Organic Products and Production Bill

Point of order. I seek leave for all provisions to be taken as one question.

Is there any objection? There is objection. The question is that Part 1 stand part.

Thank you, Mr Chair, and I thank the Minister for coming to the House late this afternoon to discuss the Organic Products Bill. Minister, can you give me some clarity, please. There is a 96-page Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that was tabled, I believe, in late October. This is a year and a half after we heard submissions in the Primary Production Committee. There are substantive changes in this SOP. Can you please reconcile it, and I’ll start with the explanatory note of the bill, right at the beginning of the bill.

What on earth does this mean? There is now a huge aspect that encapsulates the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi—Treaty principles. Now, I’m trying to reconcile that with what’s over the page and speaks about verifiers. What will verifiers and the consenting or certification process ultimately look like when you’re a ma and pa organic grower anywhere that would arguably supply the likes of a market garden or a Saturday market anywhere in New Zealand?

The process of adhering to Treaty principles speaks to a representative Māori membership on an advisory council. What will that mean for ma and pa operators? I can offer you all sorts of anecdotes where this organic growing industry has small owner-operators, but this has actually added a small portion to their income. These are really small people. Will this follow science or mythology? We’ve got to have an honest conversation about what this means to smaller operators, not exporters.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I appreciate the questions that have been asked. This bill has been a long time in the making. Good things do take time. The Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) was a result of, I guess, issues raised by the industry, by iwi themselves, by Māori, our partners in the Treaty, but, actually, also across the wider business and food production sector.

The SOP clarifies the consultation requirements. It streamlines some of the interoperability, and ultimately this is about ensuring that the consumers, the people who buy organic products, have confidence that what they’re buying is true to the production systems that they understand to be there. This is about confidence for the consumer but, ultimately, confidence for those people who commit to organic production that they’ll get value for their efforts.

Thank you, Mr Chair. Now, I think it’s laudable that New Zealand has an organic products industry, and one that we already trust. I know that we trust it, because if I went to the electorate of Auckland Central, which Helen White campaigned in, I could go to the Grey Lynn butcher and I could buy organic eye fillet, and that’s probably where the Labour MP Helen White buys her eye fillet because it’s very, very good.

Then if we think about honey, New Zealanders love mānuka honey. In fact, we love it so much we tried to trademark the term “mānuka”. How is honey made? Well, for those members of the Labour Party who are here today who don’t know much about primary production, honey is made by bees. They fly from the hive, they collect pollen from flowers and flowering plants and trees, and they fly back to the hive, and then they feed it to the babies and the queen and they make honey—something along those lines. I’m an environmental engineer—OK?—not a biologist. But along the way, there’s a risk that some of these bees, some of these beef cattle, or some of these lambs will actually pick up contaminants, and that means that they won’t meet an organic purity standard.

So if we think about the general policy statement, which says, “increase consumer confidence”—increase consumer confidence—well, I could tell you that I’m 100 percent confident that if I go to my local organic butcher, I’m getting an organic product, because it wasn’t that long ago that New Zealand lamb used to compulsorily be dipped in DDT and arsenic—

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): Sorry, can I just remind members. We’ve had our sort of sparsely populated Chamber over the last few days, but there are a lot more people in here and so the noise is travelling a lot more, so can we just keep our voices down so that we can hear what the speaker is saying, please.

Thank you, Mr Chair. It wasn’t that long ago, and I would expect that honourable members such as Eugenie Sage would concur that New Zealand’s food products could have been hopelessly contaminated with arsenic, with DDT, with dioxins, and with the residues of all kinds of products that were used in our manufacturing and on our farms. That could have been chlordane and lindane, it could have been pentachlorophenol, which was used to treat fence posts and railway sleepers, or, in fact, as I mentioned, New Zealand legislation required that sheep heading to the works be dipped for flystrike before they arrived at the works. There was a minimum time frame of about three weeks.

Now, no farmer worth his salt would bring all of his stock down from the high country, put them in the yards, run them through the dip and let them go back to the high country, and then bring them back three weeks later to put them on the truck to send them to the works—that never happened. What used to happen was that the sheep were brought to the pens, the truck was going to arrive in the afternoon, and the farmer would run the sheep through the dip and, often, straight up the ramp and into the truck. So New Zealanders were eating a food product that was contaminated with DDT and arsenic, but it wasn’t a problem to New Zealand. It was our international consumers who raised this with New Zealand, and that’s one of the reasons why we stopped using products like DDT and arsenic to treat our sheep for lice and flystrike. We’ve come a long way—that’s nearly 50 years ago.

So when we consider why we need an organic products and production bill, New Zealand businesses and New Zealand consumers have already signalled clearly what they want. They want safe food products. We have the Food Act, which regulates food safety. It says what should go into food and what shouldn’t. We have many other Acts of Parliament around what consumers should expect. Consumers should have confidence that if they go to the shop and they buy a product that says free range or organic, that’s what they’re getting. And I’m not aware of any cases where somebody said, “You know what? I went to the Grey Lynn butchery, where Helen White most likely buys her eye-fillet steak, and said ‘I don’t think this is organic enough.’ ”—I don’t think it’s organic enough! Now, Helen and I have had a number of friendly chats at the Grey Lynn farmers market on a Sunday morning, while we’re shopping for organic produce together, and I do not recollect Helen ever pointing out to me that she had a lack of confidence in any of the organic products to be found at the Grey Lynn farmers market.

Now, I’ve also spent a fair amount of time travelling around New Zealand, as an ACT member of Parliament. Well, actually, Anahila Suisuiki makes a good point that it’s actually Chlöe Swarbrick who’s the member for Auckland Central, but I’ve never seen Chlöe Swarbrick at the Grey Lynn farmers market.

💬 Hon Eugenie Sage: Point of order. I wonder if the member could come back to the bill and could—

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): The Chair will decide that, thank you. Carry on.

So I’d like to just talk about Teanau Tuiono’s Supplementary Order Paper—

💬 Hon Member: Sound it out.

Teanau Tuiono’s—from the Green Party—Supplementary Order Paper. Now, I’ve run into trouble today because we’ve been under urgency for some time and my pronunciation of both English and other words such as “Eskimo”—but we won’t go there.

Now, I support agricultural production that works with ecological systems to sustain the health of soils ecosystems and people, but isn’t that what—

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): Mr Court, that’s unnecessarily provocative, given what happened earlier in the day. Just carry on and just perhaps some good manners at this stage, rather than anything else, might be actually put on display. Carry on.

That’s right. So I think it would be fair to say that New Zealand farmers already produce agricultural products that work with the ecological systems and sustain the health of soils, ecosystems, and people. So while I think the intention of this Supplementary Order Paper 279 is laudable, it doesn’t add anything to what New Zealand farmers and primary producers and people who make organics products already do.

And then if we consider ACT MP Mark Cameron’s Supplementary Order Paper, producers selling products—

Tim van de Molen: Point of order?

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): Sorry, that paper does not relate to Part 1. In fact, we are straying—we’ve been fairly liberal on that and I’ll be looking to some very specific references to Part 1.

Mr Chair, I want to talk about increasing business certainty. Now, New Zealand businesses rely on their brand, their international brand. Whether they’re selling organic kiwifruit, whether they’re selling organic milk, or beef, lamb, and other products into the international market, that’s absolutely vital. But there’s a big difference between selling products locally and internationally and the ACT Party fears that this bill will, in fact, impose unnecessary and undue costs on local manufacturers of organic products, whether that be ice-cream, cheese, honey, kiwifruit. Because while it’s important that New Zealand maintains its reputation on the international stage, for local people like myself and Helen White, who shop at the Grey Lynn food market, or if I go to other farmers markets around the country, we can be confident because we’ve shopped there for a long time. And we know a lot of the growers and the primary producers and the people whose passion it is to make wonderful consumer products, whether they be healthcare products—moisturiser you might put on your skin—homemade yoghurts, and they are made to a high standard and to an organic one for an organic consumer who wants to buy those products.

And as ACT member Damien Smith points out, a lot of them also have probiotic and other properties which are really beneficial to people who have gastrointestinal conditions and who actually rely on the products that they buy from their local suppliers at farmers markets around New Zealand. They rely on them and they’ve always relied on them and they don’t need a piece of legislation to tell New Zealanders whether they should continue to trust the organic products that they buy from their local farmers markets, for example. So the ACT Party will be proposing Supplementary Order Papers and amendments to this bill.

We also think that while this has been an urgent matter for some time—so urgent that in fact the Green member James Shaw repeatedly asked the Leader of the House, Chris Hipkins, “When will the “Organic Products and Production Bill come to Parliament?”—now it’s here, we in the ACT Party are surprised that no other MPs in National or Labour appear to want to debate the bill. So we invite them, given how excited they were about this bill, to take the opportunity to debate it. Thank you, Mr Chair.

Thank you, Mr Chair, and as the old guy in the Mainland cheese ad said, “Good things take time”—and so did that last speaker. But I wanted to begin by acknowledging the passage of this time of this bill, all of the submitters who are passionate about organics—who are passionate about making sure that the food that we grow is in line with regenerative agriculture; in line with a holistic way of thinking and being. And I acknowledge the work that the Minister has done—there’s quite a substantial Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) on the deck there as well—along with the Primary Production Committee, who put spades in the ground on this particular bill as well.

My Supplementary Order Paper is part of clause 1, and it reads as “… support agricultural production that works with ecological systems and sustains the health of soils, ecosystems, and people.” And that’s that holistic view that we’ve been talking about as well.

I acknowledge that there has been movement in the title, from just being about organic products to acknowledging that, actually, it’s about the production. The way that these products are produced—that is where the value is added. That is what, when you see it on the shelves, actually adds that extra value. That is what consumers are looking for as well; that is what growers and producers are looking for as well.

So from the perspective of the Greens, this naturally flows down into the purpose of the bill, and from our perspective this could be better refined to reflect what the bill is intended to do. So my question to the Minister is if he could reflect on the change of the title of the bill and this new purpose that we’ve outlined in our Supplementary Order Paper.

And I just wanted to reflect and acknowledge Organics Aotearoa. I look back at their submission to the select committee, and they did indicate and talk about this; but because there’s been so much movement and growth—which is a good thing. Like this House, when I was looking at it half an hour earlier, it was emptier, but it has organically grown for more and more members in the House as well.

Also, I wanted to acknowledge the Hon James Shaw, who cannot wait for this bill to be passed—but of course, we must ask some questions, Minister.

Thank you very much, I’ll take the opportunity to answer a couple of questions that have been put up. Regarding the SOP from the member and from the Green Party—look, I understand the intent of it, and it’s a kind of follow-on from the definition in the bill, but then, the unintended consequences of that might be that, as he’s put up here, “support agricultural production”. You know, horticultural production is not specified in that, and then some organic products—which are what we’re looking to cover—are in things like shampoo and such; they’re not just the things that we consume. So that’s why the definition is a little open: it puts in place a process for the sectors to define what they think is organic production, so it is a framework for flexibility. And the further down, in terms of the specifications of what is organic, then the tighter that will control options into the future. So we will not be supporting that—not that we object to the intent; it’s just that sometimes more is less, and in terms of how this bill and how the organics systems will evolve, then I think the SOP might constrain that into the future.

Regarding the ACT Party’s SOP—and they wished to have the “[organic] producer [as one] producing and selling products only for the local market.” Well, that is an exemption for them—

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): That’s on part 2.

Sorry, it’s on part 2. Sorry, I forgot that we weren’t just basing it on the bill as a whole.

Thank you, Mr Chair. [Interruption] I’m incredibly grateful that the other side of the House finds this funny; these are actually some very amazing New Zealanders that grow these products and I actually take this quite seriously.

I’ll read out a submission very quickly, Minister, if I can. And that meaning of “described as organic”—and this was a submission that we all heard that were pensioners: “we supply organic fruit to the Timaru farmers market.”—fancy that. “We are very well supported by our local community, but rely on being certified organic as a point of difference. We want to continue as a small growers scheme. Currently,”—this is OFNZ, or Organic Farm New Zealand—“we earn under $5,000 a year.” This is big bickies for certain people, and this potentiality—or the outcomes of this legislation—tends, by virtue of that, to potentially marginalise people. “We are pensioners and rely on this income.”

Now, again, we are trying to minimise the cost and bureaucracy—and we will speak about this in Part 2—on smaller owner operators. These are not big commercial exporters. And in the verification process it speaks to this, and the meaning of what is “described as organic”. You can see, Minister, with the greatest respect to you, these people are trading and to a Saturday or a farmers market, and you have no idea what you’re talking about.

I mean, we certainly do on this side of the House. These are pensioners. This is one example of rural New Zealand, very small owner operators supplying into a market.

💬 Hon David Parker: Ask the question.

Can you please give them some surety going forward, because I think they absolutely deserve it.

I move, That the committee report progress.

Mr Speaker, the committee has considered the Organic Products and Production Bill and reports progress. I move, That the report be adopted.

Motion agreed to.

Report adopted.