Fitzsimons Jeanette: Forests Amendment Bill — Consideration of Report of Local Government and Environment Committee 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Forests Amendment Bill — Consideration of Report of Local Government and Environment Committee 
[Volume:617;Page:12616] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 This bill has taken an extraordinarily long time to pass through the House. The Local Government and Environment Committee was constantly asked to defer action while the policy was further developed and we are glad to see the bill finally progress. The resolution of the South Island Landless Maori Act forests issue is long overdue. It has been a blot on our environmental record ever since the 1993 amendment to the Forests Act. There is so little lowland indigenous forest left and what there is has been very greatly modified. 
New Zealand has taken a number of steps in recent years. We now have three kinds of indigenous forest in New Zealand. Our public forests are recognised—because there is now so little of them—as heritage icons that should not be interfered with for industrial purposes at all. That is the will of the people and is what they clearly voted for. Our privately owned native forests must be sustainably managed under the Forests Act and logged only at the rate that they re-grow. The conditions for sustainable forest management plans could be better but by and large that is a huge improvement over clear-felling. 
A third category of forests—the South Island Landless Maori Act forests—is still being clear-felled and that is an anomaly. It is both an environmental disaster because it is a loss of important biodiversity and an economic disaster because the cheap flooding of the market with clear-felled rimu and beech depresses the prices that are received for sawn timber that has been sustainably managed. 
One other point on which I agree with Nick Smith is that the whole system falls over when there are no restrictions on the import of unsustainably managed clear-felled hardwoods from South-east Asia and the Pacific. The only way we could claim environmental benefits from the New Zealand policy would be to impose a ban on the import of hardwoods coming from Sarawak the Solomon Islands South-east Asia and the Pacific which are most definitely not being sustainably logged and where the indigenous people are being deprived of the value of their forests by multinational companies that are simply clear-felling them and selling them cheaply. 
This bill has been a balancing act: a balance between environmental protection and consistency with other landowners on the one hand and on the other hand not legislating away yet again further Maori land rights—given that we have a bit of a bad history of doing that as a country. It is therefore a compromise and perhaps that is why nobody likes it very much. I believe it is probably the best compromise we can get in the current situation and that is why the Greens support it. It does not ensure that all clear-felling will stop but it does provide very strong encouragements. It does not allow the current owners to do whatever they like with their forests but it does leave them a number of reasonable options. 
In fact it leaves them with 3½ options. The first is that if they have high value forests for conservation purposes substantial funding is now available through the Nature Heritage Fund to agree to conservation covenants on the land while retaining the current ownership of that land. By protecting the land from logging the owners can get a funded stream of benefits without losing their title to it. That option will be most profitable for those groups that have never logged their land at all. There is a certain justice in that. If groups have had some income in the past from partly logging their land then it will be of less value now to the Nature Heritage Fund and there is less likelihood of groups being able to negotiate a covenant. 
The second option is for forests to come under the sustainable management provisions of the Forests Act. Contrary to what most speakers have said this does allow exports of sawn rimu and beech timber and of manufactured products from those timbers. What it does not allow is exports of whole logs or of chip and in that respect the South Island Landless Natives Act owners will be in exactly the same situation as all other private owners of forests. But they still have a third option. There is nothing in this bill that prevents them from clear-felling their forests and converting to pasture or pines if they choose to do that. But if they take that choice they cannot export any of the products from that clear-felling. 
The fourth option or the third-and-a-half option if one likes is that they have another 3 years to decide. The moratorium that actually pays them an annual rate not to log while they think about it continues for a little longer so that they can develop their sustainable management plans if that is what they want to do. Owners could get their forests valued and take the other steps that would help them make the right choice. So this is a bill that encourages rather than forces sustainability but $19.7 million of funding to encourage good environmental decisions is likely to move the whole system much closer to sustainability. 
Obviously the Nature Heritage Fund is currently seeking the best blocks—the ones that have not been previously logged and have the best biodiversity—but eventually with the money left they may move to some less desirable ones as well and those owners will benefit too. 
Maori submitters to the select committee which I chaired still believe that they suffer significant losses through this bill. I do not agree with them. I have looked into it very carefully and I simply do not believe that those losses are real. They say they are suffering losses because they will no longer be allowed to export chip. From 1993 onwards chip exports were stopped and then because of a loophole in the law that was overturned. But actually the exports never started again. It is a long time since anybody exported any chip from New Zealand. In fact chip exports need high volume. The little bit of waste made from sustainably harvested forests with selected trees does not produce enough chip to be worth exporting. The hulls of those huge ships need to be filled in order to export chip so it is not a very serious option. 
We investigated whether it would be more consistent to allow the export of chip from sustainably managed forests but not from clear-felled forests and we found that there were intractable practical problems with doing that. First of all it is possible these days to make logs traceable—to label them and to determine which logs come from a sustainably managed block and which do not. It is simply not possible with chip. There is no way a distinction can be ensured right through the value chain of chip from one kind of forest rather than another kind of forest. 
But there is now no market for chip from New Zealand indigenous timbers. The market is being flooded overseas with eucalypts which are being produced in larger and larger volumes—nobody particularly wants New Zealand native timber chip. The price if anything can be got for it at all is extraordinarily low and that is unlikely to change because more and more eucalypts are coming on stream. There is however a domestic market for waste wood in a lot of parts of the country particularly near urban areas and that is for firewood. So we believe that that is a better option for the owners of these forests. 
This whole policy package has actually handed a significant financial advantage to the owners of forests with millable timber because the price of rimu has risen a lot since the 1993 Act and the price of beech has risen somewhat and is likely to continue rising. In my view that ought to balance out any losses that the owners have sustained as a result of the export ban. 
I was fascinated by Gordon Copeland’s performance just now. It reminded me of a Christchurch television show some years ago called  
Susan Sells 
 where people used to come on and advertise their products. Or maybe it was a little bit like a Tupperware party. I do wonder how he proposes to distinguish between manuka sawdust from a sustainably managed forest or from a clear-felled forest or is there no intention to make that distinction at all? If there is no intention at all what we are doing is encouraging farmers everywhere to denude their manuka and kanuku areas for sawdust exports with serious damage to our farmland and our biodiversity.