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Opinion
FARMERS WEEKLY – farmersweekly.co.nz – May 15, 2022
Why take our tools of the trade? Alternative View
Alan Emerson
I’M SICK of Police Minister Poto Williams telling me that an Arms license is a privilege. While I accept it isn’t a right, I don’t agree it is a privilege. According to my dictionary privilege means the advantages or immunities enjoyed by a small, usually powerful, group to the disadvantage of others. I’m at a loss to figure how the Minister thinks it is a privilege to own a firearm. I first received a firearms license years ago aged 15 or 16. My father, who was injured in WW11, told me it was now my job to provide meat for the family and I did with a .303. Most Fridays I biked through the Greymouth CBD with my rifle slung. No-one ever questioned me and I don’t accept that providing food for my family was a privilege. Is the Minister also suggesting that shooting noxious animals is a privilege? I certainly didn’t encourage them and they’re most destructive not to mention catastrophic for the climate. I don’t shoot them as a privilege.
ESSENTIAL: Alan Emerson doesn’t accept that providing food for his family was a privilege.
Is it a privilege to shoot a dog whose had its back broken by a cow’s kick? What would Minister Williams have me do, sit it down and give it a talk on co-governance? Is it a privilege to shoot a steer whose fallen down a bank and broken bones or a bull that’s lost it and threatened to cause mayhem on the road? Is it a privilege to shoot a wild pig when it has bitten the heads off half a dozen lambs? It begs the question does anyone in Wellington have any idea what firearms are used for in the provinces? We now have an inefficient, totally screwed up system of gun licensing and license renewal that is contributing to both hunger
in many outlying areas and the explosion of noxious animal numbers in others. How is that justified? By telling people they’re enjoying a privilege and can be dicked around on bureaucratic whim? It further begs the question is it a privilege for a builder to have a hammer or a car driver to have a license? Both can kill. I have several issues with the current firearms impasse. As I’ve said I don’t believe anyone in Wellington has the faintest idea of the practical use of firearms in the provinces. They’re still thinking toys for boys. I think Minister Williams is both
incompetent and out of touch. Her so-called Arms Advisory Group is a joke designed to give her the answers she wants. The police, like the Minister, are incompetent when it comes to firearms. They have no idea. Taking eight months to renew a license along with over 30 pages of largely irrelevant garbage is ridiculous and shows that neither the Government nor the police have any regard for legitimate firearms owners. We have the police wanting feedback from gun clubs with a 130-page document that allowed six weeks for a response, which was a waste of time anyway as the new law is to come into effect in June. The Police Commissioner tells me that guns aren’t imported into NZ, yet in April the police told the nation that firearms were being imported from the United States. I sent an Official Information Act request to the police, which was a total waste of time. I asked how many of confiscated firearms were legal to be told there was no such thing as an illegal firearm. I then asked how many of the firearms taken were semiautomatic to be told that semiautomatics were ‘prohibited’ – not illegal firearms, which I thought was a cute response. There were 34. I wanted to know of the 865 arrests in the recent Operation Tauwhiro how many had current licenses.
The answer was 43, around 5%. My point is that it isn’t legitimate firearms owners who are the problem so why try and marginalize them as both the Government and the Police do? We keep reading that the arms laws and police actions are all about keeping people safe as a result of the Christchurch mosque shooting. That’s rubbish. The mosque shooter was an Australian white supremacist who should never have been given a gun license. He bears no resemblance to the 250,000 legitimate, licensed gun owners in NZ. Legitimate gun owners also bear no resemblance to the many nonlicensed gang gun owners who can import guns and get around the system. In the recent ruckus over gang numbers in Parliament the Minister basically denied that gang numbers had increased. The police union suggested the Minister talk with police and get the real facts. The Minister would talk to the police several times a day, which leads me to the conclusion that either the police weren’t giving her the facts, or the Minister wasn’t listening. Those suffering the fallout are legitimate, honest licensed firearm owners.
Your View Alan Emerson is a semi-retired Wairarapa farmer and businessman: dath.emerson@gmail.com
We must get the regulations right Dr John Roche A RECENT Farmers Weekly article raised issues about the complexity of the regulatory process for approving methane inhibitors, delays and a suggestion that the process appears “to have grown more complicated”. I love how quotations can be succinct turns of phrase that capture profound insight. The article I refer to reminded of two such pearls of wisdom: the old Chinese Proverb that “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago … the second-best time is now”, and my father’s line that “laws made in haste, make bad laws”. The value of New Zealand’s food exports is built on the credibility of our food safety and biosecurity standards. We are world leading and we are known for that competency. This reputation is underpinned by our regulations and the fact that their development is evidencebased, with appropriate domestic and international consultation. We undermine this at our peril. The Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicine (ACVM) Act came into effect in 2001, and the impetus for its establishment was to regulate inputs used for the management of plants and animals for reasons outlined above.
This was well before methane or nitrous oxide inhibitors were even considered ‘a thing’. When it was recognised that the ACVM Act did not cover such inhibitors, work began on the best way to overcome this limitation. Industry strongly supported the work to amending the legislation and making sure it was done right. To ensure it was done right, a two-step approach was designed. This involves declaring a list of inhibitor substances to be agricultural compounds using the legal measure as an Order-inCouncil, while a more permanent solution will be achieved through a legislative change to the ACVM Act. Substances on the list will be subject to the Act and will require registration. The process has not become more complicated. Instead, for many people interacting with the process, this is simply their first time doing so. The regulatory process for these inhibitor substances will be the same as for other agricultural compounds, such as pesticides and veterinary medicines. And it is important to be clear. No methane inhibitor (or any other type of inhibitor) has been delayed to market due to the regulatory process because available inhibitors can be used without ACVM registration. Crucially, however, the new
registration process will give the primary sector and consumers here and abroad genuine confidence in inhibitor products. Reducing our greenhouse gas emissions is complex. We’re battling more that 50 million years of evolution to suppress methane. This is not easy and the products to do this are new. We must ensure no negative impacts on animal welfare, food safety, or product integrity, as well as ensure the efficacy of the inhibitor relative to its claims. It shouldn’t be surprising, therefore, that government would require chemical residues and efficacy data to register a product. Farmers, food processors, and our consumers will want this. With five million New Zealanders and more than 40 million people overseas depending on our food safety system, not to mention the reputation of more than $40 billion in export revenue, it is vital that we do not cut corners. We need to work together to achieve our collective aims: he waka eke noa, we are all in this together.
Who am I? John Roche is the chief science adviser at the Ministry for Primary Industries.
CARE NEEDED: Ministry for Primary Industries chief science adviser John Roche says the value of New Zealand’s food exports is built on the credibility of our food safety and biosecurity standards and we undermine that at our peril.
