Sage Eugenie: West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is subject to correctionSage Eugenie: West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 26 June 2014. Volume:702;Page:18941. Text is subject to correction.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. It is a tragedy not that there has been a large area of windthrow but to hear the sentiments extolled by Mr Brownlee that we are not wealthy enough in this country to set aside some areas that we protect permanently where nature can rule and where we can experience nature on nature’s terms. That is why we have protected our conservation land as places where nature dominates. We are a windy country. We have big snowstorms. We have big wind storms. Windthrow on the West Coast is nature in action and if we are to be serious about setting aside parts of New Zealand to protect them for their own sake and for the sake of all of the species that call them home and if we are serious about protecting them so that present and future generations can experience something of the original New Zealand then we do not open them up to mining to oil and gas drilling and now to logging as this Government is doing. It is because the National Party is stuck in the past with its destructive short-term thinking which Mr Brownlee embodied in his speech. It has got economic policies that revolve around the aggressive exploitation of nature—dig it drill it frack it irrigate it and now log it.The West Coast forests are nature’s cathedrals. You have the grand beech forests on the fertile river flats with their big branches. You have the rimu trees festooned with orchids and climbing plants. You can hear the call of the korimako the tui and if you are lucky at night the kiwi. We in the Green Party respect these places. We would protect them not open them up to chainsaws to skidders to haulers and to all of the damage that they will do. Conservation lands are supposed to be the areas that we set aside but nothing is sacred to this National Government—nothing at all. The Minister suggested yesterday that logging had occurred numerous times on conservation land. That was very misleading. Certainly it has occurred where there were past licences prior to the Conservation Act that allowed logging. It has occurred near Reefton where there has been a big open-cast goldmine.But the Conservation Act deliberately prohibits the extraction of timber for commercial purposes from our protected areas. That was quite deliberate because of what happened with the Forest Service prior to the establishment of the Department of Conservation. In a very perverse way it twisted the legislation at the time and twisted the concept of extracting dead trees to include dying trees and then to include living trees in the Kaimai Mamaku Conservation Park. Parliament deliberately in section 30 of the Conservation Act prohibited the use of conservation land for logging for commercial gain. That provision has enjoyed widespread public support for the last 27 years.Mr Brownlee with his comments that the waste of timber is a disgrace shows a profound misunderstanding of basic ecology. Nature does not do waste. Death is part of nature’s cycle. Trees are not going to waste if they decay in the forest. They are an important part of the forest ecosystem. Where you have standing dead trees they provide nesting holes for species like kākā and kākāriki and then when you have rotting trees on the forest floor they store carbon and they recycle nutrients back into the forest soils. Thousands of species from fungi to insects to birds rely on these rotting logs for food. They provide a home to these species. They provide moist sites for insects which birds like kiwi need to feed on and they provide ideal sites for regeneration for new forest giants. The Minister does not care or does not understand that rotting logs are an essential part of the forest ecosystem. If you are not protecting the whole cycle of the forest you are not protecting the forest at all. I encourage the Minister and Mr Brownlee to read the blog by ecologist Michael North on the Forest and Bird website where he highlights just how much windthrow and the cycle of decay are a natural part of our forest system and a really important part of it.Past Governments have progressively wound back the logging of our magnificent rimu and beech forests on public lands in response to the public demand for their protection. We finally stopped logging on public land on the West Coast in 1999 as one of the first acts of a new Labour Government to stop Timberlands’ destructive West Coast beech scheme. That scheme involved helicopter logging. It was not the gentle extraction of single logs from the forest. It was pockmarking the forest with an ugly series of 2 to 3 hectare clear cuts. That is what we will get with this bill. We stopped logging on public land for a very good reason. We need to protect what remains because we have been so successful in clearing burning converting to pasture and destroying the native forest that make these islands of Aotearoa so very special.Forests once covered 85 percent of New Zealand—some 23 million hectares—yet in the space of just 25 to 30 generations humans have reduced our forest cover to around 20 percent of land area. That has had a devastating effect on our biodiversity on our plants and on our wildlife because of the loss of habitat. The industry has been winding down because New Zealanders have pushed past Governments to wind it down and to protect these areas. New Zealanders see more value in the forests as habitat for plants for wildlife and for the species that make New Zealand special. No other country has birds like our flightless parrot the kakapo and like the kiwi which has got nostrils at the end of its beak. No other country has species like the giant wētā which preforms the role of rodents in other countries. Our biodiversity is some of the most distinctive in the world. We have so many species that are found only here in Aotearoa: all of our reptiles 90 percent of our insects 80 percent of our vascular plants and 25 percent of our bird species. That is why we need to protect forests on conservation land not open them up to logging.We have a biodiversity crisis with over 2000 species threatened with extinction yet what is the Government doing? It is not spending more on conservation to fund predator control but opening up our public protected areas to logging—Hon Dr Nick Smith: Yes we are.EUGENIE SAGE: Yes only money that you have managed to save because the Department of Conservation did not cut as many staff in its restructuring last year.We are opposing this bill. The reason the Government wants to push it through under urgency is because it knows that the public will oppose it when they understand that it is not just single-tree extraction. We will see logging trucks skidders haulers and heavy equipment on conservation land destroying our forests opening up large areas to weeds destroying the ground conditions destroying the natural drainage patterns and devastating a large area of forest in order to access the wind-thrown trees. There is nothing in this bill that restricts the logging to helicopters. Instead we will get the ground equipment used the big heavy machinery which has been so devastating in logging on the West Coast in the past. When you have been through a forest that has been logged it is soul-destroying because it such a desolate landscape such a broken landscape. That is what this Government is allowing by bringing the chainsaws back on to conservation land when Parliament 27 years ago deliberately decided that we should not have logging for commercial gain.