Salesa JennyIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Speaker. I didn't really expect to get to speak on this very good piece of legislation tonight but I will. I thought we might have delayed it a little longer.The Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill has been around for a little while and been before the Primary Production Committee and has now come back to the House. Of course we're making our way through the second reading. As my colleague Joseph Mooney pointed out there's an issue that has arisen which will go back to the select committee and no doubt if there's changes required as a result of that it will come back to the House in the form of a Supplementary Order Paper at committee stage.This bill is a piece of legislation that we need to have in place and the Minister the Hon Stuart Nash outlined it pretty well. We need to have it in place to ensure that we can access I guess a lot of our market places around the world. But we also need to have it in place to protect those people in New Zealand. There's been a very recent case in New Zealand where timber has come into New Zealand under I suppose somewhat dubious circumstances and it's a very good example of why this bill is required both from an exporters' perspective in New Zealand and from an importer's perspective because it also protects them. If you're buying timber in the international market or any form of wood product in the international market you really want to know that when you do that you're buying something that's legally harvested and that you're not going to be questioned about its origin when you get it. And the same thing applies in reverse.So it's really important to the New Zealand industry which is a very big industry in New Zealand now the total wood industry. Of course we export I think in excess of 80 percent of our wood products. Of course very topical I suppose for the last few years is the number of logs going out of New Zealand in one piece. There's a very good reason why those logs go out of New Zealand in one piece of course because our timber industry in New Zealand is only capable of dealing with so much wood and it's only capable of dealing with some forms of wood as well. So there are some grades of logs which we don't have a great deal of use for in New Zealand. And the interesting thing about harvesting a forest is you get every grade of timber whether you like it or not. So you can't harvest a forest and just take your P grade logs or your pulp grade logs. You've got to take the whole lot and so we've got to find a market for those logs. Otherwise it becomes very uneconomic for the tree grower to actually grow a tree at all.So that's the reason why we see so many logs going out through these ports and for those of us who drive up and down the State Highway 1 and go to Tauranga or even Napier or in fact even New Plymouth—if you can get to New Plymouth because the road is so rough going up there now with all those tankers logging trucks etc. going up the road. But that's why we see so many of them going out over the port. It's simply because the industry in New Zealand can't deal with all of those pieces of wood or I suppose you'd call them big pieces of wood of course. So the issue for New Zealand is that we need to protect that industry. We need to ensure that we protect the markets around the world that we want to supply and to do that we need to have this bill in place.There are a couple of other issues about this bill which I think the select committee will also be considering. There's some doubt around the terms as to what is legally harvested and I think the intention of this bill is to preserve the integrity of the product. It's not necessarily the integrity of the ownership structures behind it or anything like that but certainly it's to preserve the integrity of the product the manner in which it's harvested and the manner I guess to ensure the sustainability of it.So there are quite a few issues involved in the background to this bill but the bill is a good one and I think the concern the select committee had at one stage—or that was expressed at the select committee—was around the reasonably significant cost it might impose on the industry. I don't think that's the case although—as I said when I spoke earlier in the night—that will depend on the manner in which the regulations are put together and of course the subsequent costs that are imposed as a result of the enforcement of those regulations. One would only hope that it's not too significant because the bill doesn't require a significant amount of policing to get it to work and get it served. So Madam Speaker I commend the bill to the House and I thank you for the opportunity to speak on it. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): This debate is interrupted and is set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow. Pō mārie. Debate interrupted.The House adjourned at 9.59 p.m.