O'Connor DamienHon DAMIEN O'CONNOR (Labour): A couple of questions I have: firstly where's Matua Shane? Where's Shane?DEPUTY SPEAKER: It's not appropriate to refer—Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR: No no sorry—he's in the House but I hope he's on the speaking list because actually I was an enthusiastic supporter of this piece of legislation when it was brought in. A ute and a laptop was literally all you needed to trade logs. We had small forests owners we had small investors and we had small processors who were getting ripped off by people who would come and make an offer people didn't have good advice and Matua Shane rightfully knew that we had to bring in a registration system so that people who were advising people new to the sector had some kind of credibility.In fact for the fourth-largest export sector in our country it is absolutely essential that we have credible systems in place. So we are going to support this. But the question is can we get guarantees from the Government that they will ensure that logs that are harvested come from areas free of disease? Because if that disease is identified offshore by any of our markets—say India for example—the risks are that those logs and our log trade will be shut down overnight. The second thing is that we are now seeing increasing obligations around deforestation. There are countries around the world that simply cut down their forests do not replant and there's growing concern about biodiversity about carbon sequestration all the rest of it. So there's an obligation to ensure that the sustainably managed and harvested forests that produce the vast majority of radiata in our country just what we're talking about here are actually replanted and run in a sustainable manner. If we can't prove that and we don't know that the logs that are going on the ship or they're going to a processing system have come from a sustainably harvested forest then we too could be shut out of international markets. Then there's the one of ensuring confidence for those who invest in or own small forests that they can be protected against road traders someone with a ute and a laptop because that's what we'll be going back to now. One of the primary drivers for the Hon Shane Jones—I guess the obligation to place on these traders some credibility some systems that offered some certification—was to ensure that the processing sector in our country if they were signed up to a contract for supply indeed had that supply delivered. These are companies—small some of them are larger—that are employing New Zealanders up and down our country to produce the high-quality timber that we all rely on for our housing market. The Government says it wants to build more houses; it will need more timber.When the log price goes up—and at the moment it's low; the export log prices. So there's lots of timber available for local processing. When the log price goes back up which we hope it does then the ability for those sawmills to compete for logs gets constrained and the traders will simply shift the logs to the highest place. If there's no comeback on them if there's no registration no certification no proof of integrity or credibility then the risk is that those rogue traders as they did in the past will just shift the logs to the highest market and leave our local sawmills at risk.So the question to the Government in passing this—and the costs are actually relative to this being the fourth biggest export sector in our country. The cost for individual traders was not that great. These are people dealing with millions of dollars coming and going in terms of logs and supply. So the money that the Government has decided it will hand back—like it is to landlords it is now handing it back to some log traders—probably won't be that great but it will leave a gap in terms of Ministry for Primary Industries' ability to provide oversight in this crucial area.This is a really important area out of our economy. It's a growing one. People are looking to invest in the forestry sector. The Government needs to give them an assurance those small forest owners that they will be protected given that the passage of this legislation will remove one of the obligations around registration that provided that protection.