O'Connor Damien: West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is subject to correctionO'Connor Damien: 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.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman):I do not like reading out the details of bills too much but I think it is important just to clarify exactly what the Supplementary Order Paper 476 is that I am putting forward on the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. The Minister of Conservation was determined to try to mislead people. My amendment to clause 9 basically puts in place an obligation on the director-general to consider a West Coast - registered company or operation prior to anyone else. The wording is: “A person may apply for an authorisation under section 10 only if that person—(a) is a West Coast registered company or operation; and (b) has been invited to do so by the Director-General.” It goes on to insert a new clause 9(5) saying: “The Director-General may only invite non-West Coast resident people to apply for an authorisation under subsection (3) if he or she has not received any applications from West Coast operations.”The Minister in the chair the Minister of Conservation thinks it is a joke. In fact regional development has been a long-held principle of the Labour Party—and Labour Governments actually. The Minister would not know anything about that because he is a flat-earth free-market ideologue who believes that development just occurs—yet he wants in his electorate of Nelson to get money from the Government to build a dam. Why do you not apply the free-market approach there Minister? He cannot answer that. No he wants to have his cake and eat it. I am not going to go on. That is the first part of the amendment I have put forward.The next amendment is to clause 10. It simply says that one of the requirements that the director-general must consider when receiving an application under clause 10(3)(a) is that “(vii) the timber is released into the market in a managed way to avoid flooding the market;”—that is that we do not sell or provide logs to anyone who is simply going to cut them up as quick as they can and dump them on to the market for a quick buck. It relates back to Part 1 where the issue of the time line for this legislation is a point of contention. My colleagues believe that it should be 2 years. It is indeed more economical and feasible to extract all those logs in a short time frame when we have the helicopter and the infrastructure and the skills on the ground. The logs need to be cut as quickly as possible and then they can be stored as the Minister from the other side said for tens—if not hundreds—of years literally if kept dry.So the objective is to get it out of the bush as quickly as possible but the Government has contradicted itself by on the one hand demanding urgency in the House and then saying that there needs to be a 5-year time line. Had the Government come back to the 2-year time line and accepted the wise amendments put forward by Labour then the whole caucus would have supported this legislation. I would have preferred that. In the meantime I put forward my Supplementary Order Paper 476 to ensure that West Coasters not other people get a fair go at utilising this resource for the jobs and the people of the West Coast region.