Sage Eugenie: West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is subject to correctionSage Eugenie: West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 26 June 2014. Volume:702;Page:18941. Text is subject to correction.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):We are dealing with Part 1 including the purpose clause of the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill which is to allow the Director-General of Conversation to authorise the removal of timber from certain conservation areas and reserves. I would like to make some general comments before going on to talk a bit about the specifics of Supplementary Order Paper 474 which is in my name. The Minister of Conservation should well know that one of the key aspects of the restructuring of environmental administration in the late 1980s under the fourth Labour Government was the recognition that multiple-use agencies did not work and that the Forest Service which at the time was napalming rimu forest to plant pines on the one hand and trying to encourage recreational use and environmental forestry on the other was utterly conflicted. So it was a decision of the Labour Government to bring together all of the green dots that existed in Lands and Survey and the Wildlife Service and to separate out the use and development agencies into the Forestry Corporation which then became Timberlands.This whole purpose clause is fundamentally changing the purpose of the department. It is turning the Department of Conservation back into a multiple-use agency. It is corrupting the core mission and focus of the department and its staff because at the very time that the department is supposed to be focused on ramping up pest control to deal with the beech mast year and the huge eruption in pests in South Island beech forests—the explosion of rats and stoats and doing a sixfold increase in control to tackle that—the department is now going to have to train up and appoint a whole team of logging supervisors in order to manage the logging that this bill allows. The bill is wrong as Moana Mackey has alluded to with its very permissive terms and the way in which it creates an environment where all of our conservation lands will be at much greater risk of illegal logging and poaching of logs by opportunists. Where you have got the department allowing logging in some parts of the West Coast there will be others who will see it as a giant opportunity to go in and take timber.I would like the Minister to take a call and explain how the department is going to know whether a log comes from one of the designated areas or from nearby conservation land or any other area of conservation land for that matter because by promoting this bill the Government is signing off on a huge increase in illegal logging on the West Coast. We already know that it is happening. Locals in South Westland report that they have seen roading contractors who were logging along State Highway 6 in the road reserve with approval from the Transport Agency and the local councils sneaking on to adjacent conservation land to get the giant rimu trees out when they knew that departmental staff were not around and that they would not get caught. How is the Department of Conservation going to enforce this bill? How many staff are going to be turned from focusing on pest control and the management of biodiversity to supervising logging? That is the huge tragedy at the heart of this bill: it is taking New Zealand back into the 19th century into that colonial attitude where wild nature existed for human use to be exploited by whomever could get in first and take the most.The other tragedy is that 20 years ago the New Zealand Forest Accord was signed. It is different from the 1986 West Coast Accord. It was a voluntary agreement between environmental organisations and the forestry industry. The industry agreed not to clear native forest and convert it to plantations while environmental organisations endorsed plantation forestry as a renewable and sustainable source of timber. This bill with this purpose in clause 3 turns its back on that voluntary agreement and the philosophy that was at the heart of that which was to protect our native forests and instead promote the use of plantation forests as the major source of timber. This purpose is taking us back to the bad old days where the department becomes a promoter and a manager of logging where we have deep conflict between those who want to protect the forests to safeguard their biodiversity and where there are those who see forests just as a source of money and a source of timber.If this Government was genuinely serious about jobs and regional development it would not be passing this bill. It would be promoting much more processing of plantation timber. If the Government was serious about job creation instead of the giant piles of raw logs that we have got on wharves around the country which are shipped off without being processed without creating jobs for New Zealanders it would be investing in ensuring that plantation pine was used for manufactured products. The purpose in the bill is fundamentally wrong and it is a major attack on conservation legislation. What it is going to lead to is Department of Conservation staff being faced with a whole host of dilemmas. They know about predator control about trap-building about recreational maintenance and about conservation planning. They are not forestry operators. We know that under this Minister we have seen political interference so that a 32-page comprehensive submission on the Ruataniwha Dam project suddenly disappeared and was not lodged.So are we going to get pressure from this Minister on the department to approve logging wherever someone seeks an application to take timber? This bill allows huge discretion to the director-general in terms of making decisions on applications to log. The Minister’s press release included three maps. There are no maps in this bill that identify the designated areas where logging will be permitted. So instead it is just any area that people can say was affected by Cyclone Ita. There is a lack of specificity there and there is huge scope because of that for illegal logging. Then in the list of areas that was attached to the Minister’s press release there were a number of areas such as various scenic reserves the Punakāiki Nature Reserve and areas that the Nature Heritage Fund had bought for addition to the conservation estate like the Ballyhooley Scenic Reserve on the Whataroa Flats which is one of the best areas of totara forest on the Whataroa Flats. Those were all part of the areas that would be open to logging in terms of the Minister’s press statement but there is no identification of them in this bill. That is why I have introduced Supplementary Order Paper 474 which would seek to exclude scenic reserves nature reserves scientific reserves and Victoria Forest Park from the ambit of the bill.One of the other areas that the Minister’s map showed was very close to the Lewis Pass National Reserve. National reserves have a status almost equivalent to national parks and yet the Minister’s map was suggesting that that was open for logging. That is why in my Supplementary Order Paper we are suggesting that there be a wider range of areas that are protected from logging—not just the ecological areas Waitangi Roto Nature Reserve and the South West New Zealand World Heritage Area that the Minister suggested. This is because Minister we set these areas aside and they have been protected under the Reserves Act with the provisions in the Reserves Act that control any removal of vegetation intended to protect those areas since the 1970s and some of them before that. This bill with its purpose of giving the Director-General of Conservation the discretion to approve logging is a fundamental change to the purpose of the department.One of the other major problems that the regulatory impact statement identifies is the research that is going to be done on logging. Why is there extensive research being done if the logging is to end in 5 years? The Minister has not closed off the prospect of logging being allowed much more extensively on conservation land. Is it going to see Scion and other agencies doing this research in order to justify opening up conservation land around New Zealand to be logged? That is a question we would like some answers to. The other area that the Supplementary Order Paper addresses is the whole issue of ground retrieval of timber. If logs get dragged through streams there is major damage. There is nothing in the bill that prevents the use of diggers of bulldozers and of big haulers and all of the problems that go with that and all of the destruction. That is why the Supplementary Order Paper provides for a restriction so that recovery can be only by helicopter.The bill is very uncertain in a lot of the provisions. It is very vague. It leaves a huge amount of discretion to the director-general and again that highlights one of the major problems with the bill—that it is going through under urgency. It has not been to a select committee. There has been no opportunity for submitters to highlight changes to the bill.