McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Speaker. Well the very title of this bill emphasises the biggest challenge we face with our emissions trading scheme (ETS): the immense and extraordinary complication of it. To have a title of a bill as long as this as the Minister for Climate Change just admitted to that does as little as this is pretty significant. But I think just to get back on to the ETS and the issues that this bill raises it does emphasise how extraordinarily complicated this whole process is in its entirety not just related to this bill. I think this bill in itself emphasises how complicated that is.I imagine there would be a number of MPs in this House who have had people come to their electorate offices who have inadvertently removed trees that were pre-1990 trees and suddenly faced a massive great bill which is quite intimidating for them. The reason that happens is because those trees have never been registered on a title and so often it will happen that someone might well have bought a farm quite innocently where the trees had been removed pre them buying the farm and suddenly they're confronted with this very issue that this bill discusses. So it's a very real issue for foresters and of course the Minister talked about this being specific to small foresters but there are many issues related to what we might term a small forest because it's pretty easy for a big forester to turn a big forest into a little forest if they want to. So you'd need to have some controls around that as well.We support this bill; I think it certainly needs supporting but I just want to talk for a minute about the issues that it raises. I think it's all very well to go back in history but because this is such an immensely complicated topic for the average person—not just this bill but the whole issue of the ETS and the way we've arranged our climate change response—one can only but think that if we'd got our heads together some 15 years ago and agreed on stuff rather than poking our heads out I guess and setting off on a path that was then reversed we might've been in a much better position now. Unfortunately when you look at the response to He Waka Eke Noa it could well happen again and I think that's tragic for New Zealand  because I think if there's one area we need some certainty in—it's probably the most important issue in my lifetime and consequently all of yours and if that's the case we should really be getting some collective thinking on how we deal with these issues and manage them in a manner that I think is sustainable for the future and gives investors and other people in New Zealand certainty as to what is going to happen in the future. Every time we bring one of these bills to the House make alterations to it it then changes some of the rules that have been set initially and I think it's very unfortunate that that should happen.So I think that whilst I said we support this—and the reason that we support it is because if you look at these penalties they were attached to the price of carbon I think three times the price of carbon. That's all very well when the carbon price is $14 a ton; not so flash when it's at $80. So as the Minister himself said the challenge of those fines and penalties becomes very significant.The changes to this bill arose out of submissions to earlier discussion on this issue and it always amuses me when we say submissions by Māori landowners and organisations noting that the penalty regime is not equitable and would affect them. It actually affects all sorts of people because not just Māoris have collective ownership of land in New Zealand; there's many people that have collective ownership in New Zealand. I think that we need to be very aware that there are all sorts of organisations that have this very same challenge that Māori landowners have. So I think it's particularly important that we consider all types of land ownership when we look at these types of penalties and the complexities and the issues that complicated land ownership arises. It's not till you go to register yourself in the ETS that you realise how extraordinarily complicated just that process can be and of course there's a massive great waiting list right now as people rush to register forests and forestry land in the emissions trading scheme. Some of them are going to be significantly penalised by the fact they could wait up to two years and so that delay in getting registered then delays their ability to claim those carbon credits.So there are quite a lot of issues facing us at the moment and I suppose my plea to the Parliament is that in the future we get our heads together on some of this stuff and don't put ourselves in a position where we create I guess divisive issues that then lead us to stall what undoubtedly we should be progressing as a Parliament and as a Government. I think it's most important that we get to a point where we can collectively agree on these things.If you go right back to the early discussions on this in—I guess it was well-known as the fart tax". In fact one of our esteemed members of Parliament drove his tractor up the steps of Parliament to protest against it. If we hadn't gone to that extreme at that time I'm sure we'd have been in a much stronger position now. So every time we take an extreme view of something we go way up there it gets pulled back and that consequently slows the progress down and we don't make the progress that we should make with respect to some of the very important issues that face us. This bill is just an epitome of that because it was put in place with good intentions the environment's changed significantly and so we have to change the rules. I think if we'd thought this whole issue through at the very beginning of this discussion probably some 20 years ago we might've got to a much better position today. History will be what it is and we've just got to put up with that.Hon Damien O'Connor: Yeah well there's the reminder there—the reminder there. Just remember that—remember that.IAN McKELVIE: And it's all very well to criticise people on each side of the House but of course every part of this House is equally as guilty as the other Mr O'Connor and so I think that we should be really careful that we progress these things in an orderly fashion and don't go to extreme lengths to try and I guess insert our will on other people or on other industries.The interesting thing about this whole challenge for New Zealand is that we're a very small country. I had the privilege of spending—you can tell by my voice; too much red wine in South America—a couple of weeks in South America and they have a very different attitude to this than we do. It's very interesting because if we start to shift our costs offshore then they're just going to lap that up and that was pretty blatantly obvious in our trip through South America. So everywhere's different but I think we need to make sure that we play our part in the world that we play it well and that we ensure that our country is sustainable for the future.That's probably about all I can put into this bill but we certainly support it and I think it's a fact that it's resurrecting a challenge that will arise in many more places than this before we get through this whole climate change discussion and the emissions trading scheme discussion in the next few years. Thank you Madam Speaker."