Prosser Richard: West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeProsser Richard: West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 26 June 2014. Volume:699;Page:18990. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First):There is no need for the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill to be passed under urgency. The excuse that it must be enacted before the beech trees that were blown down in the cyclone start to rot or the sap starts to run or whatever else is just that—an excuse. It is already too late for that. Those trees have been down for a couple of months already and in another couple of months the rot will have already set in. There are according to surveys from the Department of Conservation and the Ministry for Primary Industries something north of 10000 hectares of beech forest affected and it will all be next to useless before even a tenth of it has been harvested. But beech is not the target here. Everyone knows that. No one is going after the beech because it will be too difficult to get enough of it out quickly enough for it to be worth anything.The real prize here is rimu—better than 5000 hectares of it including a massive block north of Karamea containing an estimated 105000 cubic metres of recoverable rimu. At an average of $250 per cube that is more than $26 million. You can take it to the bank but as soon as they get boots on the ground up there they will find there is twice that much—100000 cubic metres and maybe twice that. New Zealand currently manages to extract and process around 6000 cubes annually. So straight away we have 15 years’ worth of rimu up for grabs and ready to hit the market. It is a market that cannot possibly hope to absorb it. It will not all arrive at once of course but that does not matter. There is no real urgency. Rimu does not go off that quickly. The biggest trees can lie on the ground for up to 5 years without being measurably degraded. Curiously enough 5 years is the prescribed lifespan of this bill. What a mighty coincidence!We are all for the extraction and recovery of this windfall timber resource. New Zealand First believes in the extractive industries. We believe in the clever use of selected resources. We believe in New Zealand sawmills milling timber such as this creating jobs and providing a source of export earnings. We believe in the West Coast the people of the West Coast and the businesses of the West Coast. We want to see them profit from this tragedy and we know that if it is done right the whole of New Zealand will profit as well. But if it is not then no one here will get anything out of this business and all the profits will go overseas as usual and the environment will suffer into the bargain.What will happen if this bill goes ahead in its present form is this. Fifteen years’ worth of rimu will hit the New Zealand market over the space of 5 years. It will drop the price through the floor and put the local processors out of business. The people who have been granted extraction permits behind closed doors by the Director-General of Conservation will hire the local mills to turn the trunks into sawn timber because that is all they are required to do and the mills will take that business because they have no other option. The timber will be sent to furniture factories in China and it will be sold all around the world here and overseas as New Zealand native timber furniture and some foreign company will pocket the cash. There will be no additional jobs here for furniture factory workers precious few for sawmill workers and no guarantee of any more for forestry workers because the overseas companies that get the job will be able to bring in their own specialists.I hear the Minister of Conservation fearmongering about fungus and how the timber is going to rot and that being why we must act quickly. Well that is beech Ministers. No one is interested in the beech. Everyone knows that the beech is going to rot and no one is very interested because it is worth only 60 bucks a metre. The El Dorado here is the rimu and it is not going off any time soon. The beech going rotten is a red herring. What this is really about is red pine. It is about possibly 200000 cubic metres of recoverable rimu worth possibly $50 million. New Zealand First believes that it should be recovered and utilised and that it should be a source of jobs wealth and export receipts for New Zealand and for the West Coast.We believe that but we do not believe that the protection we have in place around our rivers and streams should be chucked away to make way for bulldozers and logging roads. We do not believe that this justifies poisoning the rivers and the whitebait or cleaning out greenstone boulders with diggers to make culverts because we do not believe that that is necessary. We do believe that roads and culverts should be able to be used if they can be put in in accordance with existing protocols. If they cannot then helicopters should be used—and they can be used because this resource is worth enough to justify their use.We do not believe that it serves the West Coast or New Zealand to allow no royalties to be paid and for nothing to come back to the Coast and for there to be no guarantees of jobs and businesses on the Coast. If the Government will agree to address these concerns then we will support the bill but if it will not then we will oppose it. There is no reason for the Government not to agree because all of this is in the best interests of New Zealand and of the Coast. If the Government will not agree it is because it has another agenda and is being disingenuous. Let us extract this timber let us harvest this resource but let us do it in a way that profits New Zealand. To not do so would be to compound waste upon waste and to turn one catastrophe into an ongoing series of them. Thank you.