SpeechIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): It never ceases to amaze me that yesterday when we had a lot of National Party members' bills going through the House the Government spent 10 minutes speaking on each slot and today the Minister spent about four speaking on this bill.Hon Kieran McAnulty: That's right.IAN McKELVIE: Very good speech though Minister. I'll have to add the fat to the bill. It gives me pleasure to speak on the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill. Interestingly it amends the Forests Act 1949 so no wonder it needs amending: it's older than I am. I think that historically New Zealand industry has performed pretty well in this respect because most of our native or indigenous forest is covered by other Acts than this one. So there are pretty strict regulations around a lot of that product.But this one as the Minister said is necessary because it brings us into line with our trading partners and in fact with a fair proportion of the rest of the world. It's certainly necessary because not every country has I guess the integrity in their forestry system that we do. So I think it was certainly necessary.One of the ironies of this bill of course is that we export about $6.3 billion worth of wood products from New Zealand. But interestingly we import about $2.3 billion worth which is pretty amazing when you think about it. I think that one of the challenges for our industry—which is not quite part of this bill—in the future will be and it's moving quite quickly in that respect now to get our exotic forestry and wood into a state that then we don't need to import the amount of wood we do. The reason for it is that we have historically had to treat most of our exotic forestry in New Zealand and there are now processes that mean we don't have to use chemicals to treat it and we can produce a product very similar to some of the extraordinary hardwood and some things we import from around the world. So hopefully the need to import quite such a large amount of wood product from around the world will diminish as we get better at manufacturing and producing product from our own exotic forestry to fill that need in the New Zealand system.So the bill's basically there to stop—well not to stop so much as to manage—the risk around illegal harvest and what I suppose would be in many parts of the world the exploitation of our native wood or forestry systems. So in New Zealand of course we are fortunate that we do have such a large percentage of our forestry as exotic and it grows very quickly and it's very easily replenished; in other words you cut it down and 25 years later you've got it back again. And that's a pretty good system and it's certainly a sustainable system for the future.So the bill gives quite a number of powers as the Minister said. I want to talk about three different issues related to it but one of the powers it gives is the power of warrantless entry and inspection—and you would hope that that would be used very minimally in New Zealand. On a number of other bills going through the House in the past few years we've had quite large discussions about this very topic which of course is challenging for many people.But I want to talk about a couple of other amendments the Primary Production Committee made. One of them: first processing. And when you think about the way we harvest our forestry nowadays once upon a time we had a whole lot of men—well they were men in those days—with chainsaws going around in the forest and a couple of massive great big tractors pulling those logs out. It was easy to work out that wasn't processing. But nowadays we have these massive machines effectively go to the forest strip the tree get it ready to put on the truck and nail it on the truck to do the whole thing. So they had to insert a definition of first processing" because it could easily be construed that first processing was occurring in the plantations; it's not of course—well you could argue it was. So a definition—this is included in this bill to describe what "first processing" is. So I thought that was quite an interesting little piece of work that had to be done.The next thing I want to talk about is the definition of "legally harvested". We had a submitter who felt that in the course of the definition of "legally harvested" we should be including I suppose suspect behaviour by logging contractors and trucking contractors which I found quite interesting. What that submitter meant by that was where they either don't pay you or don't do the job properly or don't complete the job. That of course wasn't quite appropriate to be put into this bill but it was an interesting issue and he wanted that included in the definition of "legally harvested". And I suppose you could argue a case for that but it would be very difficult to put parameters around that.There's also offences for providing false or misleading information and there are offences related to log traders. Of course every bill we put in place in New Zealand has to have an offence included in it so that was part of this bill as well.So I think on the whole the bill achieves what it set out to achieve which is to put us on an equal footing with our trading partners around the world and to ensure that our wood exports are done with integrity and done what's termed in here of course as "legally".One other issue I just want to raise very briefly in respect of this—and it isn't covered by this because it's covered by other legislation—is there's quite a lot of wood exported out of New Zealand or has been over the years. When you think about what's been going on with these cyclones in the last few months there's an awful lot of native trees lying in our riverbeds and things like that. Historically some of those sort of trees—and kauri in the North was an example of it—have been dug up at later dates and then exported in various forms.This bill doesn't cater to that because it's catered for elsewhere. But it is an interesting issue when you think about the amount of wood that's lying around in some of our riverbeds now—and some of that wood will be extremely valuable were it able to be harvested and exported. That will be something we need to watch in the future but as I said there is legislation covering that already and hopefully that's able to continue to be policed.So we support the bill. We think it's a good piece of legislation and I think the select committee did a pretty good job of getting to the point it's got to. Thank you."