Copeland Gordon: Forests Amendment Bill —  
Copeland Gordon: Forests Amendment Bill —  
[Volume:617;Page:12953] 
GORDON COPELAND (United Future) 
: 
 For reasons that I have explained at both the second reading and the Committee stage United Future will support this bill. Notwithstanding I must confess to still having some qualms of conscience about the way the bill treats the owners of the South Island Maori forests and the straightjacket nature of the outcomes from their point of view. I hope the Government may not regard this bill as the end of the matter but rather a start point for a more detailed and sympathetic look that might both achieve the major policy goal of this bill with regard to the ban on the export of sustainably produced wood-chips and other sawn timber from indigenous species and at the same time give some more flexibility by having regard to the actual on-the-ground state of the beech trees contained in and on those lands. 
 During the Committee stage I drew the House’s attention to my own experience with West Coast beech. Only one in every five trees is suitable for timber because around 80 percent of the trees are way past their maturity date and have rotted right down through the middle—a reality that can only be ascertained when the trees have been felled and dissected in a sawmill. 
I will put that another way: once the millable timber has been removed from beech trees for the purpose of furniture manufacture or similar a huge amount of waste often remains. This opens up opportunities for wood pellet fuels. If the SILNA forest owners were able to find an economic use for that waste material be it within New Zealand or overseas why would we stop them doing that? 
In addition to the reject-quality timber—because of rot or similar—the waste material can also include branches and using modern technology extraction the stumps and even the roots of trees. Such whole-of-tree strategies are now increasingly common in places such as Scandinavia the USA and Germany. Literally nothing gets wasted—everything is put to some good commercial use. Who would possibly quibble with such outcomes when surely they represent simple commonsense? 
What I am saying is that we should not rob the SILNA forest owners of those kinds of export opportunities without good and sound reasons. Surely it is not beyond the wit of Government officials to ensure that the millable beech and rimu is taken up the value chain into furniture or similar before it is exported whilst at the same time allowing export opportunities utilising the waste material to proceed. 
As I mentioned at the Committee stage of the bill a determining factor in United Future’s support is also the letter received from the Waimumu Trust seeking the rapid passage of this bill so that it can advance its claim for compensation with the Waitangi Tribunal. That claim will now go ahead. It will start to be heard immediately that word of the passage of this bill reaches the Waimumu Trust people and its legal counsel. So like it or not the reality is that the Government has not heard the last of this matter. 
 I want now to raise a further matter which has also been touched on briefly by Brian Connell. Last year New Zealand spent $284 million importing into this country so-called special-purpose timber. But very few of those imports were from verifiable sustainable forest sources. At the same time we insisted that our own indigenous privately owned timber industry should mill and market only against high-level sustainability criteria. That is a complete mismatch that does nothing for world conservation utilises scarce overseas funds and has adverse economic impacts for our indigenous timber industry. With that in mind I have raised with the Government the possibility of banning such importation to New Zealand unless in line with our practice here it is sourced on a verifiable sustainable basis. That would do no more than create a level playing field in favour of our own forest owners. 
It is extremely important that the Government continues to look at the matter because fledgling industries in New Zealand using beech for say furniture manufacture need—if they are to become serious export players—to first develop strong domestic markets. However that will not happen if they are undercut by rival furniture manufacturers here in New Zealand who are able to pick up equivalent or superior timbers imported from overseas derived from the clear-felling of virgin indigenous forests in places such as Indonesia Malaysia or Africa. 
I am disappointed that the Government has indicated to me that it is not prepared to move on the matter at this stage. It believes that it would be difficult to impose a blanket ban on imports of such timber without inviting retaliatory measures from our trading partners. I beg to differ with that analysis. On the contrary I believe that New Zealand has a strong moral case to argue when it comes to non-plantation virgin forests or indigenous timbers. Fair international trade for everyone means meeting sustainability criteria equivalent to that established for our own forests. 
We have a proud tradition of displaying some leadership in those kinds of areas. I think for example of our nuclear weapons position which has earned us the respect of the international community. I see no good reason why we cannot do the same for the sake of the world’s forests and their preservation for future generations. After all it is not just New Zealand but the whole globe that is called to wise stewardship of those scarce and fast-disappearing forests. 
In short some tidying-up remains and I hope that the Hon Jim Sutton the Minister of Forestry will ensure that the work in the area I have mentioned continues on into the future until those matters are resolved.