Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. I'm pleased to take a short call on the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill. The scale of illegal logging internationally is enormous. It's doing immense damage to forests to plants to wildlife to indigenous communities who depend on and live in those forests to rivers to streams to wetlands and to the climate by destroying the planet's lungs and the web of life which sustains us.In 2021 just 9 percent of the world's natural forests remained intact. So we need to be much more ambitious in protecting what remains from the scourge of deforestation illegal logging and other activities like illegal mining and the ecological collapse that goes with that.It's also because the proceeds of illegal logging support criminal activity political corruption and they strip indigenous communities of both their livelihoods and their rights. As Mark Cameron noted the scale of the international trade is billions of dollars annually.So this bill is well-intentioned but it's inadequate given the scale of the crisis and the scale of action that's needed. Where you have illegal logging like illegal mining short-term profits tend to trump everything else and you see some of the worst aspects of human behaviour and human exploitation of nature and a total failure to recognise the fragility of the web of life and our dependence on nature.The Green Party is supporting this bill because it does improve on the status quo but it could be so much better. It would have been much better if it had tackled the other commodities which lead to illegal logging and deforestation; not just wood and timber products but things like cocoa palm kernel expeller (PKE) chocolate palm kernel palm oil—all of these products which also lead to illegal logging.The bill certainly does provide a legal harvest assurance system for the forestry and the wood processing sector. It helps safeguard exports from Aotearoa New Zealand enables market access and protects our reputation as a safe trading partner. But that is just for imported timber and wood products.It does take steps to improve the integrity of the supply chain but this bill was promised 18 years ago by former forest Minister the Hon Pete Hodgson. The Green Party is disappointed that the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) did not use the intervening 18 years to have a system that is more like the European Union—with recent regulations there which cover a much wider variety of forest products—and that we are stuck with something that just deals with timber and wood products.Given that Aotearoa New Zealand is the world's largest importer of palm kernel expeller—around 2 million tonnes annually to feed dairy cows and agricultural intensification—if this bill had dealt with palm oil and PKE we would be contributing significantly to avoiding deforestation and protecting the original forest cover which is burnt and logged in order to establish palm oil plantations and the breach of the human rights of the indigenous communities that that involves. If this bill had been more ambitious it would really help protect that habitats of orang-utans tigers and elephants and it would really help to reduce climate pollution and protect the lungs of the world in the forests of the Amazon and South-east Asia. It's really disappointing that the EU's efforts since 2013 did not inspire MPI to provide much more ambitious advice and legislation. So there's a shortcoming with the limited range of commodities—only wood and timber—that it applies to. It's also got a very narrow definition of what is legal which relies on the concept of legal harvest" and requires logging companies to comply with the national laws. That's problematic because in countries like Brazil and Indonesia we've had significant deforestation which has been seen to be legal in terms of the national laws of those countries.As Greenpeace Aotearoa noted in their submission the Indonesian Government scheme for wood and logging "ignores international laws and agreements such as CITES [and the] International Labour Organization and [it] does not deal"—really fundamentally—"with the illegal trade of wood and wood products." The Indonesian Government has undertaken very few prosecutions against businesses operating illegally in the forest estate even when well-resourced organisations like Greenpeace International are reporting those breaches.Also the wood that complies with the Indonesian Government's regime is OK to be imported into New Zealand. So that very narrow definition of "legal harvest" which relies on national laws is too limited. We would have preferred to have seen a much more comprehensive standard where legality included a requirement that the rights of indigenous peoples were honoured and that their consent and the consent of local communities was obtained before any logging occurred.There's also no full traceability for wood and timber products because the bill focuses on "legal harvest" and doesn't really recognise that the timber supply chain often involves the mixing of illegally logged wood with legally harvested wood. It relies quite heavily on international schemes such as the Forest Stewardship Council which doesn't require full traceability of products in the timber supply chain.So as Grant Rosoman from Greenpeace says—and I quote—"The bill will have a very limited impact" because of its narrow scope and these shortcomings and because 80 to 90 percent of the imported timber trade in New Zealand is already providing evidence of legality and sustainability through the requirements of the international tropical timber group. So there's some added value because it refers to "specified timber products" which potentially includes things like paper and tissue but it's not clear in the bill what those specified timber products are.We need stronger more ambitious legislation. We need more Green MPs because the Green Party hasn't got the numbers to have a permanent member on the Primary Production Committee. This legislation could have been more ambitious and really tackled the issue of forest deforestation by focusing not just on wood and timber but also the range of other products like palm kernel expeller and palm oil. So the Green Party is supporting it but it is an opportunity lost."