Mooney JosephJOSEPH MOONEY (National—Southland): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. I rise to speak on the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill at its third reading and it's one that the National Party supports passing into law. the illegal harvesting of timber is a significant problem globally contributing to deforestation and ecosystem degradation with wide-reaching environmental economic and social impacts on affected communities.The question is: how does this relate to New Zealand? Well forestry is New Zealand's third-largest exporter. Its value at the year ending June 2021 was $6.3 billion; it's anticipated that will be $6.7 billion by the year ending June 2023—this year. It employs around 35000 people and it's a critical part of our economy. At a time when we have a balance of payments deficit that is the greatest in the developed world it's more important than ever that we are selling goods and services and products to the world and earning that foreign exchange. Forestry is a very very important part of that.So this bill is something we support as improving global confidence in the logs and the wood coming from New Zealand—having confidence in the integrity of the supply chain and the operators when the system is critical for both domestic processing and New Zealand's reputation as a timber exporter to the world and that important part it plays as the third-largest export earner for our country.We also have a rising volume and diversity of imports into New Zealand which increases the risk of New Zealand being seen as a conduit for the illegal timber trade due to a lack of mandatory assurance measures something that this bill seeks to address and something that we support. And I should note that globally the world deforests around 10 million hectares of forest each and every year—10 million hectares; that's an area the size of Portugal. Around half of that deforestation is offset by regrowing forests. So overall the world loses around 5 million hectares of forest each and every single year. In fact 95 percent of that deforestation occurs in the tropics something that New Zealand wants to make very clear that we want to have no part of and that our industry is not part of.So while New Zealand has had voluntary measures in place since the early 2000s and there have been proactive initiatives by importers the coverage has not been complete. New Zealand has historically relied on its reputation of being a low-risk producer of illegal timber products to ensure we have the market access to sell our timber into globally. However more recently New Zealand exporters have been required to demonstrate the legality of their timber products in a growing number of export markets. This bill which shortly will become law is something that can assure those markets globally that New Zealand is taking this seriously and does have an assurance programme in place to make sure that we are not exporting illegal timber to the world.So I would just make the point also that the plantation forest area in New Zealand peaked in 2003 at 1.83 million hectares. It declined for the next 16 years at just under 1.69 million hectares. Over the past two years the area has increased by 43000 hectares to 1.7 million hectares and it would take roughly another two years of forestation at current rates for the estate to recover to the area of the early 2000s.But as my colleague across the House Soraya Peke-Mason said forestry is also very important for the Māori economy and Māori communities providing both employment opportunities for rangatahi and to provide economic opportunities in our regions. So this is a very important—very important—industry for New Zealand for Māori for all New Zealanders. So this is a bill that we do support and we'll be pleased to see it shortly passed into law. Thank you Mr Speaker.