McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): I was quite quick to my feet on that occasion. This bill I'm not going to be vehemently critical of it because I think everything that's brought to this House is brought with good intention. But none the less I'm not going to say we're going to support it either and we're not going to. There are some parts of this bill that I think like many bills that come to the House have a little bit of logic to them depending on how they're handled as we move down the track. Clearly I think the registration of people who operate in the sector has some value to the sector and probably to those people who grow and participate in the forestry industry right from the processing sector back to the person who plants the trees. Of course the most important person in the whole of this process is the person who owns the land that the trees are planted on and as we've seen with some of the decisions made during the COVID lockdown if you don't give confidence to foresters and people who plant crops to plant those crops they won't plant them and that will create distortions in the market and all sorts of shortages. One of the problems with this bill I think is that it's imposing—or it has the potential to impose because we don't know what it's going to impose—a regime on the industry which may well suppress prices. If those people planting trees don't have confidence in where they're going at the time of planting—and we've seen that on a number of occasions in the last 30 years with the forestry sector in New Zealand where they've lost confidence in the ability to get a return from planting trees because of various decisions of Government—that puts significant challenges in front of them and dents their confidence. The point is: they don't plant trees as a result of it. I think that the potential for this legislation to effectively legislate the price of logs down is a significant problem and I think that will worry forest growers. I do accept the Minister's point that there are really three different types of forestry owners in New Zealand. There are the big multinationals and it's all very well for us to attack big multinationals but one of the challenges that I'll get to in a minute is this sector like many others in our primary sector is desperately short of capital. There would be ways you could free that up which I'll talk about in a moment. So I think that the part of this legislation that sets up the forestry authority and that gives that authority the opportunity to effectively register logging exporters and consultants in the industry and people who participate in the advisory service in the industry isn't altogether bad and probably has a place. It could've probably been handled by the industry itself and from my understanding of the Minister's answer in the committee stage that may well be how that bit of the bill works. The problem for us is absolutely the regulations and the fact we have no confidence in those regulations. I think the fact that over 600 people submitted to this thing—and I don't know how many submissions or emails we got as individual members of Parliament but it was massively significant; it was of the proportions that I've never seen in a bill like this before actually so someone got very active. But over 600 people submitted to the Environment Committee on this bill—11 in favour. I'd lay odds that of those 11 that were in favour at the time at least half of them are no longer in favour. I have talked to a number of those and there's no doubt they are no longer in favour of this because they are very nervous about the way it might manage the thing. Now if you look at the industry and if you look at the industry in my part of New Zealand—I have a pulp mill I have a fairly large sawmill I have a very large sector of forestry in the Rangitīkei electorate and I have two big roundwood producers and one big roundwood producer right next door in Nathan Guy's electorate. The roundwood producers are the ones that are challenged for wood actually in my part of the world not the sawmills and the pulp mills. The reason they're challenged for wood is because they want a type of log that's not economic to produce. In other words they really want you to grow a tree to about 18 years and chop it down just when it's putting it's—I probably shouldn't be trying to explain something that's biological but trees put on a whole lot more weight as they get bigger like I tend to actually. They grow much faster towards the end of their life and the end of their useful life for a pine tree is about 30 years. After 30 years they start to get lighter for exactly the same reason that we start to get lighter—the calcium in their bones starts to disappear and they get smaller and smaller! Well they don't get smaller but the wood doesn't weigh as much.So what happens with the roundwood suppliers is they cannot get a supply of roundwood because it's not economic for a forester to effectively grow that wood specifically for them. Now some of the roundwood operators—and they're pretty big operators in New Zealand now. You only have to look at the growth of horticulture and pipfruit industry and certainly the growth of development around the country in the form of roads and things like that and the amount of roundwood that's just used on the side of a road for example—it's massive. So there's a very big industry in New Zealand. They're challenged because there's only a certain amount of roundwood or potential roundwood that comes out of a forest when it's milled or cut for export at maturity. So that's the challenge that is faced in my part of the world. This bill won't overcome that because effectively it's got to encourage the foresters to grow wood that they can afford to sell to those people at a price that's economic for them to grow it. So that's one of the big challenges. The other challenge I think that this bill doesn't address and that would solve some of the problems that the Minister has with the processing sector particularly and also to some extent with the harvesting sector is the fact that they're short of capital and there's just not enough capital to develop these industries and to get them going. The reason there's not enough capital is because there's not enough income in. So they can't get the income out of it. So there are other things in New Zealand that need to be changed to enable that capital to be injected into the industry that will give it the equipment they need to compete on the international markets. The reason they can't as I said is because they have not got the capital to do that job properly. There would be other ways of fixing this other than putting in place a bill that creates regulation that the industry right across the board is very nervous about. I don't think it's only the big international forest owners that are nervous about it; it's the people who are planting trees on a daily basis it's the farmers and the farm foresters and it's those New Zealand people who—and a large number of them do—invest in forestry for the future. They're the people that are threatened by a lot of what goes on in a bill like this and worry about it. So I don't want to see for a minute investment in the forestry sector drop off because we put in place a piece of legislation that has the potential to distort the market in the future. That's the reason I think that we oppose this bill. I was not part of the select committee process so I'm probably going to be followed by some people who know more about it than I do. But I do have a lot to do with the industry and I think it's a great industry for New Zealand. I admire the Minister for trying to protect it and trying to fix it but I don't think this is the way to fix it. I think were we to become the Government after the election—and I've counted the days; it's 57¾ days I think it is or something like that until the election's over—we would not pursue the regulations and would likely repeal this piece of legislation. If it was necessary to put in place a piece of legislation to deal with the bits of this bill that I think are useful we would probably do something about it. So we can't support this bill for that reason but I do think the industry is worth the effort that we put into trying to make it work. The very last thing I want to say is—and I have mentioned it already tonight—the moment Governments start to mess around in what effectively is a market situation we almost always get it wrong. We've seen numerous examples of that in the past. So we cause distortions in the market place and I talked about that earlier in my speech. We cause distortions in the market place which create uncertainty which get results that we don't anticipate getting and cause problems for us. Thank you Mr Speaker.