New Zealand Parliamentary Debate

Valedictory Statement [4446]

a meeting of noisy Hawke's Bay orchardists, assured the industry that the status quo would prevail. I was utterly dismayed by this. But Cabinet, after intense discussion, decided that the Prime Minister's word, however careless, must be our bond.

The issue that exercised me most in 1990 was how to respond to the devastation left behind by Cyclone Bola. By promoting sustainable land management, we devised and won funding for a scheme called FARM Partnership-the letters of FARM standing for facilitating action for risk management. FARM Partnership perished in the mother of all Budgets the next year, but what remained has endured-the reorientation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry from an organisation that existed to try to make two sheep graze where but one had grazed before to an organisation whose mission is to promote sustainability, where the three pillars of environmental, social, and economic sustainability are seen as interdependent and of equal importance. The Sustainable Farming Fund, established post-1999, has given wings to another ingredient of sustainable agriculture-the energy and innovative impulse of our rural communities. I am continuously amazed by the quality of Sustainable Farming Fund- assisted projects, and suspect the scheme will enjoy a long life.

This time round we have at last done justice to producer board reform. It has been successful because the Government reached agreed positions with the stakeholders in each sector. Undoubtedly, the jewel in the crown is Fonterra. I confess now to having been a sceptic with regard to the one-company model, but was persuaded by cunning regulation that disincentivised any unfair manipulation of milk and share prices by the dominant company. Anyway, even if Fonterra does not work in theory, it is hard to argue with success in practice. Initially the 13 th biggest dairy company in the world, Fonterra is now the world's third or fourth largest, with the vision and the momentum to become New Zealand's Nokia.

Other highlights of my tenure in rural portfolios have been the ongoing strengthening of biosecurity, food safety, and animal welfare. All these, of course, are important in their own right, but doubly so because of market risks that threaten the living standards of every citizen, whether or not they know it. A personal highlight was, as New Zealand's Minister of Agriculture, to be honoured to be elected to the chair of the biennial conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. The last New Zealander in that role had been Keith Holyoake in the 1950 s. Rome is a beautiful city in a beautiful country. That organisation is an unwieldy bureaucracy but nevertheless it is trying to operationalise an important part of the United Nations vision.

My other major portfolio, which steadily increased in size until it demanded almost a full-time commitment, was that of trade negotiations. I had not anticipated getting trade negotiations. Nothing in my parliamentary experience had prepared me for it. I had expected to be typecast, as usual, in a suite of primary industry portfolios- excluding, of course, forestry, from which I had withdrawn because I could not support my party's policy of ruling out production from any part of the extensive Crown beech forest estate. What I did not realise until later was that Helen Clark was being vigorously lobbied by suburban greenies not to allow that Sutton anywhere near the fisheries portfolio. They said I was too close to industry. I am willing to accept contributions of blue cod.

So I was somewhat surprised when about a month before polling day in 1999 Helen said: Jim, you'd better have your bag packed on election night.-my God, I thought, there has been a bad poll in South Canterbury-It may take weeks to form a Government, so I have agreed with Jenny that you and Lockwood Smith will both go to the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle. And so it was. I have been to Seattle, Doha, Cancun, Geneva, Hong Kong, all the APEC conferences, bilateral and