Stanford EricaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Mr Chair. I'm pleased to take a call at the committee stage of the zero carbon bill. I'd just like to start by saying that I'm going to be talking about one particular Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) amendment today. But before I do so I just want to give a little bit of background to some of the Supplementary Order Papers that we'll be debating today. For the most part—and I think the Minister in the chair James Shaw will agree—there was very good cross-party consultation that went on between Mr Todd Muller and the Hon James Shaw for the most part of a year. I think even the Minister will agree that it was unfortunate that there was a period of silence before the bill was introduced to the House and I know that the Minister apologised for that. Notwithstanding it did mean that there were some things in the bill that were unexpected that we hadn't discussed and that we weren't ready for. I think it would also be fair to say that in the Environment Committee National Party members were in disagreement with some parts of the bill. There were changes we wanted to make but obviously we didn't have the numbers and we weren't able to do that. So here we are at the committee stage and we have a number of Supplementary Order Papers that we will be speaking to today.The first one that I want to talk about SOP 404 is in the name of Todd Muller. In clause 8 after new section 5ZI we insert 5ZIA Review of … forestry assets". This amendment comes from the many submissions that we had around the rapid buy up of farmland and whole-of-farm conversion to forestry.I want to talk about one particular submission that relates to this SOP that I'm going to be debating and it was from 50 Shades of Green. They had a concern around monocrop planting of pine trees on fertile land. They talked about the 30000 hectares that have been planted in pine alone this year on the East Coast. They spoke about the Overseas Investment Office changes which have been smoothing the pathway for overseas companies to purchase land for forestry. We've all seen reports in the media of the amount of farms that have been purchased by overseas companies and turned into pine forests. He spoke of farms in his area that were completely locked by forestry. He spoke about a tipping point in rural communities where there are only 20 to 30 kids left in schools which means that closures are potentially imminent and the nearest school is 50 to 60 kilometres away. He spoke about the decimating of rural communities the pressure on farmers and the attractiveness of the price that farmers were being offered—up to 25 percent above normal market value—and sales to what they call "carbon cowboys" which has led to sales of tens of thousands of hectares now planted in pine.He spoke specifically—and this is the bit where he was very emotional and cracked up—and said that they had recently lost 15 families in Pongaroa. That's massive for a small community. With this in mind our amendment—section 5ZIA(2)(a)—talks to the monitoring of the commission. And we would like to see that the commission must consider "the social economic cultural and environmental impact of activities undertaken for the purposes of generating offsets from removals from land use land use change and the forestry sector;". And given Shane Jones' answers in the House today and the complete I would say misunderstanding of how the rising price of carbon credits will affect the increase of whole-farm conversions this amendment is very important. Moving on to section 5ZIA(2)(b) we heard from many submitters about the monoterpenes that are released from pine trees. I have to say I'm not a scientist but we did hear this from many submitters and they talked about how this gas interacts with methane in the atmosphere and potentially makes the warming effect of methane far greater. Subsection 2(b) would require the Climate Commission to consider scientific and technical research into the warming and cooling impact of pine forests. So given the amount of submitters that we had who were concerned about that we wanted to insert that into the new section.And finally in section 5ZIA(2)(c) the commission must consider the degree to which offsets from land use change and the planting of pine forests reduce any incentives created by the 2050 target for the New Zealand economy to transition away from fossil fuels. Now this is a very big and important point. I mentioned in my speech yesterday one of the comments from the submitters. One of the comments in particular stayed with me from one of the submitters. She said "Why should the polluters continue to pollute and transfer their dirty problem to the agricultural sector by having rural communities destroyed by the mass planting of pine trees?" The National Party position is that we are concerned about the level of planting required and what that will mean for dirty polluters to actually change their behaviour and not just continue to offset that with planting. And as the Minister knows I'm sure the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment shared our concerns and he prepared a number of papers that I'm sure the Minister has read. But he noted that it was a key concern for him—that is the absolute absence of any effective mechanism for managing the risks of forestry and in particular that they may be overused at the expense of achieving reductions in gross emissions. And the risk of the relative impermanence means they will not actually provide the climate mitigation hoped for. He went on to say that in his opinion these risks were serious and would fundamentally compromise the purpose of the framework. Now we heard from a lot of submitters in this area. We share their concerns. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment shares our concern as well which is why we believe that this section 5ZIA(2)(c)—the amendment—is so very important in that the commission must consider the degree to which these offsets are going to potentially not change the behaviour of our big emitters. As I said earlier many of them were saying especially the farmers it is not fair for companies to continue to pollute continue to emit and just transfer that problem to the rural sector. And so that is why we've popped that provision in there. I've got a number of other Supplementary Order Papers that I will speak to. But I'll leave that one there so that my colleague Mr Scott Simpson I think can have a go."