Henare PeeniHon PEENI HENARE (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. Can I also endorse the words of the Minister the Hon Todd McClay when we think about the forestry sector and the impact it's taken and absorbed over a number of years certainly in my time in Parliament and my mind right now casts to the East Coast and the Hawke's Bay and the East Coast knowing full well of the long forestry history the long forestry growth that happens on the East Coast and the impact that this devastating weather event will have on them. I do want to support the words of the Minister and say that in order for the forestry sector to continue to thrive into the future this particular bill is important.It is important that as we look towards the support of the sector moving forward we make sure that the right levers are in place to ensure the forestry sector will continue to grow. It is a big part of our economy. It is a big part of making sure in small places and rural places around the country places like where I'm from in Te Tai Tokerau where forestry does play a large part that one we can continue to support the endeavours of those who are in forestry and two we can also look towards incentivising those who want to get into forestry by removing some of the burdens and some of the bureaucracy that might come with the forestry sector and is inhibiting those who wish to get into forestry. We also must make sure that there are a number of protections in place and I want to acknowledge the Minister for reaching out over the past one or two months—four to eight weeks—to discuss this particular matter. It would be remiss of me if we didn't go and contact the local forestry councils those who are key stakeholders in the sector to make sure that this is exactly how we can support them to make sure that the forestry sector thrives.It's important to remember that this particular bill was put in place initially led by the Hon Shane Jones when the Labour coalition Government came to power in 2017. He did a lot of work with the sector to make sure that as more forests were coming online to be harvested and those logs ultimately exported we could make sure there were safeguards in place to ensure that cowboys didn't take advantage of those who didn't have the skill level or didn't have the experience to be able to trade their logs offshore. There was a number of so-called cowboys in the industry at the time which is why the Hon Shane Jones brought this particular bill to the House. The Minister after the Hon Shane Jones the Hon Stuart Nash ushered this bill through and ultimately it landed with me as the last forestry Minister in the Labour Government of the last term.During that entire time we continued to work with the sector to ask whether or not the changes that were implemented under the Hon Shane Jones met what they were intended for and despite the good intentions—and why I want to be very clear here though—that onus was put back on the sector to come to us about what might work for them. That was the predecessor to this bill. That's what we're repealing here today because after a number of years with that particular regime in place as the Minister has already described it didn't meet its intention. So with the support from the Minister and the sector we want to on this side of the House as part of the Labour Party make sure that we can continue to support the forestry sector into the future.However I will be very clear and put on the record here today that we still look towards continuing a strong forestry sector one that will continue to respect the growers respect the harvesters respect the workers and respect those that process wood locally. What we can't keep having is thousands and thousands of logs just sitting at the ports here in Wellington Tauranga and Auckland. What we had endeavoured to do was to make sure we could process locally and that was part of the solution to support those who were harvesting their forests who didn't want to send their logs offshore—that we could process those locally providing local economies local jobs making sure that we could stop having logs traveling up and down the country on the roads and they could be processed locally and even manufactured and sold locally.So we want to make sure that we put on the record that Labour still believes in that: making sure that we can process our logs locally and that we're not exporting all of the logs that are grown here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Why? Because we believe it supports our economies we believe it supports rural towns up and down this country and we want to make sure that forestry continues to thrive into the future. We'll make sure we put that on the record through the length of this debate. We support this bill.