Sage EugenieADVERSE WEATHER-AFFECTED TIMBER RECOVERY ON CONSERVATION LANDS BILLFirst ReadingDebate resumed from 24 March.Hon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. I'm pleased to take a call on the Adverse Weather-affected Timber Recovery on Conservation Lands Bill and I am grateful to my Labour colleague Rachel Brooking for her very careful legal analysis and dissection of the many failings of this bill from a legal point of view. But I want to focus on why the Green Party is opposing this bill and will be voting against it. This bill represents a fundamental attack on conservation values on nature on our public protected lands and our indigenous forests nature's cathedrals: our kauri rimu beech kahikatea mataī and podocarp forests. The Green Party opposed the bill on which this is based—the Hon Nick Smith's West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill—in June 2014 which was pushed through the House under urgency with no chance for select committee consideration and no chance for public submissions even though it affected public land. This bill fails to recognise the history of forest clearance in Aotearoa New Zealand. Forest once covered 85 percent of our country some 23 million hectares and yet in 25 to 30 generations we have reduced the extent of that forest cover to around 20 percent of our land area. We've converted it to pasture. We need to protect what remains. We need to protect these magnificent forests on conservation lands and the homes that they provide for our distinctive indigenous plants and wildlife yet this bill goes back to the 19th century with its desire to see logging on conservation land authorised by the Director-General of Conservation which would see the Department of Conservation collect fees for that logging. The National Party and the member are grounded in the 19th century not the 21st century. They fail to recognise the key ecosystem services that these forests provide and their importance as habitat for wildlife. It's opportunistic plundering of conservation land that this bill is promoting rather than safeguarding its indigenous biodiversity. The bill also fails to recognise that for over 30 years there has been strong public support for the prohibition on logging in section 30 of the Conservation Act 1987. That prohibition on logging was put in place for very good reasons because when Te Papa Atawhai—the Department of Conservation—was established in 1987 it brought all of the green dots" that were spread throughout the Forest Service Department of Lands and Survey and the Wildlife Service together into one agency. We had had the Forest Service which was trying to be a multiple-use agency. On the one hand its environmental forestry arm was encouraging recreation on public land and on the other it was napalming indigenous forests rimu forests in the Buller and elsewhere and converting those into pine plantation. That was enormously destructive. The Labour Government phased out the Forest Service in that restructuring in the 1980s. It created Te Papa Atawhai which has the Conservation Act which prohibits logging. This bill also fails to recognise the history of the huge effort that the conservation movement—New Zealanders iwi; all of us—have made to protect these forests on public land from logging. We had the big campaigns in Orikaka in Ōkārito in Waikukupa Whirinaki Pureora and the Longwoods and Rowallan forests in Western Southland to stop logging on public land. The dying days of logging were under the former National Government. A newly elected Labour Government stopped the beech scheme that Timberlands West Coast wanted to proceed with which would have resulted in pock-marking the forest with a whole lot of clear-cut and saw 120000 hectares of West Coast forest then added to the conservation estate. This bill would take us back to that era of logging destruction of biodiversity and destruction of nature. It fails to recognise the key role that wind-blown timber and fallen trees have in recycling nutrients in the forest that dead trees have in providing nest holes for birds like kākā and kākāriki and that fallen trees have in providing a seed-bed for regenerating forest and regrowth of the forest. This bill is just opportunistic. It seeks to plunder conservation land and the Green Party is opposing it."