van de Molen TimTIM VAN DE MOLEN (National—Waikato): Thank you Madam Chair. Thank you. I just wanted to come back to my earlier question the Minister hadn't addressed yet either in relation to his comments around the need to progress this change back in 2018 I believe it was with haste to ensure that the appropriate changes could be made before the Trans-Pacific Partnership came into being.Hon David Parker: Comprehensive and Progressive.TIM VAN DE MOLEN: And yes with the additional letters that the Government chose to add to embellish it somewhat and try and sell it better to the public having opposed it very vehemently over the previous campaign election up and down streets across New Zealand. But I digress somewhat. Anyway the extra letters and suddenly it was all OK.So I'm interested in whether or not there are any other land uses that have potentially been impacted in his mind—or could be impacted—by not having been put through the same process that he was very actively keen to put forestry through and whether that's something that we need to be addressing under this or potentially in a future iteration as well.Then I just wanted to pick up on the comments from the forestry Minister as he came in with his contribution as well. Because I thought it was quite interesting that he was a strong fierce lion in support of maintaining property rights for agricultural purposes and yet four years ago was nowhere to be seen when New Zealand First were advocating for this particular bill.I think it's really important because I've heard consistently from a lot of farmers who have been very concerned by the impact that this has had. And the Minister made the comment that we haven't yet seen a level of afforestation at a level in line with the deforestation that happened over the previous decade.I'm interested to know whether he is setting that as a benchmark; that he wants to see that same number of hectares converted back into forestry before he will be satisfied that we might make changes that bring the tests to a comparable level for agricultural land and also for the forestry land as well. I'll leave it there for now. Thank you.Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): I'm sure many members present will join with me in saying that they miss the provincial champion and the billion trees that he promised.I actually agreed with some of the reasoning of New Zealand First at the time. They observed that the forest industry had suffered quite a lot of uncertainty in the prior years caused in part by some rapid changes to the price of carbon which at times discouraged and then encouraged deforestation. Because the price of carbon—when it dropped to $2 a tonne—saw lots of people chopping down their forests at a time when they could do it very cheaply including through purchasing if they wanted to Ukrainian hot air units that were admissible at the time into the New Zealand emissions trading scheme. So New Zealand First were concerned that whilst we introduced forestry registration rights into the screening regime that we didn't disrupt the forestry sector and that's one of the reasons why. Although they agreed for the green forest registration rights into the scheme they wanted an easy regulatory path.Are there other areas that we see the need to change regulation on? No we did urgently—one of the reasons we opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership when the prior Government was promoting it was that they were refusing to move on overseas ownership of New Zealand homes which if we hadn't moved on before the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership came into effect no future Government would have had the regulatory space to control overseas ownership in New Zealand housing stock which is something that we fixed at the time.