Simpson ScottHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you Madam Chair. Well look the previous member who was just speaking must have been reading my mind because that's essentially the subject that I wanted to raise with the Minister and that's the general principle of forestry offsets. Mark Patterson has raised I think a reasonable point in that at select committee when we were discussing offsets and forestry offsets more generally—and there's quite a lot in this bill relating to what's affectionately referred to as P90 offsetting land—there was some very genuine concern raised by some of the carbon farming organisations as Mark Patterson has raised.So I'm keen to tease out from the Minister just why he's taken a policy position not to explore at this point in time the proposal put to the select committee for instance by New Zealand Carbon Farming Group who made some pretty generous offers in terms of being able to use finance that had been generated through offset funding for instance when a company—just for an example maybe Air New Zealand. If the Minister was to tick the right box when he purchases his Air New Zealand ticket he can claim or pay an offset fee. Those offset fees get collected somewhere and eventually get used to plant a tree somewhere. That's essentially where organisations such as Mark Patterson has been talking about derive their income stream.So they're not interested in a plantation forest. They're interested in using that offset money that has been raised. One could argue about the merits of raising funds like that and the potential for essentially trying to buy your way out of sin in terms of carbon emissions but the situation exists where those funds are available and companies like the New Zealand Carbon Farming group and others have funds to invest they want to plant native trees primarily on land that is not productive pastoral land—on frankly what we would call pretty scrubby maybe stewardship-type land; non-productive land. I think that just on the face of it if nothing else there is some merit in the proposals that they have put forward. Yet in this bill there is no provision for that type of modelling to occur.The second point I just want to raise while I'm on my feet at this point relates to the general principle of offsetting. Really if there's a matter in this legislation that is not comprehensively addressed it is that matter. I'd like to have an indication of how the Minister sees that debate and that policy discussion being brought to light particularly in terms of what I thought was a very thoughtful and good and well-considered report released in March of last year by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment the Hon—I think he might be even the Rt Hon Simon Upton. He argues in that document at some length that essentially the current approach of reducing climate change for countries like New Zealand relies very heavily on the planting of trees. But if you follow that logic to its natural conclusion without change to emissions creations sooner or later you run out of land to plant trees on no matter how big the landmass is. So that's not a long-term sustainable proposition in terms of eventually sending the right messages about a transition to a low-carbon economy over a time frame.In fact Simon Upton argues that by allowing offsets in the way that we do in this legislation arguably we are actually delaying the kind of change that the Minister's looking for. When we were talking before the dinner break about the high-emitting industries and the industrial allocations that argument can be extended to other emitters who find by simply offering their customers or paying themselves for offsets they don't make a change but go to bed at night feeling they've done good because a nice native tree has been planted somewhere in New Zealand. So I'm interested to hear the Minister's views on that in relation to this bill.