McKelvie Ian; Williams PotoIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Speaker. Despite the best efforts of the previous speaker Gareth Hughes where I come from you can't get the train to Wellington you can't get the plane to Wellington you can't bike to Wellington you can't walk there—well you could if you walked better than me. But that's one of the problems we have in rural New Zealand.Anyway I want to talk about a few things in respect of this bill but the first issue I want to raise was a very interesting thing that happened to me last week when a young woman from Taihape who came into this House for the first time with a group from Taihape as I just said asked me what made me think I could represent the Rangitīkei. Well I nearly sat down I suppose but it was a very interesting question. I think every MP should ask themselves what makes them think they can represent the people they come here to represent because it does take a bit of thinking about. So having thought about that I thought I would talk about the issues in this bill that actually impact on the electorate that I come here to represent. Like David Carter I think there's some things in this bill and in this Budget that actually have quite a positive impact on my part of the world. Of course the Rangitīkei has the three big defence bases in New Zealand in it. Well I call them the three big ones—can't worry about Auckland or Christchurch—in Ōhākea Linton and of course Waiōuru. The significant spend in defence and the increase in personnel that will follow that spend in defence I think is not only positive for the Rangitīkei it's positive for New Zealand. So I commend the Government on that and I think it's good to see faith in our defence forces. From our perspective that's a hugely positive thing. From my electorate's perspective it's positive as well.Of course we like every other electorate in New Zealand—every large rural electorate—have some special challenges with health education and things like that and a lot of them relate to transport. It's very difficult—and going back to the last speaker's words on transport—for us to find other ways or alternative forms of transport when you're as remote as places like Taumarunui. I was a bit intrigued by Minister Jones going on about his railways. If he gets the Taumarunui railway station up and operating like it did in the 1950s he really will have achieved something. But I'm not sure how he's going to do that because of course Taumarunui on the main trunk line was a very famous railway station in its day. You always got a good pie there.Hon Scott Simpson: Will the pies be better?IAN McKELVIE: They will be better now. The meat quality's a lot better than it used to be. Of course my electorate also runs on the sheep's back so to speak. But I wanted to get back to one or two other things that impact the Rangitīkei and the tertiary sector is one of those in that Massey University is part of the Rangitīkei electorate and the Universal College of Learning (UCOL) serves a large part of my electorate from Taumarunui—where Unitec comes in at the top end as well—to Palmerston North and of course it goes across to Whanganui and down into the Wairarapa. So I have a very large tertiary sector either related to my electorate or sitting in my electorate. The fees-free scheme which was designed to boost that sector didn't really have the outcome it set out to achieve and of course money has been returned to the Treasurer as a result of that. But the tertiary sector is none the less very important for me and I'll be watching with interest the changes to UCOL which is of course the tertiary institute in Palmerston North. It will be significant and it will be very important for my electorate the result of that but it's equally as important to those remote towns because they do provide services into those towns—hugely necessary. So I wanted to now turn to the gun buy-back scheme and the $150 million - odd that's allocated in this document for that purpose and of course it's a bit more than that now with the top-up from ACC. We supported the legislation around the gun legislation with some reservations but certainly we supported it and I think the legislation achieved what it set out to achieve. There's some areas that with hindsight could have been done differently and perhaps better but that's all very well. The heat of the moment brings out some interesting decisions. But the reason I want to comment on the gun buy-back is because I think we have in a way undermined the work that was done by that bill because I think the lack of confidence in it is going to be significant and I think it's going to take some getting over. I just hope when they start to come in which will be any day now that it does work because I've got my grave doubts about that. The other thing that seriously challenges me about the gun buy-back scheme is that there's no real provision for all those guns out there that are held by people with no licences or are held illegally. Now just because someone's got a licence doesn't necessarily mean they were held illegally before this bill was put in place. Those people will not be able get anything for those guns. Are they going to hand them in? Who knows but it certainly could well force those guns underground. So I think that effectively our gun buy-back scheme looks like it's going to—I was going to say it's going to penalise gun owners; it won't penalise every gun owner but it will certainly penalise a number of gun owners unless some reasonable recompense is reached. It's certainly not going to penalise all those people that hold illegal guns in the country because if they don't take advantage of the amnesty—well if they take advantage of the amnesty they don't get any money for the gun so are they going to do it? Probably not. I think it's going to force a whole lot more guns underground and I think it's very unfortunate. I think it's interesting because the other thing that happens in rural New Zealand—and I saw the list of venues that they're going to host these things at and they're quite well spread so I think in that respect at least they've got a spread that will enable rural New Zealanders to hand those guns in when required. But none the less I'm hugely I guess disappointed in the way they've got to the point of pricing those guns and the way that they've encompassed the guns that aren't necessarily legal in New Zealand. I want to talk about a couple of other things. David Carter touched on one of those and that's the M. bovis situation. I think I've said before in this House that I go back to a time when I saw large numbers of cows going out the gate in the early days of the TB clean-up in New Zealand. It was much easier in those days because it cleaned up the TB—well it hasn't cleaned TB up yet entirely but it's done a great job really. But there was a payout and the meat was valued and it worked in that extent. There was never a compensation for milk or anything like that. The world's different now and so it's a much more complex compensation system we've got to go through. But I want to congratulate the Government for carrying that on. Very difficult circumstances—I think they've done pretty well. It is difficult for those families and those people who are in that situation particularly in the South Island. In the Rangitīkei it's not nearly such a serious problem but I do have great sympathy for those people caught up in that and I think it's an issue that the Government is managing about as well as they can. I want to move on to I guess what I think is a very interesting issue. So I attended the national Fieldays on the first day of the Fieldays and since then have had a number of meetings in the rural parts of my electorate. Last night there was quite a large meeting run by the dairy section of Federated Farmers in Palmerston North really about the climate change bill and the legislation around that—the methane situation. The speakers I think did a very good job but I've never known in my time in rural New Zealand—particularly with prices like they are; as good as I've ever seen them—where there's kind of like an air; it's almost a sombre air so an air of nervousness and there's no confidence in rural New Zealand to invest in anything. It's an unusual circumstance I think we're in because there's so much change up in the air but none of it's definitely been confirmed. I think farmers and rural towns are very nervous about where we're getting to with the future and I think the Government needs to make some positive decisions and make them pretty quickly. Whatever the decisions are they need to be made because I think the air of uncertainty is certainly going to drive our economy backwards and it's certainly providing significant nervousness in rural New Zealand. So I'd urge the Government to move in that area. I just wanted to talk very quickly about the tree situation in respect of that as well because we've got a situation in rural New Zealand where trees are being planted about as quick as they can be bred actually—in fact probably they're not going to get bred quick enough to plant the trees that are wanting to be planted. I think that there's some issues with that and I know the Government's aware of those issues but I think the real problem for us is where there are going to be trees planted and there will be large tracts of them planted that will never be harvested because they'll never be economic to harvest. Now some of those trees that are being planted will be economic and they'll do a great job for New Zealand and they'll be planted in the right places but there are some problems with some of that and some inhibitions in the way they can be planted in the right areas. I think we need to seriously consider how that happens moving forward and it's urgent that we do it too because we could see some land use change that we don't want to see and in 25 years' time the country will be paying the price for that because carbon's only—you know basically if the trees aren't cut down its use is going to expire and the trees will effectively rot away. That would be very unfortunate and I don't think they'll revert very easily because pine trees don't have a great impact on the rest of our community. So those are a few things I wanted to touch on. There's other things going on in our community which I think are pretty positive but there is that air of nervousness that I think the Government needs to move quickly to get over. I think that a lot of the issues that are included in the Supplementary Estimates papers are issues that are sort of unknown and are things that we need to get on top of quite quickly so I urge the Government to get on with that. And that's my words on the bill. Madam Speaker thank you. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I understand this is a split call. Dr Deborah Russell you have five minutes.