Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Thank you. I'm pleased to take a call on the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill. The Green Party is supporting this bill which will amend the Forests Act 1949 to create a legal framework for ensuring that wood imported into and exported from Aotearoa is harvested legally. We're supporting it because it is an improvement to the status quo but it is a lost opportunity. The Green Party wants a much-stronger purpose stricter liability provisions and changes to the bill to widen its scope and to ensure that it is effective in outlawing illegal logging rather than providing a fig leaf to cover it.This bill needs to be about much more than safeguarding market access for New Zealand logs and timber. It needs to prevent the curse of deforestation in temperate and tropical rainforests. It needs to be strengthened if it's going to have any significant impact in outlawing illegal logging and ending the human rights abuses that logging has on customary forest owners and on indigenous peoples. And the Green Party will be looking for changes in the Primary Production Committee to ensure that the bill has a robust regime in terms of what constitutes legal and illegal harvest. And we want to see its scope expanded beyond timber products to include all forest products including palm oil and palm kernel expeller (PKE) because as the Minister noted the scale of illegal logging is enormous and it's having huge impacts not only on plants and wildlife and the integrity of the forest but on the indigenous communities that depend on those forests for their cultural and social identity and wellbeing and it's having huge impacts on the climate because deforestation and the change in land use to farming involves enormous loss of carbon. Illegal logging is violence against people against nature and against the climate. And the Minister recognised the efforts of importers and timber producers but the people we really have to thank and acknowledge for the fact that Parliament is even considering this legislation are courageous activists from Brazil to Indonesia and environmental organisations such as Greenpeace. It is their strength their determination and not that of Governments and Government agencies which have exposed the seriousness the extent and the impacts of illegal logging and what this heinous trade in illegal timber is doing to nature the climate and the ability of the planet to support the amazing web of life which is found in unlogged tropical and temperate rainforests. And can I pay tribute and extend the condolences of the Green Party to the family friends and colleagues of the Guardian journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian activist Bruno Pereira. They've been missing in the Amazonian rainforest since 5 June and are widely thought to have been murdered while they were looking at the impacts of cocaine trafficking and illegal poaching on the Amazonian rainforest and on the indigenous people who live there.This Parliament has a duty to strengthen and expand the scope and effectiveness of the bill. So it certainly puts in place a framework and puts the onus on proving legality on importers exporters log traders and primary processors who will be required to establish due-diligence systems. It allows for the recognition of private certification systems such as the one organised by the Forests Stewardship Council. It defines timber as FMPI legally harvested" if the harvester has the right to harvest the wood has the necessary legal authority to exercise that right and doesn't contravene the harvest laws of the place or country of harvest. But this definition is too weak because in terms of the applicable legislation in the country of harvest if you have loose legislation official documents won't often provide adequate proof that it's being logged legally without threat intimidation violence or abuse of the rights of indigenous people. There needs to be a look behind that country-of-origin documentation. There needs to be additional investment into site visits third-party auditing verifying species and the origin of timber through DNA and isotope testing. And the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) needs to work with organisations like Greenpeace which have investigated supply chains and gone behind those official documents because Greenpeace in its studies on the Brazilian logging has shown that huge indiscriminate and illegal logging is occurring there. Loggers are after trees like the ipe tree which when it's processed into flooring and decking can fetch up to US$2500 a cubic metre. And all of the satellite imagery that Greenpeace and others have shown there is that logging is spreading right into the core of the Amazonian rainforest. And when the logging penetrates illegal roads go in further and more logging happens. So we're seeing a huge destruction of biodiversity and an intensification of violence—people terrorised intimidated and murdered. And we've had decades of violence because the Brazilian Government has been able to get away with not doing the enforcement and prosecution that's required. There's a weak licensing process in Brazil for forest management plans there are no field inspections there are poor estimates of timber volumes in forests and there are changes to the accounting in terms of sawmills and tree species not being properly identified. So MPI needs to work with the environmental organisations that have got the data on this. And this bill needs to apply not just to timber products but to any forest products that are associated with illegal logging because in a report that Greenpeace did last year—it was a very detailed report called Deceased estate: illegal palm oil wiping out Indonesia's national forest—Greenpeace has described the illegal palm oil plantations and their expansion into the rainforests in Indonesia's forest estate as I quote "the largest single cause of destruction of critical Indonesian rainforests over the last two decades." And who benefits from that encroachment? Not the forest not the customary indigenous owners but industrial agriculture in Aotearoa New Zealand and the New Zealand dairy industry. One of four palm oil producers with more than 50000 hectares in the Indonesian national forest estate is Wilmar International and it's a major importer of palm kernel expeller into New Zealand as a supplementary feed for the dairy industry. And of course Aotearoa is the world's largest importer of PKE so we are directly involved in the destruction of rainforests. This bill will do nothing—nothing—to stop that. It will do nothing to stop the forest destruction caused by the illegal expansion of palm oil plantations. So that's where the bill needs to change and if it changes there then it would do something about protecting the 2000 indigenous communities in the Indonesian rainforest. It would help protect the habitat of orang-utan of elephants and of the Sumatran tiger and it would help reduce the climate pollution and the carbon loss from the land-use change involved in deforestation. MPI also needs a major change in culture if the system is to be robust. We have seen what happened with the swamp kauri debacle in Aotearoa where it took the Northland Environmental Protection Society—taking MPI all the way to the Supreme Court—to establish that the export of sawn planks did not qualify as finished products or tabletops as the swamp kauri miners were claiming. And that was NGOs again. So there needs to be behind this bill a complete change in MPI's culture so that the legislation when it's passed is actually properly enforced because we need to stop this illegal logging. The life of the forests depends on it. The lives and wellbeing of indigenous communities who depend on those forests also depend on it. The bill needs to be significantly strengthened. Kia ora."