Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker and I rise also to contribute to this debate about the idea that the bill that has just passed its first reading should be reported back from select committee if I heard right from the Minister by 5 June—in other words in three weeks' time. And this speaks to a chaos in the Government's legislative programme much of which actually came out in the Minister's speech in favour of shortening the report back period for the select committee.The Minister said something very interesting. He said that it wouldn't be necessary to have as much consultation at select committee because there'd been a lot of consultation by the Minister. Well that's extraordinary for two reasons. One is that he's saying that actually this is very urgent and needs to be done quickly so one might ask when did the Minister start his consultation and who knew about it? Well he didn't say. You'd think that if his argument was that all the consultation had already been done by the Minister he could have told us. So I think we can dismiss that as an attempt at justifying this rush that doesn't have any substance. But more important is the fact the Minister seems to think that if he's done the consultation then Parliament doesn't have to. He seems to believe that actually it's not up to Parliament to make laws; it's not the people of New Zealand sending their representatives to Wellington to reflect their views that are important in New Zealand lawmaking. So long as the Minister tells us that he has in some unspecified way gone about a consultation then New Zealanders should be happy with that. That is a fundamentally undemocratic proposition.And then there's this question of it being so urgent to get this done and another contradiction in what the Minister had to say. He used the hackneyed refrain of the Government Well you guys didn't do it before. Nine long years this legislation wasn't introduced." Well let's just remember that the current Government has had 2½ years and they didn't introduce any legislation like this in that period either.SPEAKER: Order! I'm going to interrupt the member. I was listening to the debate from my room and I will say that the Minister was quite wide of the mark in a number of the comments that he made with regard to relevance for this motion. The fact that he did that does not open it right up for everyone else to provide irrelevant comments. I'm just doing a warning now that the length of the debate will depend on people coming back to what is a very narrow motion and speaking to that.DAVID SEYMOUR: Well fair enough Mr Speaker. I did feel that that was the case but it was important to address his points.I'll now come back to some of the practicalities of the committee. A couple of things the Minister said—that Mr Speaker I hope you'll agree were relevant—were about where the committee would conduct itself. He asked that the committee be given permission to meet anywhere in the country. Now I think that's a very good thing because trees don't all grow in Auckland and Wellington. In fact forestry is probably the most widely distributed and remote industry in the country with the possible exception of some farming and fishing. And so it makes good sense that the committee can travel and go to the places where the people affected by this legislation predominantly are. That makes a lot of sense.He also said that the committee should be able to meet on Fridays and I always think that members of Parliament should earn their salaries and the idea that they shouldn't be meeting and working on Fridays is absurd; so I give the Minister a big tick for that.But if it's his intention that the committee is able to do this kind of wide consultation well there's another way he could achieve that and that is simply by giving it the due amount of time to go out and consult people properly. That's important because the process that has to be gone through actually has a number of stages and I think it's really important that we actually just remind ourselves what those are before we whisk them away with a truncated select committee process.First of all people who have had this bill dumped on them under urgency—remember no one in this House had seen the bill. The Minister says some people have been consulted; we don't know if that's true or not—SPEAKER: Order!DAVID SEYMOUR: Presumably no one had seen this bill until last night. And people who are going to be affected by it are going to have to form a view on the bill. This is the first formal opportunity that they've had to do that. Once they've thought about it perhaps talked to their colleagues perhaps come to a conclusion as a group or as a body within the forestry sector or maybe many groups and bodies might have different and conflicting views they've actually got to get together their submissions. And that takes some work; these people are busy—as we know there's a crisis on out there. And once they've done that they've got to send them in. And for there to be any meaning to this process we then need the MPs on the Environment Committee to actually be able to read and digest them and understand them and then perhaps seek their own advice and say to people they may know in the sector or in their electorates or that their party has a relationship with "Does this make sense? What do we think about this?"Then they've got to hear those oral submissions that the Minister mentioned perhaps on a Friday perhaps travelling around the country as maybe they should. That's all got to happen but of course that has to be scheduled in. People are busy; they've got forests to plant trees to chop down logs to shift things to mill. There's quite a lot going on in the sector. Not everyone has time to drop everything just because a select committee wants to hear your view on what it's about to do—what Parliament's about to do to you—in this very shortened time frame. So that is another consideration. But even if they get to make the oral submission you'd hope that the select committee is then going to deliberate and think of suggestions for how the bill's going to be improved so that the committee can report the bill back to this House. And I think people should get the picture: in the three weeks between now and 5 June there is just no practical way that that can happen for one region let alone if the committee plans to go to many regions. It's completely impractical that there will be any kind of real consultation on this bill.And then we come back to the question of the speed of changing the law in the context of a crisis and the fact is that changing laws while sometimes helpful also introduces great uncertainty. So the Minister has argued that this has to happen quickly and I think people should accept that that's going to lead to lower quality lawmaking and trust in lawmaking than we'd get if there was time for the full process to occur. But also the fact is that even if we accept that the law may not be as good as it could have been even if we take that and say that's worth it what is the effect of getting this law into place in the middle of a crisis? I would argue that actually when it comes to people being able to navigate through crisis conditions it's actually going to make it harder for them if there is a new legal framework put in place right in the middle of the very crisis that the Minister would have us believe this legislation is going to fix.So to conclude I believe that the Minister has inadvertently made the case to take longer on this legislation. He's right that there are people in a range of disparate locations affected and it takes longer to travel and get to hear from them. He's right that there is a crisis going on and that there's great uncertainty and that people need to be clear on what is actually happening. And he's right that forestry is a vital and critical industry for the wider New Zealand economy. But when you think about it all of the reasons the Minister gave for a shortened select committee process are actually reasons why this Parliament should be doing full and proper processes to make good laws. Thank you Mr Speaker."