McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Madam Speaker. Well what goes around comes around. Anyway I'll get back to the bill: the Overseas Investment (Forestry) Amendment Bill. I was thinking what goes round comes around all right. Anyway the National Party will support this bill to select committee and we do it because I think that—and I'll get into the reasons why we're doing it shortly. But I'll also get into the reasons why the bill came about in the first place and why it's caused the problems it's caused. It effectively amends as the Minister said the Overseas Investment Act 2005 to ensure that overseas investment that results in the conversion of farmland or other land to forestry benefits New Zealand and I guess that's really key to any foreign investment or overseas investment in New Zealand—it's important that it benefits New Zealand. And I think that in this case we've seen some—as we often do with Government interference in processes and industry and businesses—extraordinary results as a result of that interference. We've had a history of it in this Parliament of interfering in things—particularly related to land interestingly. If you go back to a particular Government of some many years ago—only one or two of us will remember it—supplementary minimum prices were introduced for example and distorted the land in New Zealand and in fact caused a lot of the problems that interestingly we're seeing up the East Coast with respect to forestry. And then we saw the Dairy Industry Restructuring Act come along and it did the same thing: it distorted the land use in New Zealand. We've seen this bill or the results of what I'll get into in a moment come along and now to some extent a potentially distorting land use in New Zealand. And I think that's the real challenge. But we've got to be very careful as a Parliament that whenever we introduce things or I guess get involved in business—and one could think of the supermarket business for example—whenever we get involved in those sorts of things we run a very serious risk of creating situations that we don't envisage at the time.I want to talk for a minute about a bloke who used to sit over in that corner over there and espouse the billion tree programme at length in this House day after day. And when you think about that billion tree programme and of course this piece of legislation that effectively has now been to some extent repealed evolved from the thought that the Government of the time had that there was a need to encourage overseas investment in New Zealand forestry to get our trees planted. Interestingly right now in New Zealand nearly 80 percent of our forestry is owned by overseas investors and actually if you think about what's going on in the industry right at this moment it's actually a very good thing because they have realised their responsibility to New Zealand on the whole and I think they're doing an outstanding job. But they also give some stability to the harvesting sector which if it weren't for those large corporates owning large pieces of forestry in New Zealand we wouldn't have that stability—or any stability—around harvesting. And we've seen very big changes in price in the forestry sector in the last six months come and go very quickly and of course the fuel crisis and the transport crisis right now or—I wouldn't say it's a crisis—the large price hikes are causing significant challenges for the forestry sector right now with respect to export and the way that we harvest our trees and the way we operate with respect to the export of timber. And just interesting while I'm on that topic the very interesting thing is that if we didn't have that very large export potential or capacity in our log situation we wouldn't have enough logs harvested to provide New Zealand with its own timber because only about a third of those trees effectively stays in New Zealand; two-thirds gets exported. That's around about how it works. We keep the best logs in New Zealand because they're the ones we need. If it wasn't for that the forestry industry itself wouldn't be able to continue to harvest. Anyway back to the real point of the bill. You see the Government at the time thought we had no ability—they thought at the time we need to plant a billion trees and we need to encourage the planting of those trees. What they didn't think of was that we had no ability to grow the seedlings we had no people to plant the trees we potentially had no capital to plant the trees with and we potentially also had no land to plant those trees on. Hence this Act was changed to allow foreign investment pretty much willy-nilly in New Zealand to plant trees. They could buy a large piece of land—weren't allowed to live in the house interestingly but they were allowed to buy the land. So they had to subdivide the house off and get rid of it because they weren't allowed to live there but they were allowed to own the land and plant the trees. So it was an extraordinary piece of legislation when you think about the results. As I said earlier it's very easy to think about things in hindsight because things change very quickly. Of course I guess you could have anticipated what would happen as a result of this very large investment being made in New Zealand by potentially overseas investors—not necessarily for the betterment of the forestry industry in New Zealand though. Because effectively they had the ability to come into New Zealand plant vast areas of trees and there was no guarantee—even though the overseas investment rules the conditions were that they should be for harvest those trees—long term that would happen. That's the real problem with it. And so what could have happened was they could have come into New Zealand effectively purchased the land planted the trees taken the income from the carbon and shoved it into their tax haven wherever it was around the world and that would be the last we'd ever see of them. That's the real threat that I guess was occurring in New Zealand and it's the reason the Government has acted in this respect to try and tidy that situation up. I very much doubt that it will effectively tidy it up because I think there will be more action needed to achieve that than has already happened. So I just want to talk for a moment about the forestry industry though because it is a very important industry to New Zealand and whatever we do with respect to legislation it's very important that we don't get involved in I guess distorting the way forestry is managed planted—even owned—in New Zealand. Because it's a hugely important industry to New Zealand and I think in my maiden speech to Parliament I was accused by the industry of saying you can't eat trees. Well I think we will be eating trees shortly and I think it's going to be very interesting because I think the potential for this industry is massive and it would be a great tragedy if we ended up with a whole lot of trees locked up because of the carbon situation—if we had trees locked up that weren't harvested in the long term. That would be not at all good for New Zealand and I guess to some extent this bill is attempting to address some of that challenge. The other thing that intrigues me about the forestry industry and the potential for trees is we've seen massive changes in harvesting methods in New Zealand in the last 10 years and I think that the next 10 years will see that incrementally grow and I think we'll be harvesting trees in 20 or 30 years' time that we don't envisage at the moment will ever be harvested. So I think that's another factor that's very important when it comes to who owns these trees where they're planted and how they're planted. So I think that improvements in technology and all that sort of stuff are so dramatic in this sector that I think we're going to see a great change in the way those things are used. I think we'll also see a lot of change in the way the complete tree is taken out of the forest whether it's processed on site or taken away to be processed. I think we'll see a massive change in that respect. So back to the bill. I do think that this bill will be interesting as it goes through the discussion of the select committee. I guess just the last thing I want to say about the Overseas Investment Act is that we've listened for a long long time in this Parliament to members of this Government or in Opposition absolutely criticising and attacking this piece of legislation every way they could. It's ironic that they've now got the bill or put the legislation in place where they've got to now start repealing some of the stuff they were totally opposed to 10 years ago themselves. Really interesting times but that's what happens when you're I guess around here too long. So Madam Speaker we commend the bill to the House.