Nash Stuart: Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Nash Stuart: Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 18 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:7803. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
STUART NASH (Labour) 
: 
 I applaud Catherine Delahunty for introducing the Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill. I think it is a great bill. I think it is a principled bill. It has a lot of real-world application. 
One of the main reasons I support this bill is the fact that the previous Labour Government did a lot of work around the issue. I will let the House know what the Labour caucus and the Labour Cabinet were doing with regard to this issue before Labour met its untimely election defeat. It will be only another 2 years before we are back; I think everyone knows that. The last Labour Cabinet invited the Minister of Forestry and the Minister of Trade to report to the Cabinet economic development committee by February 2008 on actions to address the sale in New Zealand of illegally sourced wood products. Given the linkages between international and domestic measures to address illegal logging and deforestation this report back was broader in scope to include the proposed international engagement. 
Our international engagement on forestry connects three components emerging in international forestry. If they had been acted on together the Labour Cabinet believed that had the potential to make a significant difference to the global environment and global wood markets. The components were reducing deforestation and forest degradation addressing the trade in illegal timber and wood products and capacity building and technology transfer for sustainable forest management in developing countries. Action on deforestation and capability building may prove to be the key in the long term. 
In the absence of action to address illegal logging global efforts to reduce deforestation and promote sustainable forest management are likely to continue to be undermined. When we are debating in this House an emissions trading bill I would have thought that every party in this House would support any measure that promoted sustainable forest management and reduced deforestation. 
The proposed approach to international engagement on illegal logging is part of the wider forestry strategy. That strategy includes engagement on and leadership in the development of international financial mechanisms for reducing deforestation in developing countries; active support and advocacy for regional and multinational solutions to address the trade in illegal wood products; ministerial-level bilateral engagement with key producer and consumer countries and in particular Australia; commissioning research to assess what further steps can be taken at a global level or by countries over and above current efforts to effectively address international trade in illegal wood; supporting efforts to have kwila listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora; and participating where appropriate in key multilateral fora addressing issues directly related to international logging and engagement with the wider New Zealand forestry sector—this includes the industry non-governmental organisations and Maori—to elicit their support and involvement both domestically and internationally in progressing this strategy. 
As members of this House will ascertain the Labour Cabinet was a long way down the road to addressing this issue and that is why I applaud Catherine Delahunty for this bill. It is a very good bill and it should be supported for a whole raft of reasons. For New Zealand a single species kwila is estimated to represent up to 80 percent of the illegally sourced wood products sold in New Zealand. Officials therefore evaluated a range of options to address the sale of illegally sourced kwila wood imported into this country. The Minister of Forestry sought Cabinet’s guidance on which domestic action or combination of actions it considered New Zealand should initiate to address the sale of illegally sourced kwila products. This action would be a consumer awareness campaign focusing on illegally logged kwila and the development of a voluntary pan-industry practice to encourage the verification of legally sourced kwila imports; and/or the mandatory labelling of all kwila products sold in New Zealand at point of sale requiring disclosure of wood species and whether the supplier has verification of the legality of the wood; and/or immediate ministerial-level bilateral engagement with key countries to develop bilateral mechanisms to prevent illegally logged kwila imports from entering New Zealand. 
This is a very good bill. It is a principled bill. It is a practical bill. As I said because of the emissions trading scheme and the global awareness around these sorts of issues everyone in the House should be supporting this bill. Labour definitely supports it. I support it as a past forester and I think the National Government should support it. My personal belief is that it would be foolish not to. I congratulate Catherine Delahunty and I thank her for a fine bill. Thank you.