O'Connor GregGREG O'CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to follow a speaker from the ACT Party who is talking about the strategic value of keeping land in New Zealand ownership so I congratulate that speaker Damien Smith because I think what this bill shows is that ownership of land is strategic because as a country it is important that we understand that the use of that land and what we produce on it is what makes this country survive and thrive. I do want to correct one of the speakers—I think the member from Selwyn—who spoke very eloquently but was really looking at the wrong Act because this is not about carbon farming. This is actually about production forestry. Now you're listening to someone here who had his fingers quite badly burnt excuse the pun by trees and forestry. In the 1980s there was a rush to get into the new greenrush" which was forestry in many farms. I was involved in an enterprise where we stuck some trees on the back of a farm without giving it any really great thought about how difficult and expensive it was going to be to actually harvest them not to mention the fact they were the wrong tree in the wrong place because they were too wet and they weren't even that good for firewood at the end of the day. So I did have a little experience of understanding how important it is to get the right tree in the right place at the right time—but of course pain has no memory so it will of course not stop me from getting involved in such ventures into the future!But this really is about making sure that we understand that where we put those trees and the type of trees that we do put in the ground is all about balancing. It's not about a decision being made in a board room in Vienna or in London where the sort of investment availability will always ensure that any New Zealand options are dwarfed financially. It means that when we decide as a country whether we are going to allow this to happen there is a test applied: is this going to be good for this country? And only that we had made so many of those decisions in the years leading up to this time. If you drive around New Zealand you look at rural communities you'll see everywhere you go there'll be skeletons of old sheep yards skeletons of old cow sheds where once there were quite thriving communities. Where now we have one dairy farm there were often about 15 maybe 20. And of course now we have that one farm and it means the local schools—it means the whole local community—has suffered accordingly. And of course the way the previous legislation was being administered it meant that our rural communities were changing the shape of New Zealand. We were changing the shape of our communities. We were changing the shape of our schools. So this legislation goes some way towards balancing that to ensure—and you've again heard the previous speaker and all previous speakers talk about the value of forestry the need to ensure that we do have access to trees in the future. I heard one very wise speaker earlier on talking about how we just don't know how the science is going to change—whether we're actually going to be simply processing trees in the place they grow. It may well be that things have changed so greatly. So this bill will give us the options to make sure that we can keep to what is I think a very central mantra around forestry: ensuring that we have the right tree in the right place at the right time. Thank you Mr Speaker."