Goudie Sandra: Forests Amendment Bill — Consideration of Report of Local Government and Environment Committee 
Goudie Sandra: Forests Amendment Bill — Consideration of Report of Local Government and Environment Committee 
[Volume:617;Page:12790] 
SANDRA GOUDIE (National—Coromandel) 
: 
 In speaking again on the Forests Amendment Bill because I was interrupted I would like to recap and reacquaint everybody with the situation with regard to it. I was actually extolling the extraordinary nature of this current Government in that it supports this bill in its entirety. Yet when the Labour members were in Opposition in 1999 they opposed the bill and Mark Peck himself called it “this grubby little Bill”. 
Mark Peck 
: I didn’t! 
SANDRA GOUDIE 
: You did and I have— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: The member will not bring the Speaker into the debate. The member will refer to “the member” or use the member’s name. 
SANDRA GOUDIE 
: The member did. He very much did so and I have those words right in front of me. I will go so far as to recall some other words spoken by some other members of this current Government when they were in Opposition. In fact on reading  
Hansard 
 I saw that the Hon Jim Sutton actually called the Hons David Carter and Nick Smith “twerps” for having spoken in favour of this bill. Now the members of this Government who made those sorts of comments which are really rather unacceptable in the House—I hope they were made to withdraw and apologise for them; perhaps we could do that retrospectively—are supporting this bill. They spoke incessantly against it then and lambasted the people who had presented the bill and who had gone and negotiated the whole situation over some considerable time. It was quite a complicated situation which had never been able to be dealt with by the previous Government. Even though that Government had attempted to deal with the situation it had not managed to yet the Hon Nick Smith did manage that. He succeeded in coming to a workable solution but that was lambasted by the Opposition of the time. 
Here are the members of that Opposition now in Government supporting the passage of this bill through the House with a ban on the export of wood-chip. It is quite a significant part of the bill that this Government has sought to ban the export of wood-chip but yes there is an exemption for somebody exporting wood-chip under another name. That exporter has an exemption so that is one particular situation where there is one exemption but there is no exemption for anybody else. We hear from the Green Party that well there is no marketfor the export of wood-chip so the ban does not really matter—as if that could possibly justify the ban. That is hardly a credible reason for supporting a ban on exporting wood-chip. So here we are having sustainable forestry and being required to meet all the same sorts of requirements governed by the Forests Act yet still being denied the opportunity to export wood-chip. We would like the Minister to take a call to explain the reasoning behind that and to expand on it. 
Although this is a difficult area it is great to see that the work by my learned colleague the Hon Nick Smith has been carried forward and is being undertaken although sadly not to the degree he would have envisaged. We pay tribute to the Hon Nick Smith for his work in that regard and to the Hon David Carter as well because he ably supported Mr Smith when he presented this legislation to the House. I have here the results of the vote taken against the bill at the time of the second reading: Labour 37 and the Alliance 11 and there was also one independent vote against it. Quite clearly those members all voted against this bill. The bill’s aim was to enable the inclusion of certain forests under the indigenous forestry management milling and export controls contained in the Forests Act as amended in 1993. Those forests were the West Coast indigenous production forests and other indigenous forests reserved for Maori under the South Island Landless Natives Act and under other legislation. The bill sought also to protect the Crown from claims for compensation and to validate any decisions made by the Minister of Forestry under the Customs Export Prohibition Order 1996. 
We have here the recommendations from the Local Government and Environment Committee. Although the export controls under the principal Act are retained this legislation expands on and makes changes to those export provisions and that is the most significant amendment affecting the South Island Landless Native Act forest owners. It affects those who choose the sustainable forest management option under the Act’s forest policy and many submitters were concerned about the loss of export markets especially from non-sawlog hardwood that has been previously exported as wood-chip as I have said. Others saw the re-imposition of export controls as counter to the principle of unrestricted economic benefit from the South Island Landless Natives Act land and that is the case. We understand that the forests on that land are often of poor quality and note that some submitters consider chipping a necessity inorder to receive a viable economic return from the land. Those submitters believe that in spite of the issue of whether or not there is a market for wood-chip they should have the ability to export it. That is something we would like the Minister to take a call on; we would be very interested in his response around that matter. We will certainly be looking for that in the Committee stage. 
I reiterate the fact that the members of this Government opposed this bill when they were in Opposition and here they are now supporting it in its passage through the House. We would hope that the sorts of comments Labour members made during the bill’s origins in 1999 will not be repeated here during this phase.