SpeechIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's with a degree of trepidation that I take the first National call on the Overseas Investment (Forestry) Amendment Bill and I'll explain this as I go through it. But I want to digress for a minute and just go into a little of what's going on in the industry at the moment and in the sector at the moment because it is an extraordinary complex and difficult area for us to manage I think in the future.As I said we're supporting this bill which received a range of submissions from those who thought it had gone too far to those who thought it hadn't gone nearly far enough. I think we've reached the right balance with this and the Minister did a very good job explaining it a moment ago. But what a week it's been in the forestry emissions trading scheme (ETS) and the carbon investors sector with Ministers Shaw and Nash coming out with their response to the consultation on the permanent forestry sink and the potential exclusion from the ETS of so-called exotic forests effectively saying There's nothing to see here."Then we have the Climate Change Commission's recommendations to the Government on the auctioning of carbon credits in the period 2023 to 2027. The Climate Change Commission is effectively wanting to lower auction volumes of carbon limit minimum prices and impose a higher minimum before the cost containment reserves come into play. This has the effect of creating a moneyfest for hill country landowners—or potentially a moneyfest for hill country landowners and carbon farmers; albeit a somewhat uncertain one as politicians are involved here. And I think that the Minister almost said the same thing himself.Against all this backdrop of the great unknown we need to understand how will forestry harvesting techniques evolve in the next few years and how diverse will the tree become? In other words what will it be used for because it won't just be used for the stuff we see in this building; it'll be used for all sorts of things. There's just such a diverse potential with our tree industry. How many jobs it will create how much it'll be worth to the manufacturing sector what impact will this have on New Zealand's red meat sector income of some $12 billion and if some of that's lost what percentage of this will be replaced by the forestry sector? One certainty is this will not happen in the next 25 years because trees' only value to that point is as a carbon sink. So it's effectively going to be 25 to 30 years before the trees we've seen planted today are available to the manufacturing sector. At present the volumes involved and logs available in New Zealand are starting to drop as the great planting spree of the 1990s comes to an end. So there's so much uncertainty in this sector and that's a little bit of background information that I want to just put context around why this is necessary and why I think it adds a little bit to the puzzle.Now Government influence on land use in New Zealand has almost always ended up in tears. And one only needs to go back to supplementary minimum prices of the 1970s or for deer of the early 2000s to see the damage it can do. The matters I've mentioned have the potential to be more contentious than the wool acquisition debates of the 1960s. And I only hope that we collectively can have a constructive debate on these issues and pretty urgently before it's too late.So with that broad outline of perhaps what is one of the greatest challenges facing our traditional land use in New Zealand in my lifetime I return to the bill in front of us today. And in doing so I acknowledge Minister Parker who's brought the bill to the House and also the select committee who I thought was one of the more collegial I guess and interesting select committee discussions that I've had—certainly Finance and Expenditure Committee in my time here. But the other thing that really complemented that was the value I thought that the officials added to the discussion because they gave us some very good explanations of how the Overseas Investment Office works how they see it working in this case. And it's quite interesting because one of the great challenges that we've I guess been given by some farming organisations particularly in New Zealand is the fact that this is just mass planting going on and we're going to see the end of farming as we know it—some have gone that far. I think the officials satisfied us to a large extent in that respect in that when applications are made they explained the process. So when an application's made for a purchase of land under this right the application will contain all sorts of things.And one of those things that's most important to us is what happens to the better classes of land in that body of land that's been acquired for forestry. I think the Overseas Investment Office will look very favourably on applications that are made where they intend to extract the better classes of land from forestry use and either sell them off or put them into other forms of agricultural use. I think we got some satisfaction from that and the discussion I thought was well worthwhile. We've got to remember that this is not affecting a large amount of land in New Zealand to date but the issues I raised earlier in this discussion certainly could change that and change it very quickly and so it is a discussion that we need to have as a Parliament and as a country and do it fairly quickly. I just want to go back to the forestry industry. I don't think there's anyone more enthusiastic about the forestry industry than I am and I certainly think it's got great potential for New Zealand in the future. But I just do want to touch on the issue I raised with respect to what happens as we transition from one land-use type to another particularly a land-use type where there's no income for many many years. That could be very challenging for New Zealand if we don't get the balance of this right in the short term; long term it might be quite different. So the bill as the Minister explained really changes the application process. It amends the Overseas Investment Act to ensure that overseas investments that result in the conversion of farmland or other land of forestry benefits New Zealand and that any risks can be better managed. It also means that overseas investors can no longer acquire land for forestry conversion or for the acquisition or establishment of permanent carbon forests. These applications will be considered under the standard "benefit to New Zealand" test as opposed to under the forestry test and the interesting thing about the forestry test is it's still available to overseas investors who wish to buy what I suppose you'd call existing forestry or plantations in New Zealand. I think that's quite an acceptable position for the Finance and Expenditure Committee to have arrived at. The forestry test is simpler by far than the tests that we're now applying which is the "benefit to New Zealand" test but it's also different than the test for farmland in New Zealand. One of the questions that was raised with the select committee and quite legitimately I think is why there is a difference between acquiring land to plant a pine tree on and acquiring land to plant a walnut tree on for example or an oak tree—because there is a difference—or a grapevine for that matter. So I think that it's pointed to some interesting anomalies in the Overseas Investment Office legislation in New Zealand and I think we need to review that in the future because as the Minister said himself we do rely heavily on overseas investment in New Zealand and we'll continue to rely on that. It's a very essential part of certainly our productive sector. Our primary sector relies hugely on overseas investment for its future development.One of the issues that was quite interesting in this whole exercise as well was we were given some statistics that historically we've been informed that almost 80 percent of New Zealand forests standing plantation forest is owned by overseas investors. In the course of this discussion we were given some information that—and I think I've got the figure right—56 percent of it is owned by overseas investors. So there is some great uncertainty in the stats that we understand around that type of investment. I don't have any issue and I'm sure the National Party has no issue with foreign investment in New Zealand forestry—it's of a great value to us. The interesting thing will be how we can in the future extract more value from that forestry investment by those international investors because it would be very good if we could get a sound base for a manufacturing sector in New Zealand that has a surety of supply of logs in the future. So just back to the carbon issue—which I think is going to be extremely challenging for us—it is a threat to some extent to our traditional farming types in New Zealand and our traditional use of farmland in New Zealand. Whether that's a threat that we can't handle or not is something I think as I said earlier this Parliament needs to get to a consensus on and to do it very quickly. We certainly support this piece of legislation. I think it opens up and certainly the activities in that sector in the last few days have opened up the need for some much greater and more urgent discussion on this whole topic. Thank you Mr Speaker."