For me the defining aspect of this
government’s response to M. Bovis has been their ability to lay the blame squarely
at the feet of farmers, positioning us as villains that they’ve had to swoop in
and rescue from our own incompetence.
It’s not a bad tactic, it plays well
with the urban base, it sows distrust amongst and it pays huge financial
dividends: industry has agreed to foot 32% of the bill to eradicate M. Bovis
compared with the 15% agreed previously. I guess we should count ourselves
luck, the Minister of Agriculture was gunning for 50%
A little over a week ago Damien
O’Connor told Parliament’s Primary Production select committee that a “farmer
he had spoken to had taken four non-NAIT compliant herds onto his property for
grazing.” He went further and, backed by MPI officials, said he was aware
movements of non-compliant stock were occurring and the problems were “very
prevalent”.
This sort of unsubstantiated bollocks
casts farmers in a very bad light, and the lack of definition around what
“non-compliance” means makes it very hard to hold politicians to account. I
doubt Mr O’Connor could provide a definition if pressed by reporters.
Michelle Edge, Chief Executive of
OSPRI which manages NAIT, says that criticisms being levelled at the system are
“significant extrapolations of the facts” and a “misinterpretation of the NAIT
review”, she said those things because it’s not a career enhancing move to
simply tell a Minister he’s full of it.
Take the meat processing industry as
an example; they’re 90 to 95% compliant. Surely as an end point they should hit
100%, what’s the story with the 5 to 10% of dead animals that are non-NAIT
compliant? The answer is those animals aren’t lodged with NAIT within 48-hours
of movement, and that’s the measure of
compliance.
On May 2nd my heifers came
back from grazing and on May 7th my grazier transferred them back to
me via NAIT. Those animals are legal and in no way obscuring any potential for
tracing disease, yet Mr O’Connor could quite correctly slam me for having
non-NAIT compliant stock because the
transfer didn’t happen within 48-hours of movement.
Mr O’Connor is not alone, though his
rhetoric is more fiery than our PM, her calm assertion that M.Bovis arrived
illegally flies in the face of all reports we’ve seen from MPI.
Despite MPI having identified seven
different pathways M.Bovis could have entered the country, most of them legal,
and saying they still hadn’t isolated the method of incursion, the PM chose to
make this bold statement on the radio: “There
is no question this has come into New Zealand by someone along the way
breaching our rules and regulations”
I’m the first to put my hand up and
say we farmers need to up our game, but is it too much to ask for our
politicians to deal in hard facts rather than blame and bullshit?
