Blame and Bullshit -- June 2018

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 2^nd my heifers came back from grazing and on May 7^th 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?