McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): It's a pleasure to take a call on this bill with a very long name. I think interestingly we supported this bill at the first reading. It's come back to the House in exactly the form it left the House—to go to the select committee—which is very unusual. So it's quite difficult to manufacture a long speech on a bill that's come back having spoken on it at the first reading; the bill has come back to the second reading in exactly the same form. The Minister just explained very well what this bill does but I guess the issue that I want to talk about really is—the fact that we've had to bring this bill back to the House points to the very complicated nature of the emissions trading scheme (ETS) and our response to climate change initiatives in New Zealand and the challenges that some of our response is going to create as a result of the legislation we put in place. And I'm not criticising that legislation because I guess we're in uncharted territory to a large extent. We're the only country in the world that really only has one mitigating factor in our emissions trading scheme and that is the sequestration of carbon by trees and I'm not arguing with that—Simeon Brown: What about mangroves?IAN McKELVIE: Yeah. We could have—we could have dandelions and all sorts of things as well Simeon. But I'm not arguing with that because I think in New Zealand's circumstances we've gone down that path and I think that having gone there we need to stick to it and we need to make it work for New Zealand as best we can. So having gone down that path it's a great shame that in the early days of this discussion—and I think that would take us back at least 10 years—we didn't get to a point where we had a plan and a road map as to how we intended to use trees for example to manage our climate change challenges and to manage the ETS. So this bill is one little feature of the myriad of issues that arise as a result of our management of the emissions trading scheme and of our challenges around climate change.So the Minister explained very well what happens in this situation. And the simple essence of the reason for this bill is that there's a myriad of small land owners in New Zealand—and these are foresters affected by this bill—what are termed small holdings" or "small forests" basically. Interestingly the value of those small forests is quite significant if you put it into carbon form—and in fact even on recent log prices quite valuable from a log perspective as well. So what can happen is that those trees can be either inadvertently cut down and the land sold to another purchaser and I've seen a number of these cases—that purchaser not knowing there was a liability around those trees that have been cut down or disappeared or harvested; and consequently is facing this liability. Now that's a challenge that's always going to exist; this bill won't change that. But this bill does give those landowners and those forest owners who find themselves in those circumstances longer to manage the liability—and it also I guess manages the liability as well to some extent because the penalties were set at three times the current carbon price effectively. So the penalties would be very significant under the current legislation and the need for the extension to that changes the liability on that and certainly improves the situation. So there are some other challenges in this area as well and we've seen just recently where the Ministry for Primary Industries have got a massive backlog of applicants wanting to register for the ETS there's significant backlogs there and—oh! I just about knocked the glass over. I suppose you could argue that that backlog and the fact that those applicants have been delayed and enter another stage of the emissions trading scheme—effectively that's taking credits out of the marketplace for a certain time and the fact that you've taken units out of the marketplace you could argue that it's forcing the price: a higher price for the unit seller in the marketplace and more cost to the cost of living price indexes and all of those sorts of things. Because the application of the ETS effectively will increase the price of a whole lot of things that we either consume—and the most obvious ones of those are fuel and also electricity. So having delays in these processes affects that and the reason I raise that is because this bill is just one of those many responses that we're going to have to negotiate our way through the future of this very challenging situation. So we set out as I said earlier on a pathway to include sequestration of trees in our ETS. We set out on that pathway but we didn't ever put a plan in place initially as to how we would manage that process. The Government in recent times has been struggling with this very issue and have proposed a number of initiatives which so far haven't found a home. The great danger of this as we try to manage our way through this process is that we certainly don't want to undermine the ETS we don't want to undermine our response to climate change we don't want to undermine our international liabilities and we don't want to undermine our credibility in the international marketplace. So there's some very big challenges for New Zealand in this sector quite apart from this bill. The other matter about this bill is that it does line us up with those few countries in this world that have a similar process in place and it's very important that we line up our climate change initiatives with international best practice because if we ever do branch out in New Zealand and take our response to the international marketplace that will allow us to fit into that international marketplace easily. So it's important that we get these things right.So I said when I started speaking that there was very little for me to talk about because the bill didn't change as it went from the first reading to the committee and then back to the second reading and it hasn't changed at all. So as the Minister said there was one submission and it wasn't relevant. But the reason there was no need for a long select committee stage or for change at the select committee stage was that the department had done a very good job of consulting on this in the first place. It is a relatively simple matter but none the less they've done a good job on consulting with it and as a result of that the bill came to the House in the shape it needed to be in—a simple bill—and went to the select committee stage and came back to the House still in that stage. And I very much doubt—despite the optimism of the Minister—that the committee stage will take very long. I probably can't add any more than that; I'll probably talk for far too long on far too little—ha ha! Thank you."