Sage Eugenie: General DebateText is subject to correctionSage Eugenie: General Debate[Sitting date: 17 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4499. Text is subject to correction.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):You cannot have a healthy population unless you have a healthy environment and the National Government’s hands-behind-its-back approach to the logging and mining of swamp kauri in Northland is all about promoting an unhealthy environment of extracting the maximum commercial advantage from nature without any care about the consequences. It is really State-sponsored negligence by both the Government and the Ministry for Primary Industries in allowing quite blatant breaches of the Forests Act and the illegal export of these ancient kauri logs which can be tens of thousands of years old. The Forests Act 1949 was amended in 1993 after a long campaign by the public to protect indigenous forests. It was amended to ensure quite strict controls on the export of indigenous timber and timber products and there are prohibitions in the Forests Act on the export of indigenous timber unless it is in a manufactured or finished form. Those controls were put in place to recognise that our indigenous forests whether they are standing trees or whether they are buried in wetlands in Northland are finite that they are vulnerable to overexploitation if the timber can be exported and a larger market created and that they should be carefully managed because of their value to Aotearoa New Zealand.Some of these trees would have fallen at the end of the last Ice Age. They have remained buried in wetlands. Some of them are fairly intact because they are not exposed to the air. They have got a value as taonga as Dover Samuels and others have called them and yet under this Government the Ministry for Primary Industries is turning a blind eye to the export of whole ancient kauri logs. That is because ancient swamp kauri has a reputation as being one of the oldest timbers able to be worked in the world and it has got a huge value in places like China where it can sell for anything between $2000 and $10000 a cubic metre. So what we have seen is a gold rush mentality over the last decade because of these very high prices for the timber and that has led to industrial-scale mining of the buried kauri forest in areas around Dargaville Kaitāia and throughout the north.It is only in Northland that we get these buried kauri forests. They are finite yet the Government is just closing its eyes to the plundering of wetlands and the plundering of these forests. Judith Collins says she does not care about wetlands. That is because her husband’s company Oravida is too interested in taking the swamp kauri from these wetlands. But wetlands have been hugely reduced in New Zealand. We are down to less than 10 percent of their former extent. We should be protecting our wetlands under the Resource Management Act; not having local councils also being irresponsible and allowing them to be dug up with huge bulldozers and earth-moving equipment.It has been the work of citizens in Northland and groups like the Northland Environmental Protection Society and the far north branch of Forest and Bird which has exposed the scandal that is going on here. They have sought numerous requests under the Official Information Act and the work that the Northland Environmental Protection Society has done shows that of the 53 notices of intention to export that were filed with the Ministry for Primary Industries in 2013 81 percent of those notices were missing quite substantial information about the milling statements and the source of the timber. In the Forests Act there is an absolute prohibition on native timber being sourced from indigenous forest land or dug up from wetlands and then being exported. So it is really important that the Ministry for Primary Industries knows the source of the swamp kauri and yet when this information is missing from the notice of export statements how can it know that?The Minister was saying earlier in the House that there is close monitoring yet I understand that the Ministry for Primary Industries often requires only a photograph of the area to be logged or a map. It is not actually sending its staff out on-site to determine where the kauri is coming from. And then we have this prohibition on the export of logs and the export of anything over than finished or manufactured products. Yet what are we finding? On websites like Alibaba there are a number of advertisements for logs. What we are seeing is big planks of swamp kauri that are rough-sawn timber that have had a brief bit of stain applied to them. Those are being exported as table tops. The Ministry for Primary Industries needs to actually enforce the Act and prohibit these log exports.