Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Look I'm speaking here this afternoon on behalf of ACT MP Mr Mark Cameron who sits on our Primary Production Committee. The ACT Party will be supporting this bill. We've heard from submitters who have pointed out some flaws some potential issues that need to be resolved and so when this bill gets to the committee of the whole House stage we'll have questions for the Minister and we'll be seeking further answers from officials. Now New Zealand's forestry industry is our fourth-largest primary sector export earner creating over $6 billion in revenues for the fiscal year 2020-21. The operational certainty the integrity of the supply chain for forestry operators for investors and for their customers both domestically and internationally is vitally important to New Zealand to our economy and to those communities which absolutely depend on forestry for their income as well as for other things. As noted by previous speakers such as the Hon Eugenie Sage this bill does create a legal framework to help futureproof the legal harvest of timber products although this bill has taken a long time to get to this stage. However the original problem that the bill was designed to solve—how can we be confident that the timber products that we purchase from the local merchant or that a builder supplies on to our project or into our home have been harvested in a way and from a place which meets a minimum level of environmental and socially responsible outcomes? So the ACT Party supports this bill but we also want to raise some of the issues that submitters identified. There is an overlap with other regulation such as the log traders regulation which was introduced through the forest advisers amendment bill last year and that may create some confusions between those administering the bill and all of those involved in the forestry industry who are tasked with submitting to the regulations. That's where the ACT Party differs from the Green Party in many ways. We heard from the Hon Eugenie Sage a very passionate articulation of the concerns that many of us have about the way timber is harvested particularly in developing countries. If we think about the Asia-Pacific region where large trees are taken from environments where threatened species live like Borneo where I recently travelled where species like sun bear like orang-utan like pygmy elephants—habitats are threatened by the removal of forest and the conversion of that land to other uses. So it is vitally important that we do have a regime which protects the habitat of places that those communities identify as special to them in the same way as in New Zealand we identify those habitats like national parks for example those places that are so special to us that we wouldn't allow the trees to be harvested from those places. But where ACT differs from parties like the Green Party is that we don't think the regulation that applies to dealing with a specific problem like harvesting trees from tropical places should also be applied to drinking cocoa for example or the oil that ends up in our two-minute noodles. There is such a thing as regulatory overreach and an excess of red tape and I think we heard the Hon Eugenie Sage articulate a vision that the Green Party has that the ACT Party fundamentally disagrees with. But there are some economic issues that are raised by illegal forest harvesting particularly in developing countries that we don't necessarily face here in New Zealand and it's where communities are forced to make terrible choices where they're faced with wicked problems.It may well be because they have a less transparent democracy than New Zealand has where the incentives to do bad things are much greater than the incentive to do good. So if a community is faced with choices between Well there's some illegal logging going on but that provides income; that provides resources for other things that we do like building homes for example in our community and maybe some of that timber is exported and we get cash for it" but the alternative is "Well imagine if we could actually exploit our natural resources like through mining for example or oil and gas"—that many countries like the province of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo where I visited recently do have access to. If the option was to say "Well we could exploit those resources and generate wealth from those activities then instead of this incentive to cut down old-growth forest and destroy the habitat of those threatened species we could actually use the money we earn from developing our other natural resources to protect that land and to give better economic and social opportunities to our people"—so while the legislation we're debating today provides for certification of timber particularly from places where we might be concerned it's not sustainably harvested causing severe damage to the environment through those practices the fundamental problem that this bill attempts to address is that in those countries the economic incentives are skewed because in many cases local people cannot benefit from the development of their natural resources.That's why when we think about New Zealand the great opportunities that we have through our natural resources whether it's minerals that lie under the conservation estate in what's called the Schedule 4 lands or those lands that were dumped into the conservation estate in 1987 during the reform of the State-owned enterprises those lands that should be available for development of our natural resources—or whether it's our oil and gas resources which New Zealand has a bounty of but which the current Government has decided to make off limits through banning exploration offshore for oil and gas and more recently stopping the issuing of any more onshore permits. So while this bill addresses a significant and real problem of where timber is harvested and how do we know that it's been harvested in a way that is sustainable and protects the economic and social interests of the communities where that timber is taken from also this bill underlines that there is a much more significant problem not just for developing countries that have orang-utans but also for countries that still would like to consider themselves First World like New Zealand must address.Concerns were raised by submitters about the size and the scale of the bureaucracy—the red tape this would impose on their industry—particularly for small forestry plot holders who might have invested in a forestry block potentially as a future retirement income or a nest egg. They are not typically managing the forest on a daily basis; they're certainly not involved in its logging and its marketing. They leave that to independent forest managers and many of them pointed out that by the time they have paid for certification for their small forestry block they may well be barely in a break-even position. So any legislation that this House passes must also take account of the red tape and the cost on small business and small land owners. There's about 14000 of those small forest owners in New Zealand whose economic sustainability may be put at risk through excessive red tape and regulation. So ACT will be continuing to focus on that when we consider the subsequent stages of the bill. However other submitters have pointed out in fact that there are many jurisdictions we supply timber to like Japan and others which have a range of regulatory standards that we are required to meet in order satisfy the demands of that market and so we should be prepared to accept some additional certification and controls so that they can be sure that timber harvested in New Zealand has not come from a place that it was not lawfully taken from.So look this bill appears to be complex but it certainly has a fundamental rationale—a problem-solving piece of legislation that ACT will get behind and support. ACT will support this bill. We will be voting for its second reading. We'll have plenty of questions for the Minister and officials at the committee of the whole House stage but we do support its intention."