Peters Jim: Forests Amendment Bill —  
Peters Jim: Forests Amendment Bill —  
[Volume:617;Page:12949] 
JIM PETERS (NZ First) 
: 
 This is a very very sorry day and it is one that in 1906 this House when it passed the South Island Landless Natives Bill as an Act of Parliament a statute would never have envisaged. It would not have been envisaged that all these many many years later this House would so lightly disregard the work of the commission of inquiry in 1888 the work done in the 1890s and the work done in the Cabinet of the day in trying to bring to this House in 1906 what was then thought to be a fair opportunity for people who had missed out by Government inclination on their share of the tenth part of the land purchases in the South Island. That is the historical basis to the bill that is before us now and it is a very very sorry day that we have come to this point in time. Those people took the legal opportunity that was presented to them by the Government of the day—because we know that this land was in the minds of people then wasteland of little value—and over decade after decade their descendants hoped for the promised ability to exploit the natural resources that they had been given. Today in 2004 the land is transformed from the wasteland of 1906 into the precious resource that our indigenous forest is and those people are being denied their proper and rightful opportunity to develop their forests. I do not mean development in an exploitative way which no true forest owner would do but development in a planned managed way so that those people are able to develop fully the economic benefit and the opportunity that is theirs—the one that they have cherished for so long. 
The Minister over there on the Government benches can lightly and very quickly speed through a few speech notes and talk about an acceptable compromise. To whom is it acceptable? It is certainly not an acceptable compromise to the owners of the SILNA lands. I doubt whether the honourable member for Te Tai Tonga who should be here to speak on behalf of his people believes that this bill is an acceptable compromise in 2004. I very much doubt whether the other members who make up the Maori bench on the Government side of the House think so either. As I said last night I am very very sorry to see that they are not prepared to stand here on behalf of their constituents and put a case not only to us over here on the Opposition benches—and we would have listened with great interest—but also to their own Ministers their own Cabinet and their own Prime Minister. This bill is for some people a complete sell-out. I know that some owners of these lands have done a compromise deal with the Department of Conservation: three blocks in the last 2 years. But under this bill the vast majority of owners will still not be able to enjoy the economic benefit that they should be enjoying. The issue before the House is therefore this and Doug McPhail put it very well in his monograph which was prepared for the Minister: should the Crown wish to reach a fair and reasonable solution it is necessary to fully recognise the facts of history and recent actions in relation to the people their land and their forests. 
What are the facts of history? I have gone through some of them previously in the debate on this bill.  
Hansard 
 records them well as do the commission of inquiry notes. The 1906 Act was very promising despite the wasteland nature of the land and it enjoyed the support of the Minister and Prime Minister of the day. I will just interpose at this stage and say again that it is very very interesting to find that in two contrasting Crown Law reports disparaging comments were made about James Carroll the then Native Minister. There was a suggestion that he had been ambiguous in what he said in his speech in the second reading debate yet every member of this House knows that when a Minister leads a second reading debate on behalf of the Government he or she deliberately and very carefully puts the intentions of the Government of the time out there. I find it very very disturbing that almost a century later Crown Law officers by various methods have begun to place uncertainty and ambiguity in the mind of a Minister such as James Carroll—unless it was to fit in with the Government of the day. 
That brings me to the second major issue I want to bring to the House which is this. In 1993 the then National Government disabused all private forest owners of their rights without compensation. The fact is—as the previous speaker has said—that it was done without any compensation at all. Compensation was not given; it was exactly as he has said. But this Government willingly gave away $120 million of our money to people not to mill our forests because those forests were New Zealand taxpayer - owned forests. This Government was as large and as generous in its goodwill to the West Coast as that yet it cannot see that in this particular instance there is an opportunity to give equity to private landowners who by Government intention and legislation are being deprived of their right to the forest on their land—to mill it. That is the issue. The fact that the then National Government of 1993 did not see fit to do the same and made private forest owners into imprest public benefactors— 
Brian Connell 
: It’s history. 
JIM PETERS 
: It may be history but sometimes history is very interesting. They became imprest public benefactors. Again on reading the notes from 1996 to 1999 I found no intention other than that. All I saw there—as I said yesterday—was the Hon Nick Smith heading down to Rehua Marae and apologising to the people there for his haste his complete lack of communication and his complete lack of a wish to communicate with them at all and then saying the situation had to be fixed and it should be done then. Any thoughtful owner one who along with his or her forebears had waited for the promise to be realised said no to that. It is to the credit of a former New Zealand First member of the House Tu Wyllie that he came back and said exactly that in this House at the time. So from the mishmash of two major parties—one previously and one now—when dealing with this issue we come to 2004. Those are some of the reasons we should look at the history of this issue and those are the facts of the matter. 
In the Local Government and Environment Committee we endeavoured to see how we could do better than this bill did with regard to clause 25 “Compensation”. We sought and we were very thankful for sound advice from the Ministry of Forestry and the Department of Conversation with regard to some of the issues we had. We looked at how the relative values of SILNA forests under sustainable management compared with values under a clear-felling regime and at whether a proper comparison could be achieved of the economic value of the forest with and without an export trade in industrial wood. So we looked for those statistics with regard to beech and rimu. Basically it was rather difficult for people to really get out of the statistics what the losses were but it was quite certain that for the 11 years from 1993 until the present time there was a loss. How much the loss was could not be quantified in the short time that we had. There was also a loss arising from the economic controls on land use activities issued by the regional council and the district council in the early 1990s. 
To come back to the present time contrary to what the Minister said in his hasty statement I say this bill is not an answer. The answer today is not as the Greens said last week to go out to the hikoi—to front up sit down fold one’s arms and put one’s feet up—and have a good chat. This bill should have been preceded by intense and lengthy discussions given the knotty issues that are still involved with regard to clear-felling compared with the concept of long-term sustainable management. We should have seen attention being given to providing funding and help in terms of modern resources and technology for the people affected by the South Island Landless Maoris Act. Most of all in closing I want to go back to my comment on the original Act. That was a unique Act for a special group of New Zealanders and was the result of the earlier failure of the Crown to remedy the issues of the day. The time had come as Sir James Carroll said and generations have passed away with a promise unfulfilled. I am sorry to say it looks as though that will be the case in the future too. We oppose the bill.