Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Well it's remarkable that there's such little deliberation on such an important piece of legislation—Rachel Brooking: Oh where were you in the committee stage?SIMON COURT: —the Climate Change Response (Extension of Penalty Transition for Forestry Activities with Low Volume Emissions Liabilities) Amendment Bill. And Rachel Brooking asks where I was. Well the ACT Party believes in participating in democracy but there are just a few of us and we're stretched thin at the moment opposing some terrible bills that have come through this House in the past 48 hours and actually having to also try to channel the concerns of our constituents and stakeholders. And the member Rachel Brooking made a good point: there were no substantive submissions on this piece of legislation. Now what this bill does is it proposes to extend the time frame for the Ministry for the Environment and the climate change commissars to work out a regime that won't so severely penalise mum and dad farm foresters that they march on Parliament with pitchforks and burning pine branches. Right? Because when this piece of legislation was initially passed—which imposed this penalty regime on farm foresters—people who grow some pine trees as an investment for their future and who might think that once those pines are cut down the revenue from that will support them in their retirement or maybe pay the tuition fees for a child to go to school. And it turns out that by cutting them down and potentially not replanting them maybe they want to use their private property for something else. I mean who knew? Under this regime using your private property—you have to ask for permission for everything. But imagine they wanted to cut the trees down and use the revenue from that to pay for the kids' school fees or pay for their retirement and then they discovered they're subject to a penalty regime because apparently by cutting down trees you're doing so much damage to the climate by releasing that carbon in the form of a tree that you will be subject to penalties three times—three times; extraordinary penalty: three times—what the cost of the emissions are under the emissions trading scheme. And when the emissions trading scheme was $5 a tonne for carbon or well $15 a tonne you probably ended up still making a profit on your trees. When it was $25 a tonne maybe that was break even. And $45—crikey that would be frightening. It's now $88 a tonne of carbon today. So that means that if you had to pay a penalty because you decided to cut down the pine trees that you planted 18 or 20 or 23 years ago—about the typical cycle for structural-timber forests or for high-quality timbers grown in a managed pine plantation—then you could be subject to penalties of $270 to $280 a tonne of carbon apparently emitted. Now that ignores the fact that these pine trees potentially could be made into a wood product that ended up in a house with a design life under the Building Act of 50 years. That's right Rachel Brooking I can see you having a bit of a chuckle over there. Imagine that. Timber for a tree that contains carbon that's cut down and milled and goes into a house which has a design life of 50 years and you say The carbon's still locked up for 50 years." but to the mum and dad farm forester "Oh no."This Labour Government that declared a climate emergency supported by a green velvet hand with the Green Party's climate Minister James Shaw passed this piece of legislation back in 2020 that imposes these outrageous costs on farm foresters on smallholders and on people with really small plots that they want to cut down mill and maybe even turn into woodchips and send off to the local school to use in their boiler because they're not allowed to use coal any more—apparently because if schools use coal or people use coal and boilers for their business like milk powder production and so on then you know the climate's going to be damaged and the polar bears will have nowhere to live and the Green Party MPs' children will have no future. We hear this a lot.But let's just come back to the bill. Let's just come back to the provisions of this bill. Let's come back to it the Climate Change Response (Extension of Penalty Transition for Forestry Activities with Low Volume Emissions Liabilities) Amendment Bill. This is barely a pimple on the backside of a pine tree this problem. And yet here we are in the House. In fact the Minister himself when he introduced it I could tell he was exasperated—exasperated—having to come to the House and introduce this piece of legislation to fix this problem. And he thought with a stroke of a climate fairy's wand he could solve climate change for New Zealand with this climate change response amendment bill or the zero carbon Act or an emissions reduction plan or some other 300-bullet-point multiple-PowerPoint-slide plan that actually doesn't reduce emissions one bit. But it turns out in the real world in practice in the world that people live in farm in grow pine trees to make stuff like timber for houses or even timber bridges if you're one of the climate pixies who works at the New Zealand Transport Agency under the current regime that actually it's quite complicated.And if you want to solve climate change using Government policies and Government laws you're going to cause all kinds of problems because Government can't imagine every single scenario that might happen to an individual to a family to a business or say to an organisation like Māori landowners who own land collectively and might decide that the palm plantation that they planted say back in the 1990s as an investment and that they want to cut down now and use that timber maybe to build homes in a papakāinga environment or maybe just for cash because goodness knows Kiwis need cash these days with the cost of living crisis. And yet the Minister who bless his cotton socks is actually sticking around in the House to make the case for this piece of legislation certainly believes that with a just a little bit more central planning he can save us from climate change from greenhouse gas emissions save the polar bears and all of those other creatures who've managed to survive on planet Earth since the end of the last Ice Age—Anna Lorck polar bears; this is all about polar bears that's right.Anna Lorck: You don't have to take 10 minutes.SIMON COURT: And the member here says I don't have to take 10 minutes.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Barbara Kuriger): Mr Court it's actually about forestry so can we stick to the bill please.SIMON COURT: Madam Speaker you're right. And I'd like to come back to the climate change response aspect of this bill which is if you cut down pine trees or if you cut down forests on your land should you be subject to a three times penalty regime—three times the cost of an emissions unit under the emissions trading scheme which is about $88 a tonne. The ACT Party says no you shouldn't but we'll support this bill for one reason—for one reason only. That's because we don't think that farm foresters and families and Māori trusts that own land collectively and planted pine trees in anticipation of earning some money in a certain time in the future should be subject to this penalty regime. We don't. We also reject the premise of the zero carbon Act. We don't think it's necessary to have centralised control of climate policy. We actually think that New Zealand businesses farmers individuals and people like me who buy petrol and who pay for our emissions through the emissions trading scheme have sufficient incentives to reduce our emissions become more efficient and carry out our own just transition into a low-carbon future without the green velvet hand of the climate Minister on the back of our neck. So the ACT party will support this bill not because we think it's good policy but because we think it would be terribly unfair to impose a penalty regime that applies from 1 January 2023 to farm foresters and to people who simply thought that if they grew some pine trees and then cut them down sometime between 15 18 or 23 years down the track they wouldn't be subject to these horrendous penalties. So the ACT Party would actually beg the Minister "Would you please save us from bad climate change policy?" But ACT will support the bill."