Ardern Shane: Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Ardern Shane: Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 18 November 2009. Volume:659;Page:7801. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
SHANE ARDERN (National—Taranaki - King Country) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of the National Party in opposition to the Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill. It was interesting to listen to the member who has just resumed her seat Catherine Delahunty talk about the tragedy—and I agree entirely with her that it is a tragedy—of the clear-felling of indigenous rainforest on the scale that has taken place internationally. I absolutely agree that it is unsustainable and that it should not be allowed to continue. But to introduce a layer of compliance on our forestry sector the one sector that can help New Zealand with its greenhouse gas position is beyond comprehension. 
I say to the member who brought this bill to the House that when she uses terms like “the denuded Hauraki Plains” and in the same speech uses comments like “this is about the environment and the people” there is something that she is missing out of the equation in this debate. It is that the triple bottom line is just that; it is social economic and environmental considerations. If the Hauraki Plains were put back into native forest the economic production that comes out of that area would be missing from the equation and that would make New Zealand less sustainable. The export loss we would have from that area would be amazing. 
I have to ask the Green Party to be consistent in what it brings forward. I admire the fact that the Green members are champions of environmental debate and I think that is worthwhile in this Parliament. To farmers the concept that we should leave our land in better condition than we found it in is absolutely ingrained in us. I find it offensive that those who do not plant trees do not invest their capital and do not have an active role to play in environmental enhancement or sustainability and who have an urban lifestyle and enjoy all the trappings of urbanisation travel the world to conferences expending huge amounts of fossil fuels in doing so. Then when they come back to New Zealand they say to the foresters of New Zealand that they want them to meet a whole layer of compliance because they want to save the rainforests on the other side of the world. That is not the approach we should take. 
I say to Ms Delahunty and the Green Party that we have international agreements through the World Trade Organization (WTO). We do not use them as excuses; we negotiate each agreement. I was recently at a conference in Africa. If members want to see a place that is denuded and that could benefit enormously from some of the agricultural policies that we employ in New Zealand they should visit Tanzania. That is what I invite the member to do. I invite her to go and ask the people there what they think of the notion that further compliance should be placed on them to develop things like a forestry industry or an agricultural industry and then come back to me to tell me how that works. We negotiate within the WTO; that is not an excuse. I invite members to listen to the discussion at those conferences on issues of global climate change and economic change and on some of the tragedy of experiments that have been carried out there both by the West and by African Governments themselves. If they then come back and say the WTO process is not the process that we should be signed up to then I am sorry but we will have to agree to disagree. We should look at the tariffs that those countries pay to get their exports into wealthy Western nations. New Zealand is by and large successful—well above its weight—in its ability to export into some of those nations because we have always continued to carry the argument in support of free trade around the world sometimes at huge cost to ourselves. That is the best thing we can do for small undeveloped Third World countries and large continents like the African continent. 
We oppose this bill on that basis and I look forward to further debate as we move through this process.