Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Minister of Conservation): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Thank you. The National Party hates regulation. The National Party appears to dislike the forestry industry. We have a system with real estate agents who are licensed to practise. What this bill does—and the Green Party is very pleased to support it—is set up a forestry authority which is going to have oversight of a registration and licensing system.What National has been talking about in its reasons for opposition fails to recognise that there are failures in the market fails to recognise that the bulk of the wood supply in the 2020s is going to be from small growers. It fails to recognise that a lot of those small growers the decision they make about when they harvest the timber on their land and how they market it will have quite an impact on the return they get from it. Having not had a lot of experience in that space if they are taking advice from log traders and others who are not registered they have no assurance about the integrity of that advice. So this bill and the licensing and registration system that it puts in place is about ensuring that the industry has a better future. It is about ensuring that those small forest growers have got access to people who have appropriate expertise and qualifications and that we can make the best of that timber.As the Hon Stuart Nash noted where you have got big companies that are primarily interested in supplying overseas markets they can sell timber directly to those markets it goes on to the wharves and it may mean that local sawmilling and wood-processing companies miss out. The bulk of the logs that are harvested here in New Zealand are sold as logs overseas without the added-value processing that we can use in this country to create jobs and to make use of the climate and soils which are so good for growing trees. The forestry industry has got a lot of work to do to lift its game to get a social licence back again when we're seeing the pictures that we've seen from Tolaga Bay with all of that slash ending up on the beaches once again. It's got a job to do to move away from the exotic plantation pine monoculture. It can do things as happening in Northland where regenerating tōtara there is being harvested on farms and the return from those logs which don't need any chemical preservatives or treatment to make them durable is providing an incentive for farmers to allow the tōtara to continue to regenerate rather than felling it for pasture. The industry needs to diversify into different timbers into native plantation timbers and not just rely on pine. This bill is a step towards ensuring a better industry by having a registration and licensing system and the forestry authority to oversee that. So I can't understand why the National Party is so afeared of that when it has been alongside 50 Shades of Green raising concerns about areas of pastoral farmland which are being converted to plantation forestry. Here you have mechanism through this bill to ensure that farmers who have woodlots those small growers are able to access advice that is experienced from licensed people and yet the National Party opposes that. They don't want a healthy industry; they don't want regulation to ensure that the forestry industry has a better future. The Green Party supports the Forests (Regulation of Log Traders and Forestry Advisers) Amendment Bill.