bill enjoys wide support across the House. It was interesting, actually, to sit in on the Primary Production Committee for this legislation.

There’s no doubt, as we’ve heard in the debate tonight, that there are some very genuine concerns with the operation of the scheme that have been coming to the fore since my colleague Nathan Guy commissioned a review, as we’ve already heard this evening, but, certainly, it became much more topical and urgent with the M. bovis outbreak, which has been devastating, actually, in a number of communities and farming areas, and certainly around where I live and in other parts of the country.

Going through the process was very interesting. I haven’t known a lot about National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) through my farming background because we’re predominantly sheep farmers, and sheep, of course, are not in the NAIT scheme. So I found it a very interesting process to understand more about the system and, certainly, the deficiencies in it. While it’s absolutely true that there hasn’t been the level of compliance that there needs to be, what is equally true is that the workability of the system and the responsiveness of the NAIT organisation and Operational Solutions for Primary Industries in running it has been far from acceptable.

One of the things I wanted to put on record in this contribution is that as part of the consideration of the bill, the select committee asked for, and received from NAIT, a very detailed work plan as to how they were going to improve the operation of the system, because before you start coming in with the big stick on farmers, actually, we need a system that works well and that can be easily looked after, and that certainly wasn’t the case.

Now, we were given a work programme on how the system will be improved, but I want to put on record that this Parliament should absolutely hold the organisation’s feet to the fire to ensure that those improvements to the system are made. We’re happy to change the obligations on farmers and change the regulatory burdens as required—and we’re doing that—but that is not a let-off for making the NAIT system itself work better for farmers and making those running it more responsive to the needs of their stakeholders. So that’s the first point I wanted to put on record.

The second really relates to the involvement of transport operators in the scheme. This is something that members from the National Party fought very hard on in select committee, to make sure that we weren’t trying to make every poor truck driver who turns up on a long, dusty road after dark and has to load hundreds of cattle beasts—and, potentially, sheep, in a future system—and is responsible for ensuring the compliance of the scheme that the Government and the organisation has failed to do. Yes, we expect them to turn their minds to it, but we cannot expect the trucking operators to be the NAIT police officers around the district.

What we’ve come up with through the select committee process I think is a very practical, workable balancing of those obligations, and it really does show the practical on-farm knowledge that members on this side of the House particularly can bring to select committee from their experience on farm.

Finally, the last point I wanted to make in this contribution is around this interesting issue of the data ownership. I’ve got to say it was quite an incredible process to see the officials insist, time and time again, that what started off in their advice as being a tidy-up of the current position changed to “Well, it might be a change, but it’s the right change.”, and the more we pushed back and pointed out to them that this was commercially a completely inappropriate provision, they finally turned around, having got Crown Law advice after the chair’s insistence, and agreed that the change in the bill wasn’t sustainable, couldn’t be supported, and so that was removed. The right outcome was reached, but it was disappointing to me that committee members had to push so hard and really force the issue to get to that point, whereas if the right advice had been sought from the outset, that issue could’ve been avoided.

So I do commend the bill to the House, but I want to again come back to the point that this bill alone is not going to address NAIT. The officials that run the system have to step up and improve the workability, the practicality, and the responsiveness of the system, not simply continue to wave the stick at farmers. Both sides need to improve. This bill will focus on the farmers, but this Parliament, the Minister for Biosecurity, and his officials have to ensure that the organisation continues to fulfil their obligations in improving the system. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koe—pleased to take a call on the National Animal Identification and Tracing Amendment Bill (No 2). Responding to the previous speaker, the Hon Amy Adams, I think one of the key changes in the bill is that some of the things that are normal in an organisation in terms of their reporting to the Minister were not clear under the previous legislation. What the amendment bill does is implement some of those quite basic things so that the National Animal Identification and Tracing organisation, which is responsible for administering and organising these regulatory services on behalf of the Crown, does now have to more clearly report to the Minister on how they’re spending their appropriation. There is a stronger ability for the Minister to set priorities, so there will be a lot more accountability from the organisation to Government.

As others have made the point, Mycoplasma bovis showed just how wanting our system of tracking animal movements was. It is said that success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. There are a lot claiming responsibility for the bill, but I think it is primarily with the current Minister, Damien O’Connor, because, yes, the previous Government did initiate the review, but it is this Government that has gone on to actually make the changes so that we get a decent system in place for regulating animal movements and ensuring that they are recorded properly so that when we get a biosecurity outbreak, they can be better tracked. The huge cost of Mycoplasma bovis—over a billion dollars to potentially eradicate it, and the Crown is contributing over $470 million of that; a big opportunity cost for that money being spent on this when it could be spent on other areas of Government spending, and huge costs to the rural community, too, in terms of the stress for individual farmers.

So it is really important in this bill, the much-improved infringement regime, the much stronger penalties, because they recognise the seriousness of not properly recording animal movement. Again, under this Government, there has been much more action in terms of infringements and proper policing so that we can lift the standard across the sector. There’s the potential for other animal species like sheep to come into a similar system. I really acknowledge the work that everyone in the Primary Production Committee, with officials, has done, and I acknowledge the Minister for Biosecurity.

This bill is overdue. It’s another example of this Government delivering to make sure that the billion-dollar export industry around primary products is more secure by having a good system to track animal movements, to record them, and ensure that there’s a much more rapid response in terms of any biosecurity challenges. So thank you.

Thank you. I’ll just take a second short call on the National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) Amendment Bill (No 2), third reading. I’d like to acknowledge the class of 2017 in the back row here, doing the hard yards late at night, carrying this side of the House. I’d like to acknowledge them all, and I’d also like to acknowledge the chair of the Primary Production Committee, another brilliant man, Dave Bennett.

This NAIT bill is a good bill. I think during the Mycoplasma bovis scare it was found wanting, as the term has been used. We set a review back in 2016, but I for one have personal experience with NAIT tags, having NAIT-tagged about 2,000—very hard to tag a flock of cows. Ha, ha!—herd of cows. A couple of thousand NAIT tags I’ve put in animals over my time, and I personally found it a very painful experience, having fallen off the top of the yards and cracked my ribs during one of those sessions. That’s how painful it was.

But anyway, look, I’m only going to speak for a short time, just to say isn’t it great how in this House tonight we are powering through the legislation, we are back and forth, and everyone’s working together? It’s a pleasure to see. I like to see that there’s cross-party support for this bill to help the farmers and to help rural New Zealand and our export economy. So I’m glad we’re in the third reading. Everything has been well traversed, and I commend this bill to the House.

This is a split call. I call Priyanca Radhakrishnan.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I too rise to take a very short call on this bill. However, the changes that are made in this bill allow for the rapid and accurate tracing of animals and their movements that enable biosecurity management and—[Interruption]

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): Order! Order, members! I know this bill is exciting everyone, but if could you just keep the volume down a little bit.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I was talking about what a good bill this is, and it’s good for a number of reasons, one of them being that we are a trade-reliant nation and the changes made in this bill will actually allow us to tell a story about where our food comes from, the system of production, and the ethical production of food that we export. While the changes might appear minor to some, it actually allows us to tell that story and to significantly strengthen our trading relationships.

I just very briefly want to say that these are changes that will ensure we can maintain our trading reputation and our economic interests. It is a good bill. I thank the Minister the Hon Damien O’Connor for his leadership, members across the House and select committee officials who’ve been involved as well, and I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Here we are now on the third and final reading of the National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) Amendment Bill (No 2). It’s good to see this progressing through. When we look at the farming sentiment around the country at the moment, it’s been very challenged, and there are a number of aspects being proposed by this Government that are causing a significant drop in confidence: increasing costs, increasing compliance, and—

💬 Hon Damien O’Connor: Starts with the banks—starts with the banks.

—reducing confidence, so that is concerning the rural sector, and we see that. The Minister’s calling out, and I encourage him to be a bit more supportive and understanding of the rural sector, because it’s a critical part of our economy. It’s nice, actually, to see now that this piece of legislation is good.

There did need to be some change to the NAIT bill—this is doing that—and I just want to touch on a couple of the key aspects within that, because David Bennett raised it earlier on around the ownership of the core data. That was actually quite an interesting conundrum that was discovered by the Primary Production Committee, effectively, when it came to determining where the ownership of that core data sat. It was a little uncertain, and so being able to shift that away from the Crown I think was the right solution. Moving that into a space where it was more industry-led was the right thing to do.

The other aspect that I really wanted to touch on was around the transport operators, too, because when we think about the requirements, where the responsibility sits, and who should be picking up the tab in terms of that, the transport operators are carrying out a core function within this. We’ve heard already about the complexities, from a practical sense, of how difficult it can be to expect the obligation to be on them, in that instance. I appreciate that there aren’t too many farming members on the other side of the House to understand some of those challenges, but like Mr King mentioned, there are a whole range of aspects that make it impractical for the transport operators to do that, some of that tagging, with the challenges around the dangerous animals as well. So those are all important things. The transport one, in particular—the exemption if they’re carrying a declaration—is a critical part that I really wanted to touch on. For me, that’s an important exemption that’s now being brought into place. It’s critical that they can carry out their function without being hindered or impeded upon, so that they can carry on conducting business appropriately.

Now, I am also mindful though, that we’ve seen in the farming sector increasing costs—

💬 Simeon Brown: Anything more you want to touch on?

—of compliance and challenges around that. It is important to touch on that, too, actually, Mr Brown, just before we wrap up. We do need to be mindful of adding additional compliance into the system, and sometimes I fear we do too much of that. But in this case it’s about getting the right balance to ensure that we can manage through any particular potential biosecurity incursions like M. Bovis and come out with the right solution at the end of the day. And so on that basis, I commend it to the House. Thank you.

Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. It is my pleasure to stand in this the third reading of the National Animal Identification and Tracing Amendment Bill (No 2). I would like to congratulate Minister O’Connor and also the members of the Primary Production Committee. I am not a member of that committee but I can see the amount of work that has been done.

In fact, I, essentially, want to highlight that this national animal identification and tracing legislation was first introduced in 2012. It then actually wasn’t fully implemented until February 2016. This bill is actually an outcome of a review that was already under way before M. bovis struck us as a country.

In fact, what this bill seeks to do is to improve the framework governing the National Animal Identification and Tracing system. Why do we want to do that? Because we want to provide for the rapid and accurate tracing of animals. It is also to enable biosecurity management and manage risks to human health. So this has been an incredibly important piece of legislation.

I do want to note, from what I’ve been able to determine, that, actually, Federated Farmers in the end did support this piece of legislation. So I want to put it out there that this has been a consultative process.

Just finally, I think what I want to leave us with is that this legislation is actually fit for the future. Again, I want to commend the Minister. I’m sure that within this area, because we’ve had to learn a harsh lesson, there’ll be other reviews to make sure that this piece of legislation continues to be fit for many futures to come. Kia ora.

It’s my pleasure to speak in favour of this third reading of the National Animal Identification and Tracing Amendment Bill (No 2). I think this whole issue came to light in the Mycoplasma bovis case earlier this year. It proved that in many cases the system was being rorted, there was some compliance issues, and there was actually a lack of response from the National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) organisation. With a Minister sitting here in the House, I commend him for getting us to this point.

I also acknowledge what the Hon Amy Adams said previously, in that there is a huge responsibility now on the organisation to make sure this works. I was speaking to some farmers last week who gave me stories—they didn’t have a tag, they rang up, and it was quite a drama to get what they wanted. So there has to be a fundamental uplift in the system.

I am very pleased that the transport operators have been listened to in this process. My colleague Hamish Walker talked about a stroppy stag. I’ve heard of raging bulls and other things that happen. As somebody that used to have a life on a farm, it didn’t happen very often, but I would have animals arrive sometimes at midnight, or sometimes we’d send animals to the South Island and it’d be loaded at 3 o’clock in the morning. There is no possible way—no possible way—you can see what that tag is at that time.

For those people in this House that think it’s somehow easy when you’re loading animals in the dark, it’s actually quite a dangerous occupation. To get them into the pen, you can’t simply stroke their back leg and expect them to move; it doesn’t happen. You have to give them a whipping—you have to give them a whipping. As a result of that, we need to look after the people in the transport sector. I’m very happy to commend this bill to the House.

As tempted as I am to speak about my experience of how effective it is to stroke back legs to get the desired outcome, I wish to speak briefly about why this bill is an effective piece of public-good regulation. It’s an effective piece of public-good regulation because it puts in place requirements that protect the broader public, social, and economic good. We know from the M. Bovis crisis just what the costs are of not having effective regulation in this area.

It’s an effective piece of public-good regulation because it puts everyone on a level playing field. It ensures that we don’t just have some good guys doing the right thing while the cowboys go along down here and put everyone else at risk. It’s an effective piece of public-good regulation because it gets the balance right. It puts in place good standards. But because we’ve had a good parliamentary process, we’ve made sure that it’s not too onerous.

Public-good regulations sometimes get a bad rap, but actually we have them for good reasons: to protect the public good and to make sure that our economy and our society are protected from risks that can have very serious consequences.

I commend all colleagues who have contributed to this bill. I commend the Minister who’s led this process. It hasn’t been a simple piece of legislation but we’ve got a good result, and it speaks to the value of public-good regulation. I commend the bill to the House.

Bill read a third time.