Graham Kennedy: Questions for Oral Answer — Questions to MinistersText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGraham Kennedy: Questions for Oral Answer — Questions to Ministers[Sitting date: 11 February 2014. Volume:696;Page:15754. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]8.Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green) to theMinister for Climate Change Issues: Is his Government’s emissions trading scheme working given hundreds of thousands of seedlings are being destroyed across the country due to the collapsed carbon price?Hon TIM GROSER (Minister for Climate Change Issues): Yes. Forestry is a cyclical business. In the 4-year period from the start of this Government the sales of tree stocks in this country increased relentlessly from 41 million tree seedlings to 72.5 million tree seedlings in 2012. We are expecting the figures when they come out for the calendar year 2013 to show a correction on that. So the market has turned and people who overstocked may have been caught out by it. Let us hope that they made excellent money during the 4 good years preceding it. Markets go up; markets come down.Dr Kennedy Graham: How can you say the emissions trading scheme is working when Graeme Dodds of Leithfield Nursery in Southland has been forced to destroy 700000 pine tree seedlings as part of this so-called cyclical industry losing tens of thousands of dollars in the process because of a carbon price collapse—going up and down?Hon TIM GROSER: Well I am very sorry for the company concerned and I just hope that he gets his projections right in the future and that he does not overstock. The same has happened to many other people stocking many other products—looking at a rising trend and just making the wrong assumption: it is going to go up; it will never come down.Dr Kennedy Graham: Will he also say sorry to and is he equally concerned about Robin Appleton of Appleton’s Nursery in Nelson who had to kill off 300000 Douglas fir seedlings which were grown in anticipation of not an up and down emissions trading scheme but a stable and efficient emissions trading scheme?Hon TIM GROSER: I would make exactly the same comment about that company too. But there is an assumption underlying this whole range of questions that is fundamentally wrong and that is that people plant trees only for carbon. People have planted trees in our country for generations before anyone had heard of Kyoto and carbon prices. And log prices which I think that people should take into account when making decisions with a 27-year horizon in front of them increased by a phenomenal 20 or 30 percent. I think it went from something like $140 to $180 per cubic metre in December 2011 to around $180 to $206 per cubic metre a year later. So people should look at the two reasons you plant trees not just carbon prices. I think it is extremely unlikely that in 27 years carbon prices—which have got nothing to do with the NewZealand emissions trading scheme; they are all influenced by the international price—will be sitting around the current extraordinarily low levels.Dr Kennedy Graham: Will he move to strengthen New Zealand’s emissions trading scheme to ensure a higher price on carbon in light of a planned $600 million claim against his Government from the Climate Change Iwi Leadership Group which actually does plant for carbon because of value lost on their forests under the current failed scheme?Hon TIM GROSER: We are not going to intervene to put a fixed price on carbon which would merely transfer assets and resources from some of the people in those iwi who are farmers who own businesses and who pay their electricity bills. You know what the policy is. We are going to stick with our current policy.