Winston Peters: Grate red-tape nonsense like cheese

Winston Peters

Biddy Fraser-Davies has been battling the bureaucrats since 2009, when food safety officials spotted her on Country Calendar and turned up at her cheese-making business near Eketahuna to ensure she was complying with their rules. Last month she took up the cudgels again to draw the Primary Production Select Committee's attention to regulatory demands that are crippling her business.

The owner of Cwmglyn Cheese company, 74-year-old Biddy, hand-milks four Jersey cows on her small organic farm near Eketahuna. The regulatory regime - milking parlour inspections, herd inspections, TB inspections, risk management audits and so on - are formidable, frustrating and costly.

Regulatory fees consumed at least half of the $40,000 revenue she generated last year and testing for one of her cheeses worked out at a formidable $250 a kilogram.

New legislation prompted by the dairy botulism scare will make things more onerous. But as Biddy says, the rules are written as though she is as big as Fonterra whereas her batch size typically is just one cheese and not thousands of tonnes of cheeses.

Fonterra and other corporate cheesemakers can absorb the regulators' demands. But they manufacture cheese whereas artisans make it. Protocols appropriate for industrial operations, involving milk collected in bulk and stored over time, are plainly inappropriate for artisans whose milk goes straight from the cow to a cheese-making vat.

Biddy isn't the only victim of bureaucratic overkill. Mount Eliza Cheese owner Jill Whalley, from Katikati, is another small-scale cheese-maker pressing for a level playing field. She noted how high compliance costs make it much harder for Kiwi producers to compete with European imports.

The Ministry for Primary Industries says it is trying to find the right balance between regulating the food industry and keeping costs down. Consumer safety must be a vital consideration and the ministry will rightly come under fire should there be a food safety scare, illness or death resulting from sloppy monitoring. The reputation of New Zealand's food exports must be protected, too.

But Biddy does not seek exemption. She is suggesting less onerous requirements for cheesemakers who use 1000 litres of milk or less each week and who can prove they can stick to a "sensible and well-planned" programme for their premises and production processes.

Labelling is another option on packaging and in restaurants. It gives customers the chance to choose between manufactured products and cheeses made under a different safety regime. Regulations like this confirm the view that this isn't the practical National Government of old. Under this new breed of MP's we are seeing the emergence of controlling 'nanny-nats.' Simply put, strangling artisans in red tape is nuts.

Winston Peters is the Leader of New Zealand First and Member of Parliament for Northland