The Food Bill

Yesterday I read Lance Wiggs’ post on making everyone in NZ part of the 1% which I believe is a fantastic idea. Of course to do this we need a government that works for the people and I’m not sure that it fully is…

Point in case, this week NZ signed the ACTA (when instead it could have being announcing a bill such as Brazil’s Civil Rights Based Internet laws) and of course there is the new Food Bill.

Introduced last month The Food Bill in its current form it effectively makes it illegal to grow food and share it with others! This blog post discusses the bill, covering all the tin-foil hat scenarios, including the AOS kicking in the gates of maraes to confiscate their vegetables and seeds :)

Unfortunately as currently written the bill would actually allow these scenarios to occur. I thought I’d ask an MP about it and tweeted Green MP Gareth Hughes:

@GarethMP WTF is this Food Bill thing about ? nzfoodsecurity.org/2011/07/19/foo…

His response was:

@rabidgremlin hey it’s not as bad as some people are making out. Here’s Sue Kedgley’s view blog.greens.org.nz/2011/09/13/foo…

I’m not sure I agree with Gareth’s assessment but Sue’s response makes good sense (is it just me or are the Greens the only party that seem to have any common sense?) and would solve the problems in the bill, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

This whole issue of course highlights the fact that governments are fallible and that poorly drafted laws can have a huge impact on our lives. We can’t just sit back and expect everything to fall into place, instead we need to become actively involved in our country, policies and government if we want to make New Zealand the country were everyone in it a part of the 1%.