Thursday, 26 June 2014
Volume 699
Sitting date: 26 June 2014
THURSDAY, 26 JUNE 2014
THURSDAY, 26 JUNE 2014
Mr Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.
Prayers.
Business Statement
Business Statement
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Leader of the House): When the House resumes on Tuesday, 1 July the Government will look to progress the Appropriation (2014/15 Estimates) Bill, the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 2), and a number of other items on the Order Paper.
GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): I just wonder whether the Leader of the House could tell us whether the Government intends to proceed with the Smoke-free Environments (Tobacco Plain Packaging) Amendment Bill before the House rises for the election.
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Leader of the House): The Government is very keen to progress as much legislation as possible. If the member is offering some extraordinary cooperation on that bill, then there is some slim possibility that a place may be found for it.
Questions for Oral Answer
Questions to Ministers
Economy—Tax System and Income Support
1. Dr JIAN YANG (National) to the Minister of Finance: What changes has the Government made in recent years to make the tax system fairer and to help families and businesses get ahead?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Associate Minister of Finance) on behalf of the Minister of Finance: In Budget 2010 the Government introduced across-the-board income tax cuts and better targeting of support programmes such as Working for Families. The package reduced tax on work and savings for every taxpayer and increased taxes on consumption and property speculation. After-tax incomes at all levels of taxable income were immediately increased by more than the increase in GST. Someone on the average wage of around $50,000 at the time was immediately about $15 a week better off as a result of the tax changes, and a family with two children on the average household income of $76,000 in 2010 was about $25 a week better off. The changes also made the tax system fairer. Two-thirds of the cost of the income tax cuts in 2010 went into reducing the bottom two tax rates. So someone earning $48,000 a year now has a top tax rate of 17.5 percent.
Dr Jian Yang: What steps has the Government taken in recent years to ensure property speculators and other investors trading for a profit pay their fair share of tax, and how much is this estimated to have increased Crown revenue?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: The Government has significantly tightened the tax system to ensure property speculators are paying their fair share of tax. Budget 2010, for example, denied depreciation deductions for buildings such as rental housing. It tightened rules for loss attributing qualifying companies. It prevented property investors from using rental losses to inflate their Working for Families eligibility and payments. It also significantly increased the Income Revenue Department’s funding to target property speculators who were avoiding tax. And it removed opportunities for income earners in the top personal tax bracket to claim losses on their property investments. Together these measures are expected to generate at least $2.48 billion in additional revenue over 4 years. That is significantly more than what another capital gains tax full of complexity and exemptions would raise over that period.
Hon David Parker: Has he read Westpac chief economist Dominick Stephen’s analysis that a proposed 15 percent tax on capital gains on investment property excluding the family home would have a significant effect on the net present value of residential property investments, and so would affect new investment decisions; if so, why did his Associate Minister Steven Joyce say on Radio New Zealand National this morning that it would have no effect on the housing market?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: No, I have not read that particular report. But what I do know is that with a growing economy the last thing New Zealand needs is another tax. The electorate knows that as well.
Dr Jian Yang: How significantly do the current income tax and income support systems redistribute incomes for New Zealand households?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: The income tax and income support systems provide a significant amount of income redistribution. For example, Treasury estimates that households earning over $150,000 a year, the top 15 percent of households by income, will pay 49 percent of income tax this year. But when benefit payments, Working for Families, paid parental leave, and accommodation support is taken into account, these 15 percent of households will actually pay 74 percent of net income tax. And that is before New Zealand superannuation is taken into account. By contrast, after accounting for these income support payments, households earning under $60,000 a year, which is just under half of all households, will pay no net income tax at all. That is because the $2.5 billion worth of income tax they are expected to pay this year will be more than offset by the $7.3 billion they will receive in income support.
Dr Jian Yang: What reports has he received on the proposal for an additional capital gains tax in New Zealand?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: It is worth noting that investors buying and selling assets for the purpose of making a profit are already taxed on their gains. I have seen reports about a proposal for an additional capital gains tax that would apply to every business and every farm in New Zealand, but only a quarter of the housing market. It would be full of exemptions for things like the family home, personal assets, collectables, small business assets sold for retirement, and payments from retirement savings schemes. However, nowhere does the documentation supporting this policy set out exemptions for KiwiSaver funds, which currently do not pay tax on capital gains, on gains made from trading with New Zealand - listed shares and most Australian shares. In fact, one of the architects of this proposal has said: “The circumstances—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! That answer is now getting substantially too long. Supplementary question Dr David Parker—ah, Hon David Parker.
Hon David Parker: Thank you, Mr Speaker—prescient again! In the Minister’s answer to the second to last supplementary question, when he was talking about income tax rates paid, is it correct that he did not include either GST or capital gains in respect of the income earned by the wealthy?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Well, what I can say is that the so-called wealthy as outlined in that answer are paying more than their fair share of tax. I refer you to Bill English’s press release of 28 May, which lays out the case very clearly.
Hon David Parker: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. We have had very long—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! Get to the point of order.
Hon David Parker: Well, with respect, the length of the answers that we have had from the Minister would give him room, you would have thought, to address the issues that I raised. I asked him whether his answer included GST or capital gains—
Mr SPEAKER: Thank you. So the point of order, effectively, is that the question has not been addressed. The difficulty was, again, not only the length of the answer but the length of the question. The question was whether the figures that the Minister used earlier included GST and capital gains. If that could be addressed, then we could move forward.
Hon Gerry Brownlee: Mr Speaker.
Hon David Parker: Point of order, Mr Speaker.
Mr SPEAKER: No, I have got a point of order here, I think, first.
Hon Gerry Brownlee: No, a supplementary question.
Mr SPEAKER: No, well I am waiting for the answer. I am waiting for Dr Jonathan Coleman to answer the question that was asked.
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: The point is we are talking about income tax. Obviously GST is paid on goods and services, which are discretionary. But the bottom line is that those people in the so-called wealthy section of the population pay much more than their share of GST as an overall proportion.
Hon Gerry Brownlee: Has he seen any reports on how taxation policy may adversely affect KiwiSaver savings?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I have seen a concerning report—a letter that David Cunliffe wrote to the Shareholders Association back in 2011, in which he said that in circumstances in which there would currently be no tax payable on capital gains, the 15 percent capital gains tax would tend to apply. He was talking there about KiwiSaver funds. The 2.3 million New Zealanders in KiwiSaver will be very concerned about that written admission to the Shareholders Association by one David Cunliffe.
Internal Affairs, Department—Withdrawal of Passport
2. Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (NZ First) to the Minister of Internal Affairs: On what basis was the recall and cancellation of New Zealand Passport LN138690 undertaken?
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery) on behalf of the Minister of Internal Affairs: I do not believe it is in the public interest to discuss individual passport matters in this House.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Can the Minister confirm whether Mr Anthony Fullman’s passport, and advice to me, was withdrawn at the request of the Minister of Foreign Affairs on the basis that Mr Fullman had been involved in plotting a coup against the Fiji regime; if so, what evidence was given to the Department of Internal Affairs justifying that action?
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: There are any number of reasons why a passport may be withdrawn, but it does not change the fact that I do not believe that it is in the public interest to discuss individual people’s passports in this House.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Did the Minister of Internal Affairs and his department receive advice from the SIS on this matter, and what steps, if any, did they take to validate that advice?
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: There are any number of reasons why a passport may be withdrawn—
Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. We are about to hear the same answer for the third time. With respect, this information was brought to me by the person in question. He wants justice and this is the place to get it.
Mr SPEAKER: That is not a point of order. We will now allow the Minister to complete his answer.
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: There are any number of reasons why a person may have their passport withdrawn. There are a number of avenues by which a passport may be returned or reissued to a person. But I do not believe it is in the public interest to answer questions about individual passports in this House.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. That, for the third time, is the same answer. The reality, of course, is whether the department’s and the Minister’s actions were legal or illegal. The illegality has been requested of me to be brought before this Parliament—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I have heard enough. I would invite the member to look at Speaker’s ruling 173(1), which clearly says that on a matter like this a Minister is perfectly entitled to respond the way he has by saying that it is not in the public interest for this information to be discussed in this House.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Were there others in addition to Mr Fullman who received grievous treatment from the department—which acted illegally—only to be later judged innocent by Justice McGechan?
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: There are a number of reasons why any person might lose their passport permanently or for a period of time, and they do have the right to go to the High Court to have that tested. I do not believe it is appropriate for individual passports and details thereof to be discussed in this House.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Well, does the Minister believe that the ministerial and departmental actions should be an instrument for oppression and harassment against law-abiding residents legally in this country; and when will the department pay those wronged innocent parties compensation, first of all, and give them an apology?
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: The member asks questions that are not best answered by the Minister of Internal Affairs, and I would go on to further say that all individuals in this country have a recourse to the courts when they believe they have been mistreated.
Question No. 3 to Minister.
Hon DAVID PARKER (Deputy Leader—Labour): I seek leave for this question to be held over as an additional question when Minister Joyce is present.
Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought for this question to be held over. Is there any objection to that course of action? There is.
New Zealand - Australia Migration—Numbers and Relation to Economic Policy
3. Hon DAVID PARKER (Deputy Leader—Labour) to the Associate Minister of Finance: Does he still believe that a 33 cent top marginal income tax rate is the reason for fewer departures to Australia in 2014?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Associate Minister of Finance) on behalf of the Associate Minister of Finance: Yes, it is one of the factors. As I said, the combination of lower taxes, a stronger economy, and more job opportunities have stemmed the flow of people to Australia. People are going to make their decision to stay in New Zealand or move offshore based on the opportunities they have to earn a good income in either country. We have supported higher take-home pay in New Zealand through lower income tax rates. In addition, 84,000 jobs were added to the economy in the last year. Weekly wages were up 3.2 percent compared with inflation of 1.5 percent in that period, and 172,000 jobs are expected to be added to the economy over the next 4 years. Wages are expected to rise by around $7,000 in that time. These are all important reasons why more New Zealanders are choosing to stay in New Zealand and bring up their families in this country.
Hon David Parker: If he sticks to his answer on Radio New Zealand National this morning, how does he explain that migration to Australia peaked at an all-time high of 54,000 in the year to September 2012, 4 years after he came to office, when the top marginal tax rate was 33c, as it is now?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Well, what I think that means is that you have got to look at the whole picture. We have had a concerted programme across the economy. I know that Labour members were hoping to take photos of football stadiums full of crowds and say that that was the net migration figure, but in actual fact they will now need a phone box if they going to try to push that during the campaign.
Jami-Lee Ross: What recent trends has he seen on permanent migration to Australia, and what are some of the main reasons for these changes?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I am pleased to report that there has been quite a turn-round in migration to Australia, and that is good news for New Zealand. For example, in the year to November 2008 a net figure of 35,300 permanently departed New Zealand to live in Australia. That is an average of nearly 3,000 every month. At that time we were deep in recession, even before the global financial crisis, inflation was more than 5 percent, floating mortgage rates were nearly 11 percent, and house prices had doubled in 9 years under the Government of the time. By comparison to those outflows in 2008, in the months of April and May this year the net migration loss across the Tasman was around 200 each month—the lowest-equal monthly figure since this data series began in 1996. So New Zealanders are clearly voting with their feet, recognising the—
Grant Robertson: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. [Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: The Minister will resume his seat. There is a point of order from Grant Robertson.
Grant Robertson: I am sure you know what it is.
Mr SPEAKER: I could anticipate. The answers are excessively long. If the Minister gets further supplementary questions, I would like him to address that.
Hon David Parker: If he sticks with his answer on Radio New Zealand National this morning, how does he explain that migration to Australia hit an all-time low in January 1984, under his spiritual forebear National’s Robert Muldoon, when the top marginal tax rate was an eye-watering 66c in the dollar?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: The problem for Labour is it is never happy—either too many people are staying or too many are going. But I guess the answer back in 1984 was that people just could not afford to leave.
Hon David Parker: Is it correct that the Minister received his advice linking marginal tax rates to migration flows from Colin Craig, the man to whom National is throwing the East Coast Bays electorate and the man who believes in chemtrails and thinks the moon landings may have been faked?
Mr SPEAKER: Where there may be some ministerial responsibility, the Minister can answer.
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: What I can tell New Zealanders is that if that crowd ever gets into Government, they will be receiving advice from a German resident in Coatesville. Labour is the tail on a big Green German Alsatian, and it better not forget it.
Schools, Partnership—Preference Factors and Early Childhood Education
4. CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) to the Minister of Education: Did she write a new preference factor for Partnership School applicants on the 14 November education report “Confirming Round Two of Applications to Operate Partnership Schools”; if so, on what advice?
Hon HEKIA PARATA (Minister of Education): Ā, tēnā koe e te Mana Whakawā, otirā, huri noa i tō tātou Whare. Ngā mihi nui o te ahiahi ki a koe e te mema, tēnā koe. Anei te whakahoki ki tō pātai.
[And salutations to you, Mr Speaker, and, indeed, throughout our House. Huge greetings of the afternoon to you the member, and thank you. Here is the response to your question.]
Yes. The addition of this preference factor for the provision of innovative models around the consistent provision for 0 to 8-year-olds was based on a range of advice I received from the Ministry of Education. The point of partnership schools kura hourua is that they are innovative and provide parents with further choice. The first round resulted in the opening of mainly secondary schools. Learning from this, as we do, we indicated six preferences for the second round. This was just one of them.
Catherine Delahunty: Can the Minister confirm that 5 days before tenders were opened for the latest round of partnership schools she handwrote a new category to be given priority, and that was a school offering options for babies aged 0 to 8 years old?
Hon HEKIA PARATA: What I can confirm is that the paper I took to Cabinet in October identified the range of preferences I would be looking to operationalise in the second round. One of the policy options was to explore innovative proposals that provided for seamless transition between early childhood education and primary school. I subsequently, when operationalising it, included that particular preference, along with five others.
Catherine Delahunty: What official advice did she receive about bringing babies and pre-schoolers into charter schools before she announced that schools offering options for 0 to 8-year-olds would be given priority?
Hon HEKIA PARATA: I received a range of advice, which included The Science of Early Childhood Development by Mustard and McCain, 1999; An Agenda for Amazing Children: Final Report of the ECE Task force, 2011; a literature review by Sally Peters, 2010, titled “Literature review: Transition from early childhood education to school”; L Mitchell et al, “Locality-based evaluation of Pathways to the Future—Ngā Huarahi Arataki” for the Ministry of Education; and a range of others.
Catherine Delahunty: I seek leave to table an answer to a written question that I received today from the Minister’s office stating that she did not receive any advice—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! The matter has been described. Can I be clear just before I put the leave that it is an answer to a written question that you have received that has not yet been published?
Catherine Delahunty: Yes, it is.
Mr SPEAKER: On that basis I will put the leave. Leave is sought to table that particular answer to a written question. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be tabled.
Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.
Catherine Delahunty: Why was she so keen on the radically new idea of partnership schools for 0 to 8-year-olds that she changed the criteria days before tenders opened to include this, in the absence of any official advice at all, as my written question confirms?
Hon HEKIA PARATA: As I have already indicated in my answer to the recent supplementary question, I have been provided with a whole range of advice. The member’s written question is accurate. It does not preclude having had a whole range of advice in the past 3 to 10 years on what needs to happen on transition from early childhood education to primary school. Why did I do that? Because we know that children who start behind too often stay behind. We are interested in giving all New Zealand children the best educational start possible.
Catherine Delahunty: Will partnership schools be allowed to use the extra Government money that babies and pre-schoolers attract not on those children but to run the rest of the school or boost the owners’ profits?
Hon HEKIA PARATA: We have not yet finalised the submissions for the second round, so whether there will be any in this category is yet to be determined, but certainly I am happy to table for the member the actual requirements of the request for proposals, which makes it very clear how early childhood component funding is to be used were there to be a proposal made of that kind, were it to be approved, were it to be negotiated, and were it to be established.
Catherine Delahunty: I seek leave to table the ministry advice that says that partnership kura will receive the same grant as equivalent early childhood services—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! It is a Ministry of Education document. I would just like the date of it and the approximate age of the document, and then I will put the leave.
Catherine Delahunty: I think it is November 2013.
Mr SPEAKER: November 2013—it is a Ministry of Education document. Is there any objection to that being tabled? There appears to be none. It can be tabled.
Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.
Chris Hipkins: Why is the Minister happy to extend the reach of charter schools to cover babies, given the results from the first round of charter schools is already mixed, with at least one school plagued by drug use, bullying, use of gang signals, high staff turnover, and high rates of student dropouts, or is she satisfied that these lower levels of accountability for charter schools are just par for the course?
Hon HEKIA PARATA: One of the core purposes of partnerships schools kura hourua is to cater to kids who have not been successful in the mainstream system. By and large, those are kids who are categorised by early exclusion and by the very problems that the member clearly takes pleasure in tabulating here. These schools really are about trying to help those kids whom the system has been failing. Unlike the member in the Opposition, who is happy to wring his hands about these problems and do nothing about them, this side of the House is prepared to do something about them. That is why we are working with the most vulnerable in our system to give them a chance at educational success.
Tracey Martin: Before the Minister signs any further contracts for partnership schools, will she make sure that there is a clause included whereby the taxpayers can regain their taxpayer-funded assets should these kura close?
Hon HEKIA PARATA: There is already provision within the education sector for disposal and reacquisition of those assets, were schools to close, and we consider that appropriate for this school as well.
Tracey Martin: No, there’s not—not inside partnership schools.
Hon HEKIA PARATA: I thought the member might want to hear my answer, but there you go.
Catherine Delahunty: Is it not the truth that she is making policy up as she goes along, and that there was no justification for a 0 to 8 partnership school, other than allowing charter school owners to use babies as a cash cow to fund the school?
Hon HEKIA PARATA: Is it not more the truth that that member is not interested in how we ensure that every child in New Zealand gets the best opportunity to succeed?
Catherine Delahunty: When poorer communities are desperate for good-quality early childhood education, why does she want to spend precious public money on a hugely risky experimental concept of charter schools for babies?
Hon HEKIA PARATA: This Government has increased funding for early childhood education from just over $800 million to just under $1.6 billion in the last 5 years. That is almost double the amount of funding for early childhood education, so for the member to suggest that this Government is underfunding early childhood education flies in the face of evidence.
Conservation Land—Cyclone Damage in West Coast Forests
5. CHRIS AUCHINVOLE (National) to the Minister of Conservation: What reports has he received on the extent of the damage to West Coast forests from Cyclone Ita and what estimates are there of the area affected and the volume of wood felled?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister of Conservation): I am advised that this extraordinary event has caused the worst wind-blown damage in the Buller area in generations, with 20,000 hectares severely damaged. There are a further 200,000 hectares across the coast where there is significant tree-fell. The volume of wood felled amounts to millions of cubic metres, but it is my expectation that only a small proportion of this will be economically recoverable, with the tight safety and environmental standards that the Department of Conservation will have in place.
Chris Auchinvole: What are the time constraints for the different types of wind-blown timber felled, and how does this impact on the timing of the legislation?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The major species affected are beech and rimu, but with smaller amounts of mataī, miro, and tōtara. Beech is very susceptible to sap stain and borer, and will quickly deteriorate in spring. That is why urgency is required in the legislation, to get the expressions of interest process under way, and ensure time is available to develop good safety and environmental control systems. I am advised that the rimu can be quite recoverable for up to 5 years, and this is the time limit set in the legislation. I am advised that spreading the recovery of the rimu over 5 years would be less disruptive to the indigenous timber market, would smooth the economic and employment opportunities, and would have negligible effect on the time for these forests to regrow and to recover.
Chris Auchinvole: Will the Government limit access to the wood to West Coast companies, as has been suggested; if not, why not?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: There are four good reasons why such an approach would be unworkable. The first is that the bulk of the benefits will accrue to the West Coast regardless of who owns the company. It is like saying that the West Coast does not want Australian companies like Bathurst Resources because it is Australian-owned, which I think is the Labour Party’s position. The second is that there is more than enough wood for existing West Coast sawmills, as well as new entrants. There are millions of cubic metres of wood. The third reason is that it would compromise safety. The recovery of this wood is not a job for amateurs, and with the recent decline in radiata log prices, there are skilled logging crews that need to relocate to the West Coast to do this work, and it would not be sensible to prevent that. The final and fourth reason is that it is an economic nonsense. We do not require that Canterbury lamb is processed in Canterbury, that Taranaki gas has to be used in Taranaki, or that Nelson apples have to be used in Nelson. It is the sort of economic lunacy that would cost jobs, and that members opposite now seem to be promoting.
Hon Damien O’Connor: Will the Minister support my amendments to ensure that West Coast businesses and West Coast workers get access to the wind-blown timber, and a requirement that any timber produced is managed appropriately on to the very small market for indigenous timber in this country; if not, why not?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I would welcome that member explaining to his constituents in Tasman—
Hon Members: Answer the question.
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: —I am answering the question—where there is the Moutere mill, which would love to have access to this timber, but the member is effectively saying to those constituents in Tasman that they do not get some jobs, because of some Stalinist idea that the wood has to stay on the West Coast.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. It has become very difficult to follow this Minister. [Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order!
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Well, I am trying to raise a point of order here.
Mr SPEAKER: The member will do it correctly, otherwise the member will be leaving this Chamber.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: My point of order is that it was very difficult to follow the Minister, because I have no idea what a timber called “romu” is, or where “Moo-terry” is as a location.
Mr SPEAKER: The member will resume his seat and stop wasting the time of the House.
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: It makes as much sense to limit access to the wood to the West Coast as it would be for us to pass a law that says that Nelson’s apples have to stay in Nelson or that gas in Taranaki has to stay in Taranaki. It is protectionism gone mad, and no wonder the members opposite are not able to provide a job growth formula for New Zealand.
Grant Robertson: I seek leave of the House to table a report that shows that the Department of Conservation spent $6,344 on Nick Smith’s photo opportunity to announce this policy.
Mr SPEAKER: Order! Before I decide whether to put the leave, it is a Department of Conservation document?
Grant Robertson: It is a media report.
Mr SPEAKER: It is a media report. We will not be tabling that.
Canterbury, Recovery—Housing New Zealand Properties
6. PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū) to the Minister of Housing: How many homes out of the 5,000 earthquake damaged Housing New Zealand homes have completed repairs as part of its Repair 5000 programme?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister of Housing): Twenty-seven thousand emergency repairs were completed on those 5,000 State homes in the immediate period after the earthquake to enable as many as possible to continue to be used. A comprehensive settlement for the substantive repairs for $320 million was reached last April, and 1,368 have now been fully repaired. We also have 360 new homes under construction to replace those that it was neither economic nor sensible to repair.
Phil Twyford: Does he stand by his statement that “Five years is not unreasonable.” to stabilise rents in Christchurch; if so, what convinced him that 8½ years is a reasonable time for families living in campervans and cars, the over 500 families on the Housing New Zealand waiting list, and the 7,400 people whom the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment says are living in insecure housing to have to wait for the affordable rental housing he has promised, given that the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority says things are going to get worse before they get better?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I would note that the portion of Housing New Zealand homes that have been repaired is significantly ahead of the pace of the Christchurch City Council’s own social housing, and it is actually going faster than those homes that are in the private sector. When you have an earthquake that wrecks 12,000 houses and you have an average of 1,500 homes usually built in Christchurch—and we have it up to 3,000 new building consents being issued per year—that is the time it takes to build and repair those homes.
Poto Williams: Can he confirm from his own press release dated 11 April that of the 700 Housing New Zealand new builds he promised in May last year, only 20 houses have been completed, or was that a typo and it is more than 20 houses actually built a year later?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: We have committed to completing those 5,000 repairs and those 700 new builds by the end of 2015. We are on track to do that, and I note that the pace at which we are replacing and repairing homes for Housing New Zealand is ahead of that of the Christchurch City Council and that of the private sector.
Grant Robertson: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. That was a very specific question from the member, and the Minister did not address it.
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.
Mr SPEAKER: Before I address that I will take the point of order from the Minister. The trouble was that it was not that specific a question, but I will hear from the Hon Nick Smith.
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: This was not a question on notice, and to be asked for the exact number of houses that have been completed is not reasonable for a Minister to have at his fingertips.
Mr SPEAKER: I appreciate that, and the best way forward—and this is advice to all members—is simply to say at the start of an answer: “I do not have that information with me.”
Poto Williams: Why has he done next to nothing to help the thousands of Christchurch families who have had to pay extortionate rents while they are having their repairs done, exacerbating the chronic shortage of affordable rental housing and holding up the progress of the rebuild?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: It is a purely political statement to say that the Government has not done anything in respect of housing. I could spend the entire afternoon in the House explaining all the things that we have done. Let me give you a few examples. We built four temporary villages. We have established the Canterbury Earthquake Temporary Accommodation Service and provided help for thousands of families. We have completed 27,000 emergency repairs. We have 1,000 people currently engaged on repairing those Housing New Zealand houses, and they are being repaired at a faster rate than those either in the private sector or not. We have partnered with the community sector to build dozens of houses. We have partnered with the Community Trust in Canterbury for additional houses. It is simply not correct for the member opposite to say that this Government has not been incredibly active in dealing with those housing challenges.
Phil Twyford: Does he stand by his assertion that Deloitte was wrong when it said that “New home/replacement home building is not yet well advanced. Less than 1,000 houses have been built under his watch out of the 12-15,000 needed,”; if so, how many new homes have actually been built, as opposed to merely consented, since the February 2011 earthquakes?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The member opposite runs this line: “A consent isn’t a house.” Well, let me tell him something: you cannot build a house without a consent, and the number of homes that have been consented in Christchurch is at the highest level ever—over 3,000 per year. In fact, last week we had the member’s colleague criticising the Government because there was too much building activity occurring in the GDP figures.
Teachers—Awards, Development, and Council
7. TIM MACINDOE (National—Hamilton West) to the Minister of Education: What recent announcements has she made to celebrate and recognise the highly effective and innovative practice happening across the education system?
Hon HEKIA PARATA (Minister of Education): I was delighted to announce the 16 finalists, from whom the Prime Minister presented six winners, at the Prime Minister’s Education Excellence Awards ceremony last night. The evening was a celebration of the wonderful work being done every day in schools and early childhood centres around the country. The supreme award winner, Ōtūmoetai Intermediate School in Tauranga, represented the best of what works to raise student achievement. I want to congratulate all our winners and our finalists and acknowledge the other 147 entries, which are making a difference for Kiwi kids every day.
Tim Macindoe: What is the focus of the Prime Minister’s Education Excellence Awards?
Hon HEKIA PARATA: The focus of the awards reflects the best evidence on what works in education to raise achievement. As has been consistently identified in this House, quality teaching and school leadership are the big in-school factors, and parental involvement and community expectations are the big out-of-school factors. These awards and their winners emphasise, profile, and celebrate what can be achieved with a focus on these factors. It has been fantastic to hear how the finalists have worked together to raise achievement for all.
Tim Macindoe: What other initiatives are in place to strengthen and value the teaching profession?
Hon HEKIA PARATA: This Government is committed to celebrating and investing in excellence in education and to backing all of our teachers to raise achievement. Our $359 million investment to raise student achievement and the establishment of the new professional body, the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, are all part of acknowledging the profession, raising its status, and recognising the critical contribution that quality educational achievement makes to New Zealand.
New Zealand Defence Force—Capacity for Overseas Deployments
8. Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill) to the Minister of Defence: Has there been a reduction in the capacity of the Army in the last three years to sustain an overseas deployment; if so, why?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (Minister of Defence): No. In fact, the army’s ability to sustain overseas deployments has improved. In 2014 the New Zealand Defence Force is able to deploy a light task group of 250 and a combined armed task group of 560. All New Zealand Defence Force annual reports 2006 through to 2013 showed that the New Zealand Defence Force could not have sustained these deployments and its other commitments, so clearly there has been a real turn-round. Despite the member’s regular assertions to the contrary, the Defence Force is in much better shape today than it was when he was the Minister of Defence.
Hon Phil Goff: Why does the Minister answer in that way when these two documents that I have here, both of them in his own name, say that the Defence Force could not be guaranteed to sustain an overseas deployment for more than 12 months, when under Labour the army sustained deployments in Timor, the Solomons, and Bamian simultaneously and continuously for 10 years?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: What the member knows is that actually under the National Government we sustained exactly the same deployments. He refers to documents that he does not quote from. I can quote from a document, the New Zealand Herald. I have got a copy of it here, actually, dated 3 September 2008, when he was the Minister, and the verdict from the New Zealand Herald was—
Hon Phil Goff: Point of order, Mr Speaker.
Mr SPEAKER: Order! Both members will resume their seats.
Hon Phil Goff: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. [Interruption] It is a point of order and the Minister is interjecting.
Mr SPEAKER: This is a point of order and it will be heard in silence.
Hon Phil Goff: Since the Minister has denied the documents and said that I will not quote from them, I seek leave to table this document, which I do not believe is available to all members. It is additional estimates questions for Vote Defence Force 2014, where it says you cannot sustain more than 12 months.
Mr SPEAKER: I will put the leave and the House can decide whether to accept that document, but I would be grateful in the future if a member would seek leave after a question is answered rather than interrupt it. Leave is sought to table that particular document as described by Mr Goff. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be tabled.
Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.
Hon Phil Goff: Was—
Hon Paula Bennett: You’d have done better than Cunliffe.
Hon Phil Goff: You will keep, sweetie, but not for long.
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I am the referee. Thursday afternoon—one all.
Hon Phil Goff: Is the cause of the Minister answering my question, saying that there is a risk that they cannot sustain now for more than 12 months, the fact that his Government has slashed Defence Force numbers in the regular force by 1,200 under its watch and, as the documents from the Defence Force say, that critical trade areas and ranks have been seriously degraded, and is that the reason why our overseas deployments under international peace operations are the lowest in 20 years?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: Look, there are a lot of noes with which you could respond to those questions. What I can say is that we have got virtually the same number of people in the army now as we had in 2005. What I do have here—
Hon Phil Goff: It’s not true.
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: It is. I have got the figures here from the chief of army. What I have got here is a long list of things the army could not do when Phil Goff was the Minister. There’s about 20, but the army could not provide a battalion level deployment—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I do not think the answer continuing along that line will help the order of the House. The Minister has answered the question.
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.
Mr SPEAKER: Again, this is a point of order and it will be heard in silence.
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I seek leave to table this extensive list of the things the army could not do when Phil Goff was the Minister. It is an original document—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! The House can sort this out. Leave is sought—
Hon Annette King: Where does it come from?
Mr SPEAKER: Oh, I apologise to the Hon Annette King. The source of the document?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: It comes from the Defence Force. [Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order! Listen. [Interruption] Order! Settle down. The Minister said that it has come from the Defence Force. On that basis, leave is sought to table—
Hon Phil Goff: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.
Mr SPEAKER: First of all, I will get this sorted out—[Interruption] The member wants to speak to—
Hon Phil Goff: Can the Minister first assure the House that he is not tabling a document from the New Zealand Herald?
Mr SPEAKER: We have heard that. It is not a New Zealand Herald document.
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.
Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat. We are going to put the leave. Do you want to clarify this, before it is put?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I want to just clarify that this is information given directly by the Defence Force to my office, assembled into an easy-to-read document, which I am happy to table.
Mr SPEAKER: That may make a difference, but we will test the House to find out. Leave is sought now to table a document that has been prepared by the Minister’s office, with information delivered from the Defence Force. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be tabled.
Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.
Hon Phil Goff: I seek leave of the House to table a Cabinet document. It is dated 23 October 2013, and it says that we have got the smallest number of personnel deployed—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! We do not need the description. The Cabinet document is dated 23 October last year. Leave is sought to table it. Is there any objection? There is not.
Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.
Hon Phil Goff: I seek leave to table a document from the Office of the Auditor-General pointing out that there has been a net reduction of 1,200 in regular Defence Force personnel—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! If it is a report by the Auditor-General—
Hon Phil Goff: No, it is not publicly available.
Mr SPEAKER: Well, I accept the assurance from the member that it is an Auditor-General’s report that has not been made public. On that basis, I will put the leave and the House will sort this out. Leave is sought to table that particular Auditor-General’s document. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be tabled.
Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.
Hon Phil Goff: What has been the impact on Defence Force capabilities of defence contractors like Babcock, which was found, in 6 months of the last year, to have key performance indicator ratings at five, the lowest of all grades and a grade that is described as “unacceptable performance”, and what is the Minister doing about it?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: The impact is that we have sorted out the sort of mess that used to happen all the time when Phil Goff was the Minister, and so we have corrected that and taken remedial action to make sure it cannot happen again.
Hon Phil Goff: Has another Defence Force contractor called Miltech been referred to the Office of the Auditor-General for investigation because it may not be certified to provide services, like the servicing of the life jackets such as worn by Private Michael Ross, who was drowned, and because there were huge conflicts of interest, and what is the reason why the Minister has been forced to refer them, after this arose in an inquiry from me and from the media?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: The member is always trying to make political capital out of the deaths of New Zealand service people, but on the day that I received the briefing or notice of the Miltech situation, I wrote a letter to the Office of the Auditor-General asking that office to investigate Miltech.
Hon Phil Goff: What was the reason?
Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: The point is I am very concerned about what I read.
Canterbury, Recovery—Support Services
9. MELISSA LEE (National) to the Minister for Social Development: What support is the Ministry of Social Development providing to people in Christchurch still dealing with the impact of the earthquakes?
Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister for Social Development): A lot. I shall just concentrate in this answer on the more money that we are putting into psychosocial services in this year’s Budget. We have invested an extra $13.5 million for continuing the Earthquake Support Coordination Service, providing more trauma counselling, supporting the 0800 Canterbury support line, and NGOs that are supporting the resilience of those people in Canterbury.
Melissa Lee: What kind of support does the Earthquake Support Coordination Service provide?
Hon PAULA BENNETT: It was important back when the earthquakes occurred, and it is still important now, that it provides practical help to Cantabrians in need of that bit of extra support to try to work their way through what can be a rather complex, at times, range of assistance available to them. The new money will provide earthquake coordination support for up to 5,000 households and access to counselling services for an extra 240 people a month.
Melissa Lee: What extra support is being provided by the Ministry of Social Development in Canterbury?
Hon PAULA BENNETT: What we know is that housing remains an issue for Cantabrians. That is why the Budget included an extra $2.26 million for the Canterbury Earthquake Temporary Accommodation Service. Yesterday, however, Minister Brownlee and I announced that people impacted by recent flooding will also be eligible to apply for the temporary assistance, which ranges from $180 to $330 a week. The flooding has compounded problems some residents are already facing due to the earthquakes, and we are committed to making support available to them for easing some of the short-term accommodation pressures.
Oil, Gas, and Minerals Exploration—Protection of Marine Mammals
10. GARETH HUGHES (Green) to the Minister of Conservation: Does he agree with the statement given on behalf of the Minister of Energy and Resources that “there has not been a single observation of a Māui’s dolphin in the block offer area”?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister of Conservation): Yes, if the part quote from the member is used in the intended context of the official Government Māui’s dolphin observer programme, where in 809 days of monitoring not a single Māui’s dolphin was observed. This context was referred to later in the question.
Gareth Hughes: Is the reason the Minister incorrectly told the House there had been no sightings—when in fact there are 10 listed on the Department of Conservation database—that he is trying to downplay the fact his Government is exposing the Māui’s dolphins to new risks?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The sightings historically are difficult to locate accurately. They go back to 1970; GPS did not exist then. So it is quite difficult to determine exactly where they were. Of course we cannot differentiate from such sightings as to whether they are Māui’s or whether they are Hector’s dolphins. I would also point out that in 40 years of the oil and gas industry there has not been a single incident that has caused any harm to any Māui’s dolphin.
Gareth Hughes: Did the Minister recently extend the Māui’s dolphin sanctuary on the basis of five confirmed sightings, including with GPS locations; if so, did he warn against seismic testing into 56 percent of his expanded sanctuary area?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Prior to this Government there was no regulation of seismic exploration work. The exclusive economic environmental effects legislation has enabled the Government, for the first time, to have compulsory regulation of those that are doing seismic survey work, to ensure that there is no harm to marine mammals. That is just another example, with this Government’s programme, of our improving the environmental protection for Maūi’s dolphins. That comes on top of us doubling the area of the set net ban.
Gareth Hughes: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I appreciate that my question had two legs, but neither of them was addressed. I asked: did he extend—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I disagree with the member. I think the second question was addressed.
Joanne Hayes: What is the probability of finding a Māui’s dolphin in the 2014 block-off area as compared with their main habitat between the Kaipara and Kāwhia harbours?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Ninety percent of the 975 historic sightings are in their main habitat, which equates to 1.25 square kilometres. In the block-off area, if we take the figures that the Green member asserts, that is one sighting per 7,500 square kilometres. That is, the probability of finding a Māui’s dolphin in the block offer area is 1/3,000th of that in the main habitat, or 0.03 percent. This is very infrequent and very nearly zero.
Gareth Hughes: Did the Minister reply to the recent Society for Marine Mammalogy’s letter to the Minister, which opposed seismic testing in the Māui’s sanctuary, and was his response to these more than 2,000 international scientists: “Well, I’m right and you’re wrong.”?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I would be happy to invite any of those 2,000 marine scientists who met in Europe to come and see what the Government has done to protect our Māui’s dolphins, to see the internationally recognised regulations for seismic testing, and to observe the fact that the Government has doubled the area of the set net ban. I would also note that since we have put those in place there has not been a single Māui’s dolphin death, and I contrast that with the record of the previous Government, where there were several Māui’s dolphin deaths.
Joanne Hayes: What reports has the Minister seen on the evidence of harm to Māui’s dolphins from the oil and gas industry?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: I have seen a very strong statement saying that Māui’s dolphins are not posed any threat by the oil and gas industry, albeit I also see another statement from a member of the same party who is saying that he does not share that view—that being Wayne Coffey. But I would also point out that that is just one of many areas where members opposite have contradictory views on natural resource issues.
Gareth Hughes: Following on from that, has the Minister read his own assessment of the threats to Māui’s dolphins, which clearly lists seismic testing as a threat, saying it is an impact likely to affect population trends in the next 5 years; and will the Minister therefore be following the example of California, which, to protect the non-endangered harbor porpoise, has banned seismic testing in that area in order to protect our critically endangered Māui’s dolphins, of which there are only 55 left on the planet.
Mr SPEAKER: The Hon Dr Nick Smith—either of those questions.
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The Māui’s dolphin threat management plan identified that 95 percent of the risk to the Māui’s dolphins was from fishing, that less than 1 percent of the risk was represented from the oil and gas industry, and that, for instance, boats were more than 1 percent of the risk. That is, if the member wants to be consistent and to say that he wants to take a zero-risk approach, then he should ban all boat movements on the west coast of the North Island because they pose a greater risk than the oil and gas industry.
Family/Whānau Violence Prevention—Government Response to Report
11. CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) to the Minister of Justice: Given the magnitude of the problem of family violence, is it acceptable to her that none of the Family Violence Death Review Committee’s recommendations from their last annual report have been completed, and no action has been taken on a number of recommendations around funding family violence training for professionals, and addressing the need for better multi-agency practice addressing family violence?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Justice): The member is incorrect. To suggest that no action has been taken is wrong. It is also wrong to expect the recommendations to have been completed within 1 year, as many of them call for work to be ongoing. The Ministry of Justice, the New Zealand Police, the Department of Corrections, the Ministry of Social Development, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Education are undertaking a large body of work to address family violence. Agencies have been working together to develop a comprehensive range of initiatives, which we expect to announce shortly. On the training front, this Government’s Family Court reforms included a review of domestic violence programmes to upskill providers, and there is ongoing training across all agencies to improve the response to family violence. In its report the committee also commended better support for victims of violent crime. This Government is committed to putting victims at the heart of the criminal justice system. In the past few weeks this House has passed legislation arising from the Victims of Crime Reform Bill, and the Victims’ Orders Against Violent Offenders Bill, and, as I have said, there are more initiatives to be announced in a few weeks.
Carol Beaumont: Regarding the statement by Professor Julia Tolmie, chair of the Family Violence Death Review Committee, that “The most disturbing death reviews for me are ones where the woman is quite clearly fighting for her life. She sees that she’s going to die and she is ... actively taking every action she possibly can to save her life. She’s contacting the police, she’s telling landlords, she’s telling neighbours, she’s telling friends ... and we are not providing her with effective help.”, is the Minister satisfied that the Government is doing enough to effectively protect women in these circumstances; and will she reconsider implementing the recommendations around better multi-agency practice?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Well, I thought I had made myself clear. I do not believe that anybody has done enough on this issue, which is why this Government is taking it extremely seriously and will have a range of announcements to make in the very, very near future.
Carol Beaumont: Given there are, on average, 35 deaths from family violence per year and many of these deaths are preventable, does she agree with the Family Violence Death Review Committee’s call for a radical change in the way our country responds to dangerous and chronic cases of family violence; and when can we expect a comprehensive Government response?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I have already answered that question. I wish that member would listen and take this issue seriously.
Jacinda Ardern: Given this report finds that children who witness intimate partner violence are psychologically damaged by it, why do they receive no ongoing counselling or support within their foster care or Home for Life placement—an issue frequently raised with me by foster parents and caregivers?
Hon Paula Bennett: That’s not true across the board.
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Well, I understand from Minister Paula Bennett that that is not true across the board, but I would also say to that member, though, that if she just waits for a short period of time, she will see the Government’s comprehensive report.
Jacinda Ardern: Why is every family violence notification referred by the police to Child, Youth and Family not automatically acted upon, when this report notes that a child who witnesses violence deals with effects that are “more disturbing than the effects of direct physical maltreatment.”?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Well, that question should really be directed to the Minister with responsibility for Child, Youth and Family—
Grant Robertson: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.
Mr SPEAKER: I can anticipate it, but—[Interruption] No, I will hear from the member.
Grant Robertson: As you know, this question was put down for the Minister for Social Development and was transferred by the Government. It is a question about the review and the review report. The Government has chosen the Minister to answer this question. She should be able to address it.
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I want to clarify this. Speaker’s ruling 152/1 is very clear: the Government has the right to transfer a question, but not if in any way it then obstructs the answer. So now we have a situation where I am going to invite the member to re-ask the question, but I ask the Minister to reflect on the answer that then says “Well, it is not my responsibility.” That should have been considered at the time the Government made—[Interruption] Order! That should have been considered at the time that the Government made a decision to transfer it. I will invite Jacinda Ardern to ask the question again.
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. With respect, the supplementary question that the member has asked is a long way away from the initial primary question, and I think that that is the issue. The Opposition has chosen to ask a primary question about a particular report, particularly around domestic violence, and Ms Ardern has chosen to take a particular part of family violence—child abuse areas—and to ask a specific question about that. That is the issue.
Jacinda Ardern: Mr Speaker—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I do not need assistance. I am going to give the member a chance to ask the question in a minute. I do not entirely accept that answer from the Minister, in that when I look at the fourth annual report—and this information was obviously in the hands of the Government when it decided to transfer the question—it notes that this is indeed a multi-agency matter. In fact, most of the recommendations are for Child, Youth and Family, which is leading the response. I invite Jacinda Ardern to re-ask the question.
Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I just want to be very clear on what your ruling now might mean for the Government’s ability to work out who might be best to answer a question. The anticipation here was that we get questions about action taken as a result of the review, and the primary responsibilities for that overwhelmingly lie in the justice portfolio, not with the Ministry of Social Development. We made a genuine transfer to try to create an opportunity to get the best information to the House. The fact that the member decides to pick on the back end of the question and then start saying that the Minister cannot answer it really indicates that the question here is far too long, in the first place, and not at all specific.
Mr SPEAKER: Order! My job is to ensure that all questions get the best possible answer. The member himself, in the point he has just raised, said that the Government’s decision was that the best possible answer would come via the transfer of this question to the Minister of Justice. I then invited the member to ask the question again, but the answer then that “I don’t have that information. It would have been better if the answer was given by the Minister for Social Development.” means that I would have to think very carefully about a transfer occurring in the future if I felt it was unlikely we were going to get the answer the member deserves.
Jacinda Ardern: Point of order—
Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.
Mr SPEAKER: I will hear from the Hon Gerry Brownlee; then I will hear from Jacinda Ardern.
Hon Gerry Brownlee: The problem that you present to us now is what if you have questions that are set down to the Minister of Justice that end up being police questions? What if you have questions to the Minister of Defence that end up—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I can explain that. What we have here is the report of the Family Violence Death Review Committee. It is, as I said, across multiple agencies, but most of the responsibilities in the document I have are led by Child, Youth and Family. I expect the Minister, having accepted that she wants to answer this question, which is the prerogative of the Government, then to be in a position to answer the question. Jacinda Ardern wants to speak to the point of order?
Jacinda Ardern: No, you have resolved that. I will re-ask my question. Why is every family violence notification referred by the police to Child, Youth and Family not automatically acted upon, when this report notes that a child who simply witnesses violence deals with effects that are “more disturbing than the effects of direct physical maltreatment”?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Well, I do not have the detail to that, as I have made pretty plain.
Carol Beaumont: Is she comfortable with her position—[Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order! Could the Minister stop yelling across the Chamber. I have asked Carol Beaumont to—[Interruption] Order! If the member wants the privilege of staying to answer the rest of the questions, we will have less interjection.
Carol Beaumont: Is she comfortable with her position that “Protection orders are pieces of paper, and if breaches of them aren’t treated seriously by the courts, then there is nothing we can do.”, when the Family Violence Death Review Committee says there needs to be improvement in the police’s enforcement of protection orders?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I am absolutely comfortable with my position on this. As the member well knows, I had a very close family member who had a protection order out on her former husband. He killed her. So I will not be lectured to by that member about protection orders.
Carol Beaumont: Will the Minister reconsider Labour’s recent call, following the Glenn report—[Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I do not want to have to deal with that member again. Carol Beaumont, would you simply ask your question.
Carol Beaumont: Will the Minister reconsider Labour’s recent call, following the Glenn report and the Family Violence Death Review Committee report showing an average of 35 deaths per year, to establish a cross-party task force to address the rates of child abuse and domestic violence in New Zealand?
Hon JUDITH COLLINS: My colleagues and I are very happy to come up with ideas to help to fight family violence. If that member has any, I am happy to listen to them.
Census 2018—Changes
12. KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National) to the Minister of Statistics: What is the Government doing to modernise the next census?
Hon NICKY WAGNER (Minister of Statistics): As part of Budget 2014 I announced a new internet-first model to be used for the 2018 census. It will transform how the census is delivered and collected and will increase the use of administrative data. We have set a target of 70 percent of forms to be completed online, but it is also important to note that at the next census people will be able to request paper forms to be delivered to their households.
Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi: What will be the advantages of this new model?
Hon NICKY WAGNER: This new model will help counter rising costs and falling response rates. It will also lead to more timely releases of information. Although the new model is technology-driven, there will also be a huge effort to reach people without technology or those who live in remote places. This is the biggest change to the census in modern memory, and I am proud to be part of the National-led Government that is responsible for this step change.
Raymond Huo: Will the Minister include collecting data on foreign ownership of our residential properties in the next census; if not, why not?
Hon NICKY WAGNER: The census collects information on housing. The census itself is for households in New Zealand. It will continue to collect that information.
Raymond Huo: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I asked specifically on foreign ownership—
Mr SPEAKER: Order! I invite the member to ask his question again.
Raymond Huo: Will the Minister include collecting data on foreign ownership of our residential properties in the next census; if not, why not?
Hon NICKY WAGNER: The census data collects information on ownership of homes, but it does not connect that information to the ethnicity of that ownership.
Grant Robertson: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. With respect, that does not address the question. That is a statement of fact. The member was asking whether the Minister intends to alter that in some way. That is the point of the question.
David Bennett: Why didn’t you ask the question then?
Grant Robertson: For David Bennett’s benefit, that was quite clear, I think.
Mr SPEAKER: The member is right. The difficulty I have is how many times we are going to ask the question.
Grant Robertson: Can we have one more?
Mr SPEAKER: I will allow one more—it is Thursday afternoon. The member can repeat his question.
Raymond Huo: Three strikes.
Melissa Lee: Raymond, when did you become anti-Chinese?
Raymond Huo: I beg your pardon? [Interruption]
Mr SPEAKER: Order! We do not need the interjections. [Interruption] Order! We do not need the interjections; we now need the question asked so the Minister can clearly hear it.
Raymond Huo: Kiwi Chinese are New Zealanders and not foreigners.
Mr SPEAKER: Order! Just ask the question. [Interruption] Order! The House will settle down. Now Mr Huo may rise to his feet and simply ask the question again, without any other comment.
Raymond Huo: Will the Minister include collecting data on foreign ownership of our residential properties in the next census; if not, why not?
Hon NICKY WAGNER: The census has been run for almost a hundred years, and it has a longitudinal study of certain questions. However, each time a new census comes up those questions can be tweaked. Between now and 2018 we will be looking at all those questions.
Urgency
Urgency
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Leader of the House): I move, That urgency be accorded the introduction and passing of the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. Cyclone Ita struck on 17 April 2014, felling thousands of hectares of native trees on the West Coast. Much of that timber is beech and, as the Minister of Conservation outlined today, there are a number of other species that can also be recovered. This is high-quality finishing timber, but it is highly susceptible to attack by borer and sap staining in the spring.
As we start this debate today, we are in a rimu-clad room, standing at rimu desks, and enjoying the soft ambience that you get from these native timbers. To see those timbers wasted in the way that the political opposition to this move want to see is, I think, an utter disgrace. There is in this bill the opportunity to recover a substantial amount of that wind-blown timber, which would otherwise sit there and, over some decades, rot and be wasted. That timber will provide a significant opportunity to the people of the West Coast, an opportunity that certainly this part of the House if not their local representative, wants to see for them, I think this is a perfectly justifiable action this afternoon. Urgency should be accorded to this because in the early days of the fall there can be damage that does make that windfall less than optimal for retrieval.
A party vote was called for on the question, That urgency be accorded.
Ayes 63
New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Noes 55
New Zealand Labour 34; Green Party 13; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.
Motion agreed to.
Bills
West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill
First Reading
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister of Conservation): I move, That the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill be now read a first time. When Cyclone Ita hit the West Coast on 17 April this year it did the worst damage to forests in that region for generations, felling an estimated 20,000 hectares of forest and causing very significant damage to a further 200,000 hectares across the Coast. That was a conservation tragedy, but it leaves a dilemma as to what to do with the millions of cubic metres of wood that now rest in those forests. No good purpose would be served by leaving that timber in the forest to rot, whether it be the rimu, the beech, the tōtara, or the mataī. As the Leader of the House noted, it is somewhat ironic in this beautiful Chamber surrounded by native timbers for people to be taking a view that is philosophically opposed to any use of our native woods.
Can I firstly address the very practical need for Parliament to take urgency in this matter. A good portion of the volume of the wood is beech, particularly silver beech and red beech. Such timbers are very susceptible to both beech stain and to borer, and if this Parliament delays or slows, by spring that timber will not be recoverable. That is why I say to members from New Zealand First and the member of Parliament for West Coast - Tasman that to somehow pretend that you support recovery of this wood but to not be prepared to support urgency is really saying that you are not going to give the opportunity for that timber to be recovered before it spoils.
After the storm caused the damage—
Jacinda Ardern: Why are you doing it for 5 years?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The question from members opposite is why we are allowing the recovery for 5 years. Let me explain it to the member Jacinda Ardern, who interjects. It is because although the beech will spoil quickly, I am further advised that the rimu, which is like the wood of our desks, can be recovered from the forest for a period of up to 5 years. In fact, the clear message I have had from both the sawmill industry and the indigenous timber industry is that it would be preferable to spread this wood over a number of years than to flood the market—a point that has been made by Damien O’Connor. I would suggest to Jacinda Ardern that she listens to that advice.
I sought careful advice from my department, the Department of Conservation, which first raised the prospect of the recovery of this wood, as to whether it could be done under existing legislation. The answer is that it could with a great deal of complexity. Yes, it is true that, for instance, when the Department of Conservation grants a mining licence in an area where there is wood, it is possible to remove that native timber and to use it for practical purposes, but it is a complex, slow process. I had been challenged by Eugenie Sage, effectively, in the media to say that to do it under the existing conservation law would create uncertainty, and I came to the view that if you were to do this, it was better to be up front with Parliament about the extraordinary event that occurred and to provide a robust and straightforward process to enable the timber to be recovered.
The West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill confines the recovery of the usable wood to areas that have been affected by Cyclone Ita and specifically excludes the very high conservation areas of the World Heritage areas, the four national parks across the West Coast, the ecological areas, and the white heron sanctuary reserve at Whataroa. It does include 100 forests across the Coast where there has been extensive damage and it enables the Director-General of Conservation to grant authorisations for the recovery of that wood. The bill requires that the director-general needs to satisfy himself that anybody proposing to recover the timber provides a safety plan to ensure that this can be done without risk to the workers or to the public. We need only to reflect on the debate that has occurred in this House over the last year about the dangerous nature of forestry work and the further fact that wind-blown timber makes it even more important for that work that we have restrictions and we have requirements for that to be taken into account. The bill also requires that the Director-General of Conservation, in granting authorisations, takes care to ensure that there is minimal environmental impact in the recovery of that timber. It is my expectation that the bulk of the timber is, in fact, recovered by helicopter, given the remote areas that are involved.
I want to rebut some of the concerns that have been expressed about this very practical bill. The first claim is that removing a portion of this wood will hold back the recovery of those forests. I would point out that only a small portion of the overall woody biomass would be recovered by this method. There will be oodles of wood for the bugs and the slugs to consume and to provide fertility for those forests to be able to recover. I have also heard criticism from members opposite that somehow they believe that the recovery of this wood should be restricted and available to only West Coast companies. I have heard some silly ideas in my day; that one would have to take the cake.
Moana Mackey: That’s what you said was going to happen.
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The member from Gisborne is interjecting. Does the member really believe that in little New Zealand—4.5 million people—we are going to start setting up individual custom areas for the West Coast where wood cannot be moved? I assure the member, whose party is split on this issue—
Hon Maryan Street: No.
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The member says “No.” Well, I have just read it on the wires. Maryan Street says Labour members are not split. Well, can the member assure me that Damien O’Connor is not going to cross the floor of the House?
Well, one minute they say that they are not split and the next minute it seems that they are. Can I be reassured by Maryan Street that Labour is voting as one on this bill? I have heard from very reliable sources that the Labour Opposition members are completely divided on this issue, as they are on the issue of oil and gas exploration, and as they were for the reasons that Shane Jones left Parliament. That is a party that does not know what it stands for and I think that will become plain as this bill is debated through its stages.
In publicly making the announcement for this bill—and I want to acknowledge the support of United Future and the Māori Party last Friday—subsequent to that, there has been concern expressed from some extractors of high-value oil from native wood that the provisions of the bill I tabled last week will restrict that sort of high-value use. As part of being open and transparent with the House about the content of this bill, I do want to draw to the attention of members of the House that there is a small change to the bill in regard to the purposes for which the timber can be recovered.
It is right that this Parliament is passionate about protecting the forests that define this country, but when we have a tragedy of this scale, and we have millions of hectares of high-value timber on the ground, it is my view that this Parliament should be pragmatic and should allow for that wood to be recovered, where it can be done environmentally responsibly and where it can be done safely. To put it very quickly, this country is not so wealthy that it can allow beautiful, valuable, native timber to be left to rot.
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. I found that a really muddled speech from the Minister of Conservation and it does lead me to the conclusion that actually this is not a serious consideration about the needs of West Coast people. By crikey, do I ever hear that representation regularly from Damien O’Connor, as he tells me and other colleagues about the battering that the West Coast has had to endure under this Government, which is totally out of touch with the needs and the realities of people. The Minister of Conservation, I think, is playing a cheap political stunt game with this legislation, the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. He had the audacity to ask the House why it would let fallen trees rot on the ground. Actually, it is because that has been in the Conservation Act for 27 years, it has had enduring support from this Parliament, and he is the Minister of Conservation, who is responsible for implementing the Conservation Act, so that question just made a nonsense of him and his position.
But that is not the first time, actually. That Minister has stood alongside his colleagues and said that we have to balance the economy with the environment. We always have to have this balance. That is why, when the Minister of Conservation is making decisions about mining on conservation land, he no longer has that authority himself—he has to share it with the Minister of Energy and Resources. What nonsense! That dual decision-making puts the Minister of Conservation right out of the loop in the traditional role as being an advocate for conservation, and his speech confirmed that today.
If this was urgent legislation to give a commitment to West Coast people that they would have better employment—good jobs, well-paid jobs—in their local community, we would certainly back it, but that is not what the Government is proposing. The Minister of Conservation actually confirmed that when he answered a question from Damien O’Connor in the House yesterday. The Minister started talking about a sawmill in Nelson that could benefit from this legislation. That was a little different—a total flip-flop—from the commitment he gave to the West Coasters that this was about them and their jobs. No such commitment is in the legislation.
I want to talk about the other points that Labour has raised with the Government. Oh, and by the way, we have not had a response. This legislation is so urgent that the Prime Minister cannot even be bothered responding to another political party on the points that it has raised about it. Let me go through those points. I am sure that the Leader of the House, Gerry Brownlee, who is going to take the next call, will respond to some of them and explain why we have not even had the courtesy of a response from the Prime Minister. The first point is that 3 months after this event, which caused such terrible results for the West Coast, not just for the forests, but for individuals’ homes and properties—it was just the most destructive force that we have seen for many years, other than the earthquakes, obviously—Nick Smith says that we are going to have this bill not just introduced, not with a truncated select committee process, and not with any consideration of the actual time that is required to get logging permits out but that we are going to ram this bill through all stages under urgency.
I know the National Party conference is starting on Friday night, so the National Party members do not care if they are stuck in Wellington. It might actually be a very generous way of saving taxpayers’ money, by not enabling them to commute home tomorrow and come back on Friday night—
Mike Sabin: It could just be to stop the timber from rotting on the ground while we stand in here postulating.
Chris Auchinvole: The timber would rot.
Hon RUTH DYSON: There is no need for urgency on this, and if there was some time constraint, we put it in writing that we would support a truncated select committee process. If West Coasters are so important, Mr Sabin and Mr Auchinvole, give them a chance to have a say. Give them a chance to have a say through a select committee process. This is a cheap political stunt, not a serious commitment to the West Coast. That is the first point. Justify this outrageous use of urgency through all stages without anyone having an opportunity to have a say. There is no commitment, despite what the Minister of Conservation said, to make sure that any jobs that are a result of this legislation go to West Coasters. That was the second point that we made. There is no need for the 5-year time frame of this, and we proposed a 2-year time frame, which would be more than adequate. This bill does not say that there will be a truncated process of consideration under the Resource Management Act. It says that the Resource Management Act does not apply—it does not apply. There could be wholesale environmental degradation with no comeback—
Hon Dr Nick Smith: Rubbish!
Hon RUTH DYSON: —because the law says those specific sections of the Resource Management Act do not apply. It is in the legislation, and if you are arguing about it, Dr Smith, read the bill. It is in your name. It is a total embarrassment to have the Minister of Conservation, charged under statute with protecting our most precious land and surrounds, saying: “Oh, but don’t worry about the Resource Management Act. Destroy the environment, destroy the rivers, and do what you like, because it’s so urgent and so important.” We said that it was not appropriate to absolutely remove any provisions of protection under the Resource Management Act.
We wanted some consideration given to the people whose livelihoods currently depend on the legal milling of indigenous trees. They are not doing all that well. We know that there are stockpiles. We know that they have not got booming businesses. What does flooding the market with trees under this legislation do to people who have a legitimate business already? What does it do to them? I know that the National Party is all keen on market forces, but this changes the rules totally for those people who already have a legitimate business, and they are very unhappy about that. What about the people who worked so hard to get their rights under SILNA finally determined? What does it do to them? Ah, there is a bit of silence from the National members; it is a pleasant change. They do not give a toss, actually, about the livelihoods of the existing West Coast business people who fought to get their businesses going, who have been acting inside the law—
Chris Auchinvole: No, come on. You shut them down. You forced them to go exotic.
Hon RUTH DYSON: —and who are struggling for both beech and rimu. There are existing businesses—Chris Auchinvole does not even know who they are. That is extraordinary. There are existing businesses that have permits that will have their market flooded as a result of this legislation. Existing businesses will be threatened, rather than having their workforce enhanced.
The final point I want to make is that the maps that are supposed to describe the areas on the West Coast that will be available for logging under this bill should be included in the legislation. If you are going to go through all stages of a bill under urgency—and gosh, we have seen some problems from Nick Smith in terms of legislation rammed through and with inappropriate use of ministerial powers before; this would not be the first time by any means—then we want to try to make a bad bill better. It should have the scrutiny of a select committee. It should have the maps that describe the areas from which logs will be able to be taken as part of the legislation, not as an add-on.
There are some quite fundamental problems with this legislation. I saw the pretty picture in the paper. The Department of Conservation paid $6,500 for the picture of Peter Dunne, Te Ururoa Flavell, and Dr Nick Smith sitting surrounded by felled trees. I think they should ask for a refund. It was pretty awful, actually. You could have done a better one on your smartphone, Dr Smith. You could have done a selfie. It cost $6,500 for a photo opportunity just 3 months out from an election. What does that say about the cynicism of the National Party? What does it say about the desperation of the Hon Peter Dunne and Te Ururoa Flavell from the Māori Party that they will travel all that way in order to get a photo op with the Minister?
Mr Brownlee, when you take the call, please give us the courtesy of responding to the letter. We have had no response at all from the Prime Minister and it is not good enough.
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery): I cannot work out from the speech given by their lead speaker this afternoon, Ruth Dyson, exactly what it is that the Labour members find so troublesome in the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. It is hard to work out why it is that they would deny that there is a significant resource lying on the ground and likely to rot with no value to anyone and why they are saying “Just leave it there. Do not touch it.” Then they are dressing it up by saying that they do not want to touch it and they do not want it used because the local people on the West Coast have not had a chance to have their say about whether we should or not.
I would say to Labour members that they should go back to Blackball, where they did their grandstanding efforts just a few months ago, and go to other small communities on the West Coast and ask them want they think. If the answer is not 90 percent in favour of recovering this timber, then I will eat my hat. If I were Damien O’Connor, who is relying on the defence of the Labour position in that speech by Ruth Dyson, then I would say: “Now you all know why I look even more grey than usual.”
What an appalling argument to run. Firstly, there is a suggestion that there will be the destruction of an industry on the West Coast that exists now. Well, the destruction of that industry occurred in the early 2000s, when native logging was cut dead—cut dead. There were all sorts of extravagant promises made to millers at the time about the quantity—or the stumpage, as it is known—in the exotic forests. What was found in a very short time? That it did not exist. There were people on the West Coast who made millions of dollars’ worth of investments in what they thought would be an exotic-logging opportunity for them, and that was lost because of misinformation peddled by the then Labour Government about the state of those timber stocks.
Here we have the party that did all that coming into this House today to say that if we were to recover some of those 200,000 hectares of wind-blown timber—a small fraction of that will be recovered, mind you; that is all—it would destroy some local industries. Well, I need to tell the House that this will not make one jot of price difference to any of those superb timbers.
It will be an adjunct to the market—no doubt about that—but it will let other New Zealanders share the sort of ambience that members of Parliament sit in every day that the House sits.
The other thing that I found fascinating about that speech from Ruth Dyson was the concern for the local member, Damien O’Connor—actually, I should say the lack of concern for the local member. I suppose that is the problem. As I spoke of before, the local millers on the West Coast made those big investments thinking that there would be exotic logs for them to cut, but found that there were not and found that their businesses in trouble. They went to the local member and said: “Can we have some help? The Government is not able to honour its promises to us”—the Labour Government—“so can you help us out? We’ve made these big investments.” He did nothing—not a thing. He did not lift a finger. He was sitting in Cabinet and never even brought the issue up. It took the advocacy of the National member Chris Auchinvole to put it before Cabinet and to get a resolution. In 2010 it was a National Government that came to the aid of that distressed industry on the West Coast, not a Labour Government.
Hon Ruth Dyson: Oh, ha, ha!
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: They sit over there, laughing. Well, Mr O’Connor, do not laugh at your own constituents, would be a good piece of advice that I am sure the Speaker would want to give you.
The other point that staggered me was Ruth Dyson sort of labouring over this idea that the Department of Conservation, which will be the beneficiary of funds that are accumulated from this particular exercise, was spending about $6,500 on a photo opportunity. Well, let me tell the House this: 1 cubic metre of mataī timber will sell for that price—1 cubic metre. We have got at least 200,000 hectares of native timbers that will be recovered. There are probably up to 10 cubic metres in each single stump, so that is tens of thousands of cubic metres. So taking the equivalent of 1 cubic metre to tell the West Coast, very publicly and in a very demonstrable way, that United Future, the Māori Party, and the National Party are very keen on giving them an opportunity in their area seems to me to be pretty good value. Certainly, it is cheaper than the cost of having to bail out the West Coasters who were lied to by the previous Labour Government over the extent of the exotic stumpage available to them.
Hon Ruth Dyson: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I take offence at the comment the Minister just made, and I ask you to require him to withdraw and apologise.
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): No. This is a very robust debate. We live in a healthy democracy. The member is not making any dispersions against members individually. He has addressed the House. This is a robust debate.
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: Well, let us look at it this way, then: the Labour Government went out and ended the indigenous timber industry on the West Coast—shut it down. Firstly, it gave some money to a trust to see what it could do, and then said to all the millers over there “Here are multiple blocks of indigenous timber so that the industry can carry on.” In a very short time it was proven that the figures that the Labour Government gave to those millers were wrong, and people lost tens of thousands of dollars in individual businesses.
Chris Auchinvole: Closing businesses.
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: Those businesses, in many cases, closed down. It took nearly 10 years and the advocacy of Chris Auchinvole to point out the terrible situation that the Labour Government had dumped the West Coast in and for that matter to be sorted out. I was very pleased to be in the party with him in 2010 when we sorted that out.
So, coming back to this bill, the issue here is simply this: if the Conservation Act back in 1987 had anticipated that there could be these tens of thousands of hectares damaged by windfall, would it perhaps have made some provision for it then? The fact is that it has been almost 30 years since that Act was passed, and this is the first and only time that we have seen this type of destruction, so it is appropriate that the person who brings this bill to the House, the Minister of Conservation, is able to recognise that this is an extraordinary opportunity for the House to consider a one-off exception to that Act. It would be utterly appalling if all of that wind-blown timber was just left there to rot—just left there to waste.
The other point I would make—and there will be people out there who want to argue with me on this because they, of course, will be learned people who know a lot about this from their textbooks—is that if timber is left to lie on the ground like that, it will delay the regeneration. It will delay the regeneration.
I well remember my uncle, who was involved in West Coast timber milling, telling the story of a group of conservationists, with a very well-known conservationist leading them—a person well known to us, in fact. They came up the road in a bit of a bust, on the bush road. My uncle came across him coming out of the bush in his Land Rover with the crew. When they met on the one-way road and had a bit of a talk, these guys said they were coming to have a look at the native logging operation there on the Coast. He said to them: “Well, look around, because this is where it is, and this is where it has happened.” That was selective logging in new, clean native forest. It had regenerated to that level very, very quickly. I make the point too, and you can argue if you like, that a beech forest can return in 80 years. So why would we leave trees rotting for 30 years, prolonging that regrowth to 110 years, when you could have it sooner? These are the small little points that the Green Party will overcome because, all of a sudden, there is going to be an explosion of bugs and all sorts of other grubs that eat timber. And when that happens, we will probably be cutting down the trees so that we can feed those bugs and grubs in the long term!
I think that this is a good bill. I think that it does reach a pragmatic solution and it creates an opportunity for the West Coast. I have got to say that even if he crosses the floor on this bill, everyone on the West Coast will know that voting for Mr O’Connor—voting for a Labour-led Government with the Greens driving the bus—is never going to see progress for them.
Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): If ever there was a person and a speech that epitomised the history of the West Coast, then it was that one—arrogant, patronising preaching from someone sitting over in Christchurch about what is best for the West Coast, when for generations his family took the sawmilling and their profits over the hill. This Government wants to do the same thing here. All I ask of the Minister of Conservation and of Gerry Brownlee is to put a clause in this West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservational Lands) Bill that guarantees benefits for the West Coast.
We have heard all the pathetic excuses from Nick Smith, who is dancing on the head of a pin. Well, I will put my credentials on the table. I was born into and grew up in the bush. My father purchased a bit of land that was bush, that was native forest, and slowly pushed it over to create a farm. I lived in it. I know what the dynamics of it are, so do not come preaching from your bloody Fendalton home, Mr Brownlee—
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Order!
Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: —Mr Assistant Speaker—about what happens in the bush of the West Coast.
Chris Auchinvole: Brownlee’s mill was one of the best mills.
Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: Mr Auchinvole is no better. The history of our region is people like Mr Brownlee and Mr Auchinvole coming in and promising wonderful things for our region, through sawmilling initially and through mining, and then packing their bags and moving out, leaving the locals to try to find some job opportunities.
You would have thought that we would have learnt over the generations. Well, indeed, it was not that long ago—in fact, only a couple of months—when the repetition of that sad event, that sad reality, came back to haunt us, when people sitting on their butts in Christchurch at Solid Energy, with a board appointed by a bunch of Tories in Government, ruined that company by upping the rates of debt, increasing the dividend to the Tory Government, and then, of course, it collapsed when, inevitably, the coal price went down. Who has suffered most? The West Coast people.
What we had was a natural event. I accept Cyclone Ita was quite significant. We have not seen anything like that in living memory on our coast, and I have certainly seen tens of thousands of hectares that have been severely damaged; that is right. So I understand the potential value in the logs that are on the ground.
I also understand the difficulties in extracting safely that timber from those forests. If you talk to any experienced forester down there, they will tell you that that is perhaps some of the most dangerous forest and forestry activity that you can undertake. Indeed, there are some valuable logs and timber there. But, as the Minister himself said, most of that will have to be extracted by way of helicopter. The only timber of value that can possibly pay for that high-value extraction is, indeed, rimu. The previous speaker, Gerry Brownlee, talked about mataī. There may be the odd mataī tree there, but in fact it will be the rimu. The reality of what happens every day that the timber is on the ground is that in our climate we do have breakdown very quickly. We do have spoilage of the logs and it is only the heart rimu that would be of any value after 2 years.
I have had some interesting and robust discussion with my colleagues. I put on the table once again my knowledge from firsthand experience in the bush. I believe we can extract some of those logs. I think we can do it economically and safely, but it will be only a very small amount of timber from those forests and it will probably just be rimu. So should we take that opportunity? Well, I have always said yes. I do not believe that it will upset the biological cycle in the forests. Indeed, if we leave them all there, there might be bugs that end up looking like Mr Brownlee—that is, too much nutrient in one space is conducive to not the very best of, I guess, ongoing health and behaviour. It is done in jest. It is not a personal affront to Mr Brownlee. I am saying that it comes from sitting in Fendalton and not on the West Coast. That is what happened. None of his relatives enjoyed that level of comfort on the West Coast when they were sawmilling.
Can I just go back to Mr Smith, who very righteously, piously, and pompously said that we should do this for West Coast benefit, and then refused to put in place minor amendments, which I will table, that will give preferential access for West Coasters. I put before you this scenario: having helicopter extraction, helicopters from Rotorua most likely, and logging gangs, again possibly from Rotorua, and trucks, possibly from Christchurch, taking those logs outside the West Coast delivers very few benefits for our region.
And do you know what? West Coasters are a bit more astute now than they were when Mr Brownlee’s ancestors came to our region. We had a story about Timberlands West Coast and the transition into exotics. Can I tell you that the reason we did not know the exact volume of the exotic logs in the region is because Timberlands West Coast, a company run by a bunch of Tories appointed by the National Government in the 1990s, was misleading the Government in terms of what was happening in the forest. You can talk to anyone on the West Coast and they will verify that. We were misled by a company that did not operate properly, that did not operate ethically, and that, in fact, in the view of many West Coasters, destroyed the opportunity that we potentially had. Moving on to the piece of legislation that we have now, it is again, as I say, one more arrogant piece of legislation proposing to offer huge and ongoing benefits to the people of the West Coast, but in fact is offering opportunities for people to come in, to get a sweet deal with the Director-General of Conservation, and to take those logs outside our region.
I come back to the point about the two mills in our regions that are capable of cutting the logs. I am sure that they would welcome a few more logs. But if you talk to them about the market and about the fragile price—and it is high. Mr Brownlee is quite correct. And it should be high. But it is very, very easy to undermine the value of that timber on the market because, for whatever reason—the chicken and the egg—rimu has fallen out of fashion with many furniture manufacturers and high-value users. Can I say that the risk to the market price of rimu would indeed undermine the economics of some of this extraction. I ask in my amendment, as well, that any permit to extract this includes a requirement for the person getting the timber to manage that timber on to the market in a way that does not undervalue or destroy the value of that timber.
I support the extraction of these logs. There are opportunities, potentially, from it, but there is also a huge risk that if, in the typically Tory, arrogant way, members opposite preach to us what we are supposed to get and then offer the opportunities to their mates and walk away with the benefits in their pockets, there will not be ongoing and lasting benefits to our West Coast community. This is an opportunity, but it is one that in the hands of that Government, without amendment to that legislation, will be lost to our region. I say to the Minister, Nick Smith, who is dancing on the head of a pin with his speech, that you ensure that the—
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Order!
Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: —Mr Smith, but I am sure you would too, Mr Assistant Speaker—benefits accrue to our region, to the people who need jobs, to the 1,000 miners who have lost jobs because of that Government’s incompetent oversight of Solid Energy. This will offer a few jobs. It is crying crocodile tears to say that Government members care about the West Coast when they let 1,000 miners walk from Solid Energy because of your incompetent oversight of a company that should still be employing more miners in our region. This is an opportunity for the West Coast. I cannot guarantee that those opportunities can be taken up.
EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. It is a tragedy, not that there has been a large area of windthrow, but to hear the sentiments extolled by Mr Brownlee that we are not wealthy enough in this country to set aside some areas that we protect permanently, where nature can rule and where we can experience nature on nature’s terms. That is why we have protected our conservation land as places where nature dominates. We are a windy country. We have big snowstorms. We have big wind storms. Windthrow on the West Coast is nature in action, and if we are to be serious about setting aside parts of New Zealand, to protect them for their own sake and for the sake of all of the species that call them home, and if we are serious about protecting them so that present and future generations can experience something of the original New Zealand, then we do not open them up to mining, to oil and gas drilling, and now to logging, as this Government is doing. It is because the National Party is stuck in the past, with its destructive short-term thinking, which Mr Brownlee embodied in his speech. It has got economic policies that revolve around the aggressive exploitation of nature—dig it, drill it, frack it, irrigate it, and, now, log it.
The West Coast forests are nature’s cathedrals. You have the grand beech forests on the fertile river flats, with their big branches. You have the rimu trees festooned with orchids and climbing plants. You can hear the call of the korimako, the tui, and, if you are lucky at night, the kiwi. We in the Green Party respect these places. We would protect them, not open them up to chainsaws, to skidders, to haulers, and to all of the damage that they will do. Conservation lands are supposed to be the areas that we set aside, but nothing is sacred to this National Government—nothing at all. The Minister suggested yesterday that logging had occurred numerous times on conservation land. That was very misleading. Certainly, it has occurred where there were past licences, prior to the Conservation Act that allowed logging. It has occurred near Reefton, where there has been a big open-cast goldmine.
But the Conservation Act deliberately prohibits the extraction of timber for commercial purposes from our protected areas. That was quite deliberate because of what happened with the Forest Service, prior to the establishment of the Department of Conservation. In a very perverse way, it twisted the legislation at the time and twisted the concept of extracting dead trees to include dying trees and then to include living trees in the Kaimai Mamaku Conservation Park. Parliament deliberately, in section 30 of the Conservation Act, prohibited the use of conservation land for logging for commercial gain. That provision has enjoyed widespread public support for the last 27 years.
Mr Brownlee, with his comments that the waste of timber is a disgrace, shows a profound misunderstanding of basic ecology. Nature does not do waste. Death is part of nature’s cycle. Trees are not going to waste if they decay in the forest. They are an important part of the forest ecosystem. Where you have standing dead trees, they provide nesting holes for species like kākā and kākāriki, and then when you have rotting trees on the forest floor they store carbon and they recycle nutrients back into the forest soils. Thousands of species, from fungi to insects to birds, rely on these rotting logs for food. They provide a home to these species. They provide moist sites for insects, which birds like kiwi need to feed on, and they provide ideal sites for regeneration for new forest giants. The Minister does not care or does not understand that rotting logs are an essential part of the forest ecosystem. If you are not protecting the whole cycle of the forest, you are not protecting the forest at all. I encourage the Minister and Mr Brownlee to read the blog by ecologist Michael North, on the Forest and Bird website, where he highlights just how much windthrow and the cycle of decay are a natural part of our forest system and a really important part of it.
Past Governments have progressively wound back the logging of our magnificent rimu and beech forests on public lands, in response to the public demand for their protection. We finally stopped logging on public land on the West Coast in 1999, as one of the first acts of a new Labour Government to stop Timberlands’ destructive West Coast beech scheme. That scheme involved helicopter logging. It was not the gentle extraction of single logs from the forest. It was pockmarking the forest with an ugly series of 2 to 3 hectare clear cuts. That is what we will get with this bill. We stopped logging on public land for a very good reason. We need to protect what remains because we have been so successful in clearing, burning, converting to pasture, and destroying the native forest that make these islands of Aotearoa so very special.
Forests once covered 85 percent of New Zealand—some 23 million hectares—yet in the space of just 25 to 30 generations, humans have reduced our forest cover to around 20 percent of land area. That has had a devastating effect on our biodiversity, on our plants, and on our wildlife because of the loss of habitat. The industry has been winding down because New Zealanders have pushed past Governments to wind it down and to protect these areas. New Zealanders see more value in the forests as habitat for plants, for wildlife, and for the species that make New Zealand special. No other country has birds like our flightless parrot, the kakapo, and like the kiwi, which has got nostrils at the end of its beak. No other country has species like the giant wētā, which preforms the role of rodents in other countries. Our biodiversity is some of the most distinctive in the world. We have so many species that are found only here in Aotearoa: all of our reptiles, 90 percent of our insects, 80 percent of our vascular plants, and 25 percent of our bird species. That is why we need to protect forests on conservation land, not open them up to logging.
We have a biodiversity crisis with over 2,000 species threatened with extinction, yet what is the Government doing? It is not spending more on conservation to fund predator control, but opening up our public protected areas to logging—
Hon Dr Nick Smith: Yes, we are.
EUGENIE SAGE: Yes, only money that you have managed to save because the Department of Conservation did not cut as many staff in its restructuring last year.
We are opposing this bill. The reason the Government wants to push it through under urgency is because it knows that the public will oppose it when they understand that it is not just single-tree extraction. We will see logging trucks, skidders, haulers, and heavy equipment on conservation land destroying our forests, opening up large areas to weeds, destroying the ground conditions, destroying the natural drainage patterns, and devastating a large area of forest in order to access the wind-thrown trees. There is nothing in this bill that restricts the logging to helicopters. Instead, we will get the ground equipment used, the big heavy machinery, which has been so devastating in logging on the West Coast in the past. When you have been through a forest that has been logged, it is soul-destroying because it such a desolate landscape, such a broken landscape. That is what this Government is allowing by bringing the chainsaws back on to conservation land when Parliament 27 years ago deliberately decided that we should not have logging for commercial gain.
Hon JO GOODHEW (Associate Minister for Primary Industries): It gives me much pleasure to rise and take a call in this debate, as we debate the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. I want to begin by spending just a moment on the purpose, which I know we will debate a little later, but just to remind members why we are here. The purpose of this bill is to allow the Director-General of Conservation to “authorise the removal from certain conservation areas and reserves in the West Coast region of timber irreversibly damaged by Cyclone Ita.” Wind-blown timber is what it is known as.
I rise to take this call as the Associate Minister for Primary Industries with responsibility for forestry and having a very real interest in this area. I would like to pay tribute right now to my colleague the Hon Dr Nick Smith. I do so because—and I think my colleagues would join with me and agree in saying—there is no greener member of our blue party than the Hon Nick Smith. Therefore, this is a member who gets biodiversity, who gets the importance of the environment, and who understands that there cannot be any economy without the environment and that they go together hand in glove. That is in fact why he has championed these causes within the National Party for so long. However, I want to say that it is this party that sees beyond blind ideology. It sees that we must have a thoughtful response to an unusual event, which was Cyclone Ita.
I visited the West Coast, and I was there on 3 May. I visited to look at the windthrown timber, which largely was in the Crown forestry estate. I also got to see a lot of the native timbers that were down on the ground. I was struck by the patches of devastation. I was struck by how long it was going to take for the recovery to occur. What the Hon Nick Smith saw in this was an opportunity for there not to be as much devastation—for, in fact, a principled, thoughtful, measured response to this particular event.
I have to say, we take our hats off also to the candidate for West Coast - Tasman Maureen Pugh, because right there on the coast she has been besieged by people who have a view that something should be done about this. The people of the West Coast absolutely get that fallen timbers are required for biodiversity—that you actually need to let things rot—but this was on such a large scale compared with anything that had been seen before.
So what this bill does is it takes a pragmatic approach. Let us face it: there does need to be some urgent action when we talk about beech timbers. The other timbers over the course of the period that this legislation will exist for will not have such a pressure to be logged or extracted. This was an extreme event. This is the sort of event that requires a pragmatic approach, keeping in mind the principles that any revenue from this event from actually logging this timber should rightly go back to the Department of Conservation, and that in fact safety—as a previous member has already said—will be paramount. This is the most dangerous logging experience anyone working in forestry will undertake. They have to be specially certificated to carry out this sort of recovery, and the Coasters know that, as well. It will be jobs for Coasters. It will be jobs that the Hon Damien O’Connor should be thinking very carefully about. This is an opportunity that should be very carefully managed. I commend the Minister and this bill for what I believe is a pragmatic way forward to achieve that.
RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): I am pleased to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to take the first of as many calls as are needed in order for Parliament to deal with this urgent piece of legislation that we have before us, the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. New Zealand First does not ordinarily support the passing of legislation under urgency. Governments riding roughshod over the established conventions of democracy is anathema to our beliefs, and it is not something we view favourably or undertake lightly or often. However, there are times when we realise, as others realise, and as we believe that the majority of the public realises, that sometimes Parliament has to act swiftly.
There are times when pragmatism trumps principle—not often, not frequently, not lightly. But there are times when people realise that although a given situation may not be particularly serious in itself, the consequences of failing to act swiftly with regard to it may be more serious than the temporary sidelining of what would otherwise be due process. It was our initial reaction when the issue to which this bill relates came to the fore that this was probably going to be such an occasion.
However, on closer inspection of the bill we have before us we found ourselves coming to the conclusion that such an approach is not appropriate in this particular case. Digging deeper and deeper into the bill, we found serious departures from what we had initially believed to be a reasoned and reasonable response to the consequences of a major meteorological event of the type that afflicts our country from time to time. It was for this reason that we chose to oppose urgency in this case.
For reasons I will outline, we are supporting this bill, on condition, only as far as the Committee stage. From then on our continued support will be dependent on whether the Government can agree to address the number of very serious concerns we hold about this bill as it is presented. It is apparent that the Government has a completely disingenuous agenda with regard to this bill. The intent of this bill—the stated intent, the intent as advertised—is something that New Zealand First would like to support. Our principles and policies are completely in line with that intention. Allowing such a tragically serendipitous occurrence as this to go to waste is anathema to our philosophy.
This is a windfall indeed. The storm that has brought us this wind-blown timber has been a tragedy for our forests, but using this occurrence as an excuse to throw out our principles and protocols, to put aside our hard-won environmental protections, would be to turn a singular tragedy into an ongoing series of catastrophes. New Zealand First wants to see some changes to this bill and we want some honest explanations from the Government as to why it contains certain of the provisions that it does.
Firstly, I want to know why the Government went back on its word and made this bill the first item of business today rather the second, as it had previously indicated. The final version of the bill hit the Table and straight away the debate began, despite members on this side not having seen anything beyond the first draft. That is disingenuous.
Secondly, we want the process by which applications for extraction permits are issued to be fair, honest, and transparent. At the moment it is not. The Director-General of Conservation can invite people to apply by any means he or she chooses—by an advertisement in the public notices, by the issuing of a tender, or by simply getting on the phone to someone they believe is up to the job. Then they can engage in any sort of negotiation that takes their fancy, behind closed doors. We want these jobs to go to New Zealand companies and preferably to West Coast companies.
Thirdly, we want the existing environmental protections under the Resource Management Act to be maintained. At present sections 9, 13, 14, and 15 are exempted for 5 years. Restrictions on the use of land, restrictions on the uses of riverbeds and lakebeds, restrictions on water use, and restrictions on discharge to water are gone—all of them—for 5 years. For 5 years people—anyone the Director-General cares to give the job to—can go into the bush, bulldoze a road, dam a river, dump whatever rubbish they like back into it, and haul away wind-blown trees. If it is not the intention that this happens, why is it allowed for?
Fourthly, we want the West Coast to be the principal beneficiary from this exercise in terms of jobs and processing. That is not in the bill now. Fifthly, we want the prohibition on the export of native timber extended to this recovery operation. At the moment the bill says that sawn timber from beech and rimu can be exported—madness. Pardon my cynicism, but it is madness for sawn native timber to be sent overseas to be made into furniture and then brought back here to be sold.
Sixthly, we want the royalty regime for native timber to be enshrined in the bill and for 25 percent of the royalties collected to go back to the West Coast. As it stands, there is no provision for the Coast to be granted a cent from this wealth and the Director-General has the absolute discretion to waive or refund any royalties that are charged.
To recap, this is what can happen under the bill as it is presented. The Director-General of Conservation can get on the phone to a logging company from Australia or Canada or anywhere else and invite it to apply for extraction rights. The offshore company can negotiate its price behind closed doors, then it can come in and bulldoze a track through a national park, put culverts into the river beds, dam the rivers for water for the operations, dump their waste back into the rivers, kill as many kiwi as they like and not be in breach of the Wildlife Act—
Hon Dr Nick Smith: That’s not true.
RICHARD PROSSER: It is in the bill, Minister. It can take out a truckload of prime rimu, mill the trunks into logs, send the sawn timber to China, have it made into tables and Scotch dressers, and send them back here to be sold as New Zealand native timber furniture—and then get a refund on the royalties it should have given to the Crown. The West Coast gets nothing and New Zealand gets nothing, except shafted. If none of that is going to happen, then why does the bill specifically allow and provide for it?
We want to see this timber used. We do not want to see it go to waste. But we want to see the benefits go to the people of the Coast and to “New Zealand Inc.” and we want to see our environment preserved. We will support this bill only if those things can be agreed to and guaranteed. Thank you.
TE URUROA FLAVELL (Co-Leader—Māori Party): Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Kia ora tātou katoa i tēnei ahiahi. Ka nui te mihi ki a tātou. I am pleased to take a call on behalf of the Māori Party in respect of the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill, and I have got to say from the very beginning that there is different perspective for Māori that is a little bit divergent to the conservation ethic among those in the modern conservation movement who may appear to have a more empathetic attitude towards indigenous ecological knowledge. They may assume that their environmental ethics and those of indigenous peoples like Māori are motivated by similar philosophies and share similar aims. However, not only is this assumption often wrong; it also contributes to the inability of the Western conservation movement to properly serve the needs of and fully empower indigenous conservation aspirations, as guaranteed to Māori under the Treaty of Waitangi.
Two months ago, as the Minister of Conservation has outlined, those forces of nature had a particularly dire impact as Cyclone Ita left large proportions of the forests, hundreds of years old, completely flattened. We know that the communities of Whataroa and Harihari were the worst hit, where floods created devastating damage to tōtara forests. That is Tawhirimatea at work; that is nature at work. There is a saying from ngā pepeha a ngā tupuna. It goes something like this “He rākau ka hinga ki te mana o wai”—a tree will fall to the flood. In essence, it tells us that there will always be forces to contend with, and that life should be valued while it remains. I think it is important to note that the forces of nature have through time wreaked havoc on our communities, leaving families cast aside as they have tried to repair their lives. Just this afternoon before I came to the House, Ruaumoko was at work. I felt a bit of a jolt as we came across, and we know, of course, that earlier in the day, I think it was, there was a series of other earthquakes at Eketāhuna, all enforcing the idea that Ruaumoko was at work—nature was at work.
When the Minister presented the bill, wishing to move on this particular proposal to us as the Māori Party, we went, as we usually do, to the people of the land. We got feedback from Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu. They gave us a blessing, but they also put some questions to us, and we in turn put those questions directly to the Minister. Just last week he invited me to go with him to look over the site, an exercise I very much appreciated because then you get a real understanding about the scale of what went on—nature at work. I appreciated seeing for myself large areas of land with trees just toppled over like matchsticks, and also standing in amongst it. Some might say it was a photo opportunity; I would like to say I was actually seeing for myself what it was all about and knowing that there were trees that had been there for a very long period of time that would just go to waste unless something was done about it.
Sure, there were concerns, and I want to outline those for the record on behalf of the Māori Party. We have expressed the view that the timber recovery should not occur in areas of the national park, ecological areas, the white heron colony, or World Heritage listing areas. The proposal confirms this and notes that it is restricted to conservation lands outside those areas I just mentioned. We have also been reassured that the local rūnanga will have access for recovery of felled timber for customary purposes. Of course, Ngāi Tahu would agree to that and get back into that.
The bill has many checks in it regarding minimising the environmental effects of recovery and ensuring the health and safety of timber recovery workers. Operators will provide health and safety plans to show that their removal methods will be safe for workers and for the public. I thought that was quite an important condition in light of the fact that at the beginning of last week I was in Rotorua at the hearing of the independent panel on health and safety in the forests. Its members are the ones who have demanded that this sort of legislation be put in place, not for the trees but around health and safety being important considerations.
The reason for urgency is that the beech timber will rapidly deteriorate, and borer and sap stains and all that sort of stuff will start to take its part with the timber, and that if the wood is to be recovered, it needs to be done sooner rather than later. I can actually say that I saw that taking place in front of my own eyes—not that those bugs were moving around while I looked at it, but I certainly saw the damage they could create, therefore rendering that timber pretty much worthless.
The impacts of the timber removal would be minimised through strict controls. No significant soil disturbance would be allowed, and operators would be required to minimise damage to the forest and to the conservation values at the site. That seems to suit and fit exactly what we want to happen.
The scale of the damage from Cyclone Ita means that there are large amounts of dead and dying tree material available to contribute to natural nutrient cycling and habitat creation within the forest ecosystem. I have got to say that this was at the heart of many of the submissions I have received during this week about the recovery of the soil, allowing nature to take its course in due time and ensuring that there is minimal damage, if any, to the soil. Only timber that can be processed for high-value logs and sawn slabs would be recovered, leaving the rest of the tree in the forest available for plants and animals within the forest ecosystem. The removal of a small portion of that material is, therefore, from our perspective, unlikely to have too much of a significant effect, and the Minister has, effectively, given us the indication that that is the case.
It is proposed that the legislation would apply for a period of 5 years, after which it would be repealed and any timber removal would cease. I asked the Minister on the way to the venue whether this was the case with the time limit, to make sure that there is not too substantial damage that will be done within that ecosystem. That guarantee is there. Limiting the time period within which timber can be recovered would also limit the disturbance, as work would be undertaken prior to areas regenerating—a good provision. Revenue from timber royalties would go back into conservation and could be used for forest regeneration—for example, through controlling pests that eat the seeds for forest regeneration and weed control in affected areas. For it to go back into the conservation estate is right and proper. The West Coast Conservation Board and the local Ngāi Tahu rūnanga will be consulted on how the royalty revenues are spent. At least in this part, Māori do have a say in respect of how those royalties will go.
Research will also be commissioned on the effects of timber removal on forest regeneration to inform future decisions—a good provision that allows us to ensure this whole operation can be monitored from start to finish. We think that particular clause has got some seriously good parts to it.
Finally, this legislation will open up long-term employment and commercial opportunities for the community. Although we are sad to see that so much native timber has been blown over by Cyclone Ita, at the end of the day we were delighted that Ngāi Tahu and the rest of the West Coast community will benefit from the passing of this legislation. In a time when the West Coast, in particular, is screaming for work opportunities to come its way, we believe that this is an opportunity not to be wasted. When you look at the scale of the devastation and the small percentage of the area that will, in fact, be accessed by those who are successful in their tenders, it makes sense. It will allow for some employment to take place, and allow for business to have a go at regenerating businesses that have long been asleep. Over a set period of time we will have it all monitored and have certain restrictions in place. From the Māori Party perspective, this bill makes sense. We commend and support the Minister in his efforts to have this bill passed under urgency.
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour): There is some common sense in retrieving windfall logs from the West Coast for milling, for construction, or for furniture. There is something sensible about that. When some macrocarpa trees came down in a storm in Nelson a couple of years ago they were very quickly chopped up for firewood. That was an understandable response. They were on council land, and those bits that were still left when the council got to them were chopped up for firewood, dried, and sold.
There is a common-sense approach, in that respect, to retrieving windfall logs. The trouble is that everything that Nick Smith does is done for political advantage. It is not done because it is the right reason, because it is the right thing to do; it is done simply because it is expedient. He is the king of expediency for the National Party. This is the Minister of Conservation, who is very keen to save dead trees but not so good at saving live dolphins.
Another feature of Nick Smith’s bills is that they are invariably inadequate in one respect or another. They are either constitutionally out of order—and I do not have time today to enumerate the bills in this Minister’s name that have fallen foul of constitutional propriety—they are wrong in concept, or they are wrong in process. This one, the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Timber Bill, is wrong in process. It is this process that causes the Labour Party such trouble.
There is sense in recovering some windfall timber. There is sense in that. But there needs to be a proper process so that the country can be assured that there are sufficient safeguards. So why does the Minister not put this to proper process? Why not put it to a select committee? Why not even have the Prime Minister agree to the suggestion from the Leader of the Opposition, who said in his letter to the Prime Minister: “We are willing to assist in speedy but rigorous consideration of the proposal. We therefore ask, first, that a truncated select committee process be undertaken, allowing for the views of New Zealanders, particularly those from the West Coast, to be urgently considered.”? What was the harm in that? Why not take 3 weeks, instead of moving into urgency?
Where is the harm in delaying this by a matter of a few weeks and going through a truncated select committee process in order to get the protections right? This is absolutely the hallmark of Nick Smith’s inadequate legislation. It is expedient. It is a political point. It is going to look good for the candidate for the West Coast, coming up to the National Party conference this weekend.
Hon Chris Tremain: Support it then.
Hon MARYAN STREET: Those are the only reasons. We might support it, Mr Tremain, if the process was a respectful and an appropriate one. We might well have supported it.
I started my speech by saying there is some common sense in retrieving windfall timber. There is some common sense in that, but let us make sure that there is sufficient safeguard around the conservation estate that does not mean that this is a precedent, that this is in defiance of 27 years of multipartisan agreement across the House on the Conservation Act, and that it is not rammed through simply for the Minister’s own petty political advantage.
This is the problem. That Government might have received some support from this party had it just taken a moment to think about the process. We wrote to the Prime Minister stating that, in particular—stating that very thing. Not only have we not had an agreement; we have not even had, to my knowledge, an acknowledgment from the leader of that party to the leader of this party that there were some issues that needed consideration.
I come back to the Minister’s hallmarks. The process of urgency denotes game playing and expediency. In this bill and in this process now, Parliament’s Order Paper is being disrupted. There is no select committee process, and there are no public submissions. Nobody from the West Coast is able to be heard, with the exception of my good colleague the member for West Coast - Tasman, the Hon Damien O’Connor. There will be no improvements made to this bill, except by Supplementary Order Paper. So I invite the Minister or the next National Party speaker to say which of the Supplementary Order Papers they are prepared to support—
Hon Dr Nick Smith: Where are they? I haven’t seen any.
Hon MARYAN STREET: They are on the Table. They are available. As soon as they come back from the Clerk’s Office—
Hon Dr Nick Smith: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I seek some clarification from the clerks. The member has said that the Opposition’s Supplementary Order Papers—
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): No, no—that is not a point of order.
Hon MARYAN STREET: Thank you. There are Supplementary Order Papers. As soon as the Clerk’s Office releases them, I would like the Minister—but let me give the Minister an example of what the Supplementary Order Papers will involve, just so that he can decide whether or not they are worth supporting.
But just to finish my point on the process, unless there is some change to this legislation by Supplementary Order Paper, then the Labour Party will be compelled, with the exception of a couple of members, to oppose this bill. We will be compelled to oppose it, with the exception of a couple of members. Ah, look, here come the Supplementary Order Papers now. I hope the Minister will look at them and consider them, because otherwise this legislation has the same hallmark of Nick Smith, which says: “I’m right and everybody else is wrong.”
First of all, I want to contrast one of the points, and it is one that is contained in Supplementary Order Paper 475, and that is urgency being required now for something with a 5-year time frame—urgency now, for a 5-year time frame. If the Minister cannot see a contradiction in that, then he is limited. I was tempted to say something unparliamentary, but I restrained myself.
We have offered a shortened time frame in one of our Supplementary Order Papers. Take it down to 2 years. My preference would be for 1 year, but let us take it down to 2 years, so that we minimise the damage. If I understand correctly, the rationale for 5 years is something to do with heart rimu—that heart rimu actually takes a long time to degrade and that the beech timber will degrade quite quickly, and therefore it would be a good idea to get in promptly, but not at the exclusion of proper consultation process, Dr Smith.
The risks have not been addressed adequately in this legislation. The Māori Party said: “Oh, well, at least there’s a protection that there should be minimal harm done to the environment.” That is all the bill says—keep harm to the environment to a minimum. So if a four-lane highway is required to go into the conservation estate to retrieve this timber quickly, then one assumes that that is minimal harm to the environment. So where is the definition and where is the protection? Is this going to be a precedent? Every time there is a storm, are we going to have another piece of legislation with another geographic title to it, and just amend the purpose to refer to a particular area?
But, more than that, this Conservation Act has been agreed to for the last 27 years. When Ruth Dyson referred to that in her speech, the Minister of Conservation turned to a colleague behind him and said something to the effect of: “Oh well, I suppose that means we can’t change it.”—the fact that it has been agreed to for 27 years. Dr Smith, that simply goes to all the anxiety that we have on this side of the House that this is the thin end of the wedge, and that this is the Minister of Conservation who will preside over the demise of conservation. We would be keen to support this bill, if the Minister did anything about proper process. We will oppose this bill on those grounds alone.
CHRIS AUCHINVOLE (National): On 22 March 2006 I called for the then Minister of Conservation, the Hon Chris Carter, to take economic and social factors into account when making decisions on the permits for activities in the conservation estate. This was a major demand of people living on the West Coast then; it still is now. I am very pleased to have seen steady, albeit gradual, carefully designed development towards this objective, particularly over the years of the National-led Government since 2008.
A further encouragement to enter politics to represent the interests of people living in the coast came from the arbitrarily decided cessation of native logging by Helen Clark’s Labour Government. This was a classic illustration of Labour absolutist thinking: stop all logging, not some—all. There was no room for sustainable logging; there was no room for windthrow harvesting. Now that the far more balanced response to the windthrow timber recovery is proposed, what does Labour do? It decides to oppose the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. It decides to oppose the bill. I presume that the Labour member from the Coast, Damien O’Connor, will do his usual standard hand-washing, asking permission to vote in favour of it while at the same time proposing Supplementary Order Papers to limit the activity to restrict it to give it a stricture. That is crazy.
West Coasters will not find team National divided on this issue, either with our partner parties, Cabinet Ministers, members, or candidates for the next election. Labour, it seems, is riven with division on this issue. The reason is twofold: it wants to cuddle up to the Greens, and it has a tradition of treating the Coast with contempt.
Grant Robertson: Oh, coming from that party over there!
CHRIS AUCHINVOLE: Oh, yes, it does. Actually, the Key-led Government likes the Coast, admires the people who live on the Coast, and is happy on this occasion to allow the harvest of natural resources in the conservation estate—in this particular case, windthrown timber. I support this bill. Thank you.
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I understand the next call is a split call. Andrew Williams—5 minutes. Andrew Little.
ANDREW LITTLE (Labour): I am Andrew Little. That is all right, Mr Assistant Speaker—I have only been here nearly 3 years. It is easy to forget!
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): My apologies to Mr Little.
ANDREW LITTLE: It is all right, Mr Assistant Speaker. I appreciate the opportunity to speak on the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. It is a bit rich of that member Chris Auchinvole to claim that the National Party is the great loved one of the West Coast. The people of the West Coast loved their last National MP so much they threw him out at the last election. The truth is this: the West Coast thrived under the last Labour Government. It opened up mining. It had great investment in mining and in other activities. Tourism blossomed. I do not think they have a blossom festival on the West Coast; they may well do. Tourism, at least, flourished under the last Labour Government. In the dairy industry, the milk flush was flushing. It was a great time on the West Coast under the last Labour Government.
One thing is absolutely clear about this bill, however, and that is that this is not a West Coast economic development measure. This is a cynical manipulation by a desperate National Government of a difficult situation for the West Coast, a region of the country that has been hard hit by economic downturn and now by weather events. And what does the National Government do? It manipulates, it calculates, it connives, and it cajoles. It is not about good-quality, sustainable economic development; it is about manipulating people in a difficult and sensitive time of their lives.
So here is the reality. There are two things that are very important to members on this side of the House and, I think, to all New Zealanders. One is conservation and, certainly, preservation of the conservation estate. That has been a cast-iron principle for this party and this side of the House from time immemorial. That is an important principle. The other important principle is promoting economic development, particularly in the regions, and especially now on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, to be absolutely specific—coming from a west coast electorate myself, but it happens to be in the North Island. What we have now in this country in most regions, including in Taranaki, but actually especially on the West Coast, are people crying out for a Government that understands regional economic development and crying out for a Government that is prepared to do a serious regional economic development plan, not this sort of spontaneous, opportunistic, manipulative strategy that we have got from the Government at the moment. No siree, that is not what we want. We want a proper, serious economic development plan, and this is not it. I personally have no objection to the extraction of windfall timber, but what I do not like, and what the Labour Party and my colleagues do not like, is the manipulative, silly, dumb way that this Government goes about dealing with this issue. You do not need to have a 5-year time frame. You do not need to eradicate coverage of the Resource Management Act on this sort of stuff for that sort of length of period of time.
The other thing you need to be is totally and utterly honest with the people whom you claim to be benefiting. Chris Auchinvole sits there with a Cheshire cat grin on his face because he knows he is in trouble, even though he is on his way out. He knows that when he goes back to the Coast and has to rub shoulders with the rich and wealthy of the Coast, he is going to have to explain why it is, Mr Auchinvole, that when this bill is passed, the West Coast actually will not see much as a result of it. It is going to be all the people outside the region of the West Coast. It will be mills all up and down the South Island because there are not many in the West Coast area that actually accommodate the timber that is going to be processed. Why is it that there will be very few suppliers of allied services that will benefit from this?
This is just a joke. This is the National Party of old—the old Muldoon. It is sort of the equivalent in 2014 of the Clyde Dam empowering legislation, and it will do nothing for the people who it claims benefit the most. It is a nasty sort of politics, and a nasty National Government, and it will not help the people, but, above all, it is a manipulation of important protections that we have in this country for the conservation estate, and an open-ended abuse of protection rights, and it is nothing to do with jobs on the West Coast. There is only one party that understands that, and it is the Labour Party, because we have experts in Damien O’Connor and experts from the last Government, which did so well in job generation when we were last in Government.
GARETH HUGHES (Green): This is not a speaking slot; it is a point of order. I seek leave at the conclusion of this first reading that this bill, the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill, is sent to the Local Government and Environment Committee for a 2-week period, with a report-back date of 10 July, so that the public can have a say on this important matter.
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is objection. I am calling Gareth Hughes. [Interruption] Sorry, Catherine Delahunty. Are you taking the call?
Catherine Delahunty: Yes, I am.
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Catherine Delahunty—5 minutes.
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): That was a point of order; I am taking my call. It is truly a bizarre moment in the history of this country when the Minister of Conservation gets up to do everything he can to justify logging fallen native trees for commercial gain, not all over the place but on conservation land, so that money can be made. It seems as if milling fallen native timber is suddenly the new cool conservation strategy. Black is white, and George Orwell would be rewriting Nineteen Eighty-Four. The bigger picture here has nothing to do with common sense or collecting firewood. It is an attack on the Conservation Act for the long term, and on that basis we must oppose it and take it very, very seriously.
The process point must be addressed. My colleague Gareth Hughes was quite right to rise and talk about the fact that we need a select committee referral. Three months after the storm we are suddenly in urgency because somebody has had a big idea, and that big idea, which has no ecological worth, or economic worth, necessarily, has suddenly been imposed. We have all seen the photograph but what we have not seen is the trees. We have not talked about the conservation values or what conservation land is set aside for.
Why the Government would want to undermine the consensus of the last 27 years is a very interesting question, but it is a kind of consistent position for it. It has never supported an end to logging on the West Coast in native forests. It has never supported that. So the idea of taking windfall timber and exporting it overseas is not a problem for it. It never was—the Government is consistent on that.
It is also consistent in terms of its attitude towards what the new normal is in the conservation estate. It is an opportunity for commercial development. If the Department of Conservation is so cheeky as to want more money to do its extremely large number of functions, that has got to be paid for by exploiting the conservation estate. It is the ultimate in user-pays. It is a complete circle. It is also a boom-and-bust cycle. It is a boom-and-bust cycle economically, and also because after 5 years any work it has created will be gone. Also, it is a boom-and-bust cycle because it will affect the timber industry in this country. We have never had a commitment to a sustainable timber industry, apart from pine. This is not it. It is not designed to be; it is a very obvious election manoeuvre. But what is missing is what the point is of having a Department of Conservation. What is the point? Why is the Government even pretending to call it that when it just wants to open the place up?
The ecological wisdom that was revealed by Gerry Brownlee was extraordinary. Suddenly and incoherently, the Government members are experts on ecology, and therefore they know that there is absolutely no point in allowing dead trees to rot, because somehow that is a waste. If we had a select committee, we could have a debate about the meaning of the word “waste” and the meaning of the word “worthless”. That is the debate we should be having about this forest rather than launching into a hastily written, badly designed, completely disingenuous bill that will open up the conservation estate.
What happens now in the Coromandel if we have kauri dieback? Shall we pull those trees out and mill them as well? I do not like to make suggestions because anything is now possible on the conservation estate—anything. Whether it is mining, oil, or logging windfall, anything is now possible. That is something the New Zealand public needs to think about. The Minister of Conservation has more of a scientific background than many people but seems more than happy to ignore basic ecological facts if there is money to be made from ripping out storm-damaged timber from the conservation estate. Actually, it is a consistent position, but we need to name it as such because at the heart of this is the purpose of the conservation lands: they were set aside for the protection and healing of our unique forests. The bill is designed to kick open the door, and it could be a precedent. What is more, it is sad and ignorant, and shows that no conservation value can be assumed to be protected.
Once they have brought in the haulers, skinners, and compactors, are they going to helicopter it all out? No, it does not say so in the bill. What kind of a mess are they going to make? Those of us who have seen forestry, right across the country, that is as open-ended as this bill have seen the mess. It has a huge impact on soils, it has a huge impact on waterways, and it has a huge impact on forest regeneration. The conservation estate is supposed to be about forests, but I have not heard a word about forests. All I have heard about is the myth of jobs, and there is more to say on that in the next reading. Kia ora tātou.
IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): I have learnt a couple of things this Labour of today. It gives me great pleasure to speak in support of an innovative, expedient, and pragmatic piece of legislation afternoon. One thing I have learnt for sure is that I am proud to belong to the National of old; I would hate to belong to the, led by the Minister of Conservation, to overcome a position of extreme adversity in our country. I do not see this as particularly a West Coast problem; I see it as a New Zealand problem, and I see it as a New Zealand opportunity that will certainly create some significant opportunities and advantages for the West Coast. It will also create some opportunity to allow those forests on the West Coast that have been so badly damaged by this storm to regenerate themselves in a much better fashion than they otherwise would. I think that is an exciting thing.
I think it is very positive legislation. To be able to attempt to salvage some 20,000 hectares of rimu, mataī, tōtara, and beech, particularly, which have fallen in an unfortunate storm, is, in my view, common sense. I support the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. I think it is an extremely sensible piece of legislation. In fact, I am proud to support something that is as sensible as this, and creates an opportunity for New Zealand in a time of adversity as this does. We are very good at that. I support this bill in the House.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill be now read a first time.
Ayes 72
New Zealand National 59; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; New Zealand Labour 2 (O’Connor D*, Tirikatene); United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Noes 46
New Zealand Labour 32 (Ardern, Beaumont, Clark, Cosgrove, Cunliffe, Curran, Davis, Dyson, Faafoi, Fenton, Goff, Hipkins, Huo, King A*, Lees-Galloway, Little, Mackey, Mahuta, Mallard, Moroney, Parker, Prasad, Robertson G*, Robertson H V R*, Shearer, Sio, Street, Twyford, Wall, Whaitiri, Williams P*, Woods); Green Party 13, Mana 1.
Bill read a first time.
The result corrected after originally being announced as Ayes 73, Noes 46.
Second Reading
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister of Conservation): I move, That the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill be now read a second time. I want to thank members for their contributions during the first reading of this bill. It comes down to a very simple question: whether we should allow timber that was blown down in huge quantities in Cyclone Ita to be recovered. That is the issue. What I have found extraordinary—particularly in the contributions from the Opposition—is that I have heard a whole lot of personal abuse, I have been called every name under the sun, and I have heard all sorts of comments about Solid Energy and all sorts of things, but what members did not fundamentally address was whether it make senses to recover the wood that has fallen over in great volume in Cyclone Ita. Members on this side of the House are absolutely clear—
Andrew Little: That’s not the issue, and the Minister’s knows it.
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: —in our position that it is sensible. The member is interjecting. I have to say that I have been in this House for 24 years and what we have just witnessed was something quite extraordinary: not one, but two members voting against their own party. What that shows is the level of dysfunctionality and the extent of division within a party that in just 3 months’ time seeks to be the Government of this country.
If they cannot resolve their position on something as simple as being able to use dead trees on the West Coast for some jobs, how on earth are they going to be able to resolve the complex issues involved in the governance of this country? They are in disarray. They are in a mess. They do not have a bolter’s hope of being able to run a sensible Government.
I do want to note, and comment on, a few of the issues of substance. The first of those is why it is necessary for Parliament to move at pace if we are to sensibly recover this wood. Well, it is very simple. It is called sap stain and it is called borer. It starts in spring. That is just 8 weeks away. Equally so, every member of this House would know that the recovery of wind-blown logs is an exercise that needs to be done with care and with safety, and every day that this House delays, it halts the work that needs to be got on with and done around how this timber can be sensibly recovered, and recovered before it deteriorates. That is why this House is dealing with this matter, quite properly, under urgency.
I quite deliberately provided a termination clause. This is not a permanent change to the Conservation Act—it is not. What I have said is that we are going to commission research as a consequence of this extraordinary event—independent research—to enable us to compare those areas that timber is recovered from with those areas that timber is not recovered from, and on the basis of that we may make a better-informed decision about whether, on a long-term basis, we should allow such recovery.
One of the most extraordinary features of the debate is an amendment that has been tabled by the member for West Coast - Tasman.
Chris Auchinvole: What does it say?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The amendment says that only companies from the West Coast - registered area should be allowed to have access to the timber.
Chris Auchinvole: That’s odd.
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: That is odd. There is a large company—in fact, the largest sawmill is owned by a company called Westco Lagan. Its registered office is in Christchurch—
Chris Auchinvole: Always has been.
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: —and always has been, as my colleague from the West Coast says. Well, what an extraordinary law to get into the business of saying: “Oh, well, that company”—which has backed the Coast and has employed people on the Coast—“is going to be discriminated against on where Labour stands.” I am just gobsmacked. Are we really going to have members saying that the natural gas that comes out of Taranaki can be used only in Taranaki, or that we cannot dare move the dairy products that are produced in one district to another district? Are we going to be telling the people of Nelson that the apples that are produced in Nelson can be used only in Nelson? If you want to wreak havoc on the economy—
Andrew Little: That would work if the apple-pickers were spread around the countryside, but they work in one area. This is about sending the work out of the region
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: If you want to wreak havoc on the economy, Mr Little, that is the sort of loopy parochialism and protectionism that you would put into law. I cannot believe—I cannot believe—that a party that seriously wants to be considered for the governance of this country would even table such a foolish amendment.
I want to deal specifically with the Resource Management Act provisions in the bill. What we could do is pass this bill, allow the Director-General of Conservation to be able to give authorisations, then require those participants that want to recover the timber to then have to go to both the regional council and the district council to get a resource consent, and then they would have to publicly notify those consents. They would be subject to appeals to the Environment Court.
Let me give a simple example. We know that a member of the Greens opposed the Bathurst Resources mine. For how long, under the Resource Management Act, have they been able to slow down consents? Well, I will tell you how many times. There have been 32 court hearings—
Hon Chris Tremain: 32?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: —32 court hearings—over the application by Bathurst Resources to mine on conservation land on the West Coast. Are members on this side of the House prepared to allow that sort of circus to occur in respect of the recovery of this timber?
Hon Damien O’Connor: You were the Minister. What did you do about it?
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: The member Mr Damien O’Connor says that I was the Minister. Well, let me remind him. The application for Bathurst Resources to mine the Denniston Plateau was lodged prior to our becoming the Government, and this Government has repeatedly tried to amend the Resource Management Act—
Hon Damien O’Connor: Five years as Minister—nothing.
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: —and the member who is screaming, who pretends to stand up for the West Coast, has opposed every single one of those Resource Management Act reforms. I am not prepared to make a joke of this legislation by misleading the people of the West Coast, saying that they are going to be able to recover this timber, and then have them tied up in months of bureaucracy and red tape because of the Resource Management Act.
I have confidence that the Department of Conservation, as it is required to do under this bill, will ensure that the recovery of that timber is done by minimising those environmental effects. Those who oppose these provisions are effectively saying that they have no confidence in the Department of Conservation staff. They are wrong—they are wrong. It will be done well. This is a sensible bill. This is a sensible response to an urgent situation, and again I commend the bill to the House.
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Before I call the next member, I wish to draw the House’s attention to a correction on the announcement of the vote on the first reading. On a recheck of the numbers, I will be clear that the result is Ayes 72, Noes 46. The record will show that correction.
Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): The Minister of Conservation, as always, cannot even get the facts straight. My amendment, to clarify the facts for the people who are listening to the debate, says that the Westco Lagan situation—yes, it is registered in Christchurch, but it is operating south of Hokitika. The amendment says that a person applying for authorisation “is a West Coast registered company or operation;”. This amendment is to ensure that people operating in our region employing West Coasters get a fair shot and the first opportunity to access these logs. It is as simple as that, and I will not sit here and listen to the Minister mislead New Zealand. That is why my colleagues are so suspicious of the legislation. That is why they cannot trust Nick Smith or any of his colleagues to indeed carry out what they say in this legislation.
If the bill does, as the Minister states, just deal with the logs from the particular event, and if the Government was to support our amendments—to tighten it up, to have opportunities for West Coasters, to reduce the impact or possible impact, and to not widen the scope of this legislation—we would support the legislation. But you cannot trust the Tories—that is the problem. So I and my colleague Moana Mackey have put forward amendments to tighten up the bill, to try to get it to do what the Minister says it does, but, unfortunately, that is not happening.
The question of why this is being done is certainly the first one that I ask. Why? Is it because the trees are there? Well, I guess if that was the answer, we would say “Well, there were trees standing there and because they are there we should utilise them, and because they are on the ground we should utilise them.” It is not a good answer.
The answer I would like to hear is that there are benefits from this and there are no adverse consequences, which I personally believe is the possibility. The problem is on the benefit side. They do not necessarily accrue to the West Coast. On the other side, the impacts, my colleagues are suspicious and want changes made in order to do what the Minister says—that is, to minimise the impacts—and it is possible through helicopter logging and through minimal soil disturbance. You can do this as long as it is safe, and the legislation makes reference to safety, but then it includes exemptions from the Resource Management Act. So my colleagues are wary, suspicious, and do not trust the Tory Government to protect the conservation estate.
On balance, I think there are potential benefits from this, but without my amendments being passed, there are no guarantees for the West Coast. Indeed, is that not what the Minister and his colleague said when they spent $6,000 to fly down in a helicopter and get the photo opportunity there, for the West Coast papers in particular? They said “Oh, this is all about the West Coast. This is all about job opportunities.” Never mind the fact that you have taken 1,000 well-paid jobs from the West Coast through Solid Energy mismanagement. Never mind the fact that the legislation does not guarantee any jobs for West Coasters at all. No wonder my colleagues are suspicious.
On balance, I have to err on the side of hope. You might say that I am a little naive. You can say that because I am a Catholic, I rely too much on my faith. Well, yes, I do. Yes, I do. So along with my colleague, Rino Tirikatene—and I appreciate that Rino also represents the good people in our region—we have to rely on our faith. It is a bit risky, but I live in hope as well. What I would prefer to do, and rather than the Minister misleading the House and New Zealand over—
Hon Members: Oh!
Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: Oh yes, misleading the House and the country over what my amendment said and what it meant. Anyone who has an operation in our region or anyone who has registered a company on the West Coast should have preferential access. That is what it says. The economic benefits from this are possible given proper harvesting methods and given the attempt to prevent the collapse of the price in the market place, which is the second part of my Supplementary Order Paper. It is possible to have economic benefits from this, and I believe it is sustainable in that the bugs and birds and bees will still have sufficient on which to survive, but the benefits to the West Coast are still just possibilities and hope, and based on my faith.
I was trying to think of an analogy for Mr Brownlee, who, as I say, lives in Christchurch, and the one that would pop up would be the fact that there is a reclamation in the Lyttelton Harbour for Lyttelton, we are told, and for the Lyttelton port company. And the question would be: should the Tauranga port company do that reclamation? If we are indeed to implement the Tory ideology of anyone being able to do anything, then why would we not open up the option for the Tauranga port to redevelop and reclaim Lyttelton Harbour—because they might be able to do it more efficiently?
What I am saying is that we expect locals to firstly get the benefits of these one-off events. I am hoping that the National Government will see its way clear and will actually start to deliver on what it has promised, because if the Supplementary Order Paper does not pass, then I fear that we will have the same old colonial, arrogant, pompous, dictatorial approach that has happened so often on the West Coast—
Simon O’Connor: This member needs to go to confession.
Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: —from people like the member at the back there, sitting on his chuff in Auckland or in Hamilton, telling the West Coast what to do. I fear that we will end up with the same thing. The helicopters will come from Rotorua. We know that, but we do not know where the logging gangs or where the trucks or where the sawmills will come from, because National refuses to put in place a measure that will guarantee benefits for the West Coast—
Chris Auchinvole: Oh, sorry—sorry.
Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: Mr Auchinvole sits on his haunches at the back there. He is too scared to speak out against his colleague Mr Smith and say “We need to guarantee West Coast jobs first.” He is always making noises about it. Here is the opportunity, Mr Auchinvole. Back my amendment. Back my amendment that says there should be jobs first for West Coasters and protection for the market, which is small and fragile at the moment for indigenous timber across this country.
I will leave it at that, and I will leave the challenge to the National Government to try to prove its so-called loyalty. I just once again remind the House that all too often we get misled by statements by Nick Smith and by National about what really happens here.
CHRIS AUCHINVOLE (National): I could speak at length in response to—not to what was said by the previous speaker, Damien O’Connor, because very little was said, but the way it was said; the injured child, trying to cover up one’s nakedness with a fig leaf. As it is, the fact has to be faced: Labour has done nothing over the wind-thrown trees. There have been no suggestions from that side of the House, and no initiatives proposed. When a sound proposal from this side of the House—from an extraordinarily experienced and gifted Minister of Conservation working with team National from the Coast—comes forward, suddenly there is a restrictive series of words hastily shoved together. We watched Damien O’Connor writing them, scribbling away, during the debates—but now he says it is a challenge. It is a challenge. It will guarantee Coast jobs.
I will tell you what. When we were looking at doing the hospital, to guarantee Coast jobs, to guarantee some expenditure on the Coast, to guarantee some development, to give them a hospital, it was: “Don’t do it. Have a survey. Ask people what they want. What sort of a hospital do they want? Where do they want it?”. He wanted it stopped—he wanted it stopped. This one, he wants it stopped or, if he does not want it stopped, he wants it put in such a position that he is able to say he would not have done it that way, or it should have been differently. I think, to use a sporting phrase, it is the story of a Monday quarterback. He comes along on Monday, not having played the game on Saturday, to say that if he had played it would have been so much better.
Hon Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga: Monday morning quarterback.
CHRIS AUCHINVOLE: Monday morning quarterback—that is the phrase. Thank you, Sam. That is the phrase there.
But for all that, the Labour Party is obviously riven—riven—with dispute over whether its members should support this or whether they should not. Should they support the urgency, or should they support the bill at all? We would really like you to. We heard Andrew Little—a man whom I have considerable respect for at select committee level—suddenly saying: “I actually support it. I think it’s quite a good idea.” Is he going to vote for it? Apparently not. Someone from over there has voted for it.
Hon Christopher Finlayson: He’s been knobbled.
CHRIS AUCHINVOLE: Knobbled—gagged, I believe, is the expression for Mr O’Connor.
I think the bill will go fairly well. It is an embarrassment for Mr O’Connor, but he is practised. He has done this before, when Labour stopped all native logging completely. He has done this before, this business of: “Oh gosh, I didn’t really want to but I had to because the party made me, but they will let me cross the floor.” So we will go through this fan dance again. It will not effectively make much difference, but it will, I think, with the wonderful support of National-led Government and the direction that it is going in, see the recovery of this timber.
For all that they go on about party leaders and Dr Smith going down to the Coast, I would encourage people to go down there. I know that Minister Goodhew has been down there. [Interruption] This will interest you. I forewent the opportunity to go duck shooting, so that I could go with the Minister to look at the squashed forest. It is a horrendous sight to see the native forests laid so low—it is; it really is. We heard a very interesting perspective from the Māori Party, which I personally found very interesting and quite moving. It is quite moving to see these trees. I have got a really interesting paper here from a scientist, and we have heard much from Mr O’Connor about people sitting in Fendalton. He seems to forget that the Brownlee family were very, very efficient loggers on the West Coast—very efficient. There was no clear felling—all beautifully selected timbers.
We have heard how, apparently, we sit in city places, not knowing what we are talking about. But I do have a paper here from a forester, from a scientist, who spent 40 years on the Coast and is very, very familiar with the forests there. As he says, the benefit of leaving timber there is all in the bark and in the sap and in the leaves. The trunks, the butts of, say, a rimu, will probably last 100 years. They will just slowly decay, so they might as well come out and be used. They will not be contributing a great deal to the flora and fauna. It is beautiful wood. I have some experience of pulling logs, working with the people who pulled logs out of Lake Brunner. They had been in there for 60 years, and the timber was in perfect condition—perfect condition. I fully support this bill. Thank you.
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I am not quite sure what the member who has just resumed his seat, Chris Auchinvole, was trying to say, but I think it is probably better just to give him the charity of my silence in response to the contribution he made. Perhaps by the third reading of this West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill he will have organised his thoughts with a better structure.
I was quite disturbed to hear the contribution to this debate earlier by the Minister of Conservation when I was speaking. I said that the conservation accord, if you like—an interesting term to use in this context, perhaps—between particularly Labour and National, because it was prior to other parties coming into the House, was forged in 1987 when the Conservation Act was first passed and native logging on all but the Timberlands area was stopped. That has carried on ever since. Then in 2000, 14 years ago, when the next round of decisions was made, the extraction and logging of native timber was stopped. When I said that that first happened 27 years ago, and it was a bipartisan agreement, the Minister said to his colleagues: “So it’s 27 years old. Does that mean we shouldn’t change it?”. I was a little concerned about that because I did not think that this was a proposal to fundamentally change the Conservation Act. I thought it was a response to a one-off event.
I will tell you what; I do not share Damien O’Connor’s view of trusting. I think that the Minister may well be using this bill as a stalking horse for opening up the extraction of native timber in the future, and that would be such a massive step backwards. Cyclone Ita was something that was very hard on the West Coast. I lived there for over a decade. I understand the views of those communities—not nearly as well as people who have lived there their entire life, but I lived there for long enough to get to know the place well. I understand the thinking about the resources that are within their own community. But it does not always mean that it is going to be the right thing for the future of New Zealand. If this is a step towards opening up extraction as the basis of sustainable employment on the West Coast, then I think it is the wrong move.
There have been a few gibes thrown at the Labour Party. I think that is a bit rich, frankly, given what is going on within some sections of the National Party at the moment. I just want to make it clear about our position on this bill. I did in the first reading, actually, but I will do it again because some members may not have had the opportunity to hear it. We put up a series of proposals to the Government in relation to our concerns about the process and the content of this legislation. The first was that there was no need for it to go through all stages under urgency. I heard the contribution that Gareth Hughes from the Greens made earlier in his point of order, and I absolutely agree. It was our proposal to the Government that instead of having all stages go through under urgency that there be a truncated period of time for select committee consideration. It would be a little nonsensical for us to try to drag out this debate if we understood it was going to be passed anyway.
But that was not the point. It was not to drag it out, and it was not to have more beech getting beyond a usable position; it was because in a reasonably robust democracy the right for people to have their say should always be exercised unless there is some extreme situation where it need not be. In this case, it would have been very easy to refer this bill to the Local Government and Environment Committee—or the Primary Production Committee; apparently, they run not a bad little ship at that select committee, I have heard—say, for a period of 2 weeks, and then require it to come back, and then it could proceed at pace. It is not a very large bill. The debate is not going to go on for too long. That was the first request that we made to the Government—a truncated period, not to delay the progress of the bill but to give New Zealanders a right to have a say, including people from the West Coast. And we had a series of other proposals that we made, which are outlined in our Supplementary Order Papers 475 and 476.
I do think there is a greater concern at the heart of this legislation. Having listened to the contribution from the National Party members, particularly the Minister of Conservation, I no longer believe that this is an opportunity for West Coasters to have jobs. It is clear they have turned down Supplementary Order Paper 476, which is in the name of Damien O’Connor and makes sure that West Coasters get any jobs first. That is not of interest to National. I do think the disdain in which they have been regarding the Conservation Act and our significant step then as a Government requiring protection of our native trees gives great alarm to members of the public around the country. This is more likely to be a stalking horse for the future logging of our native trees.
It is really frustrating—particularly in the week that we have had, I suppose—that the Minister of Conservation can show such passion and concern for dead trees at the same time as he shows little regard for the 55 remaining Māui’s dolphins that we have. We have the International Whaling Commission’s scientific committee saying for the third year in a row: “This Government is not doing enough. That species will be extinct unless they take better measures.” Nothing has happened as a result of that. For 3 years in a row it has been just tinkering at the edges—not making substantive protections, and certainly not enough to save the species. At the same time, we have legislation going through all stages under urgency to do something that this House has said no to for nearly three decades.
This bill is a puzzle. I think it is a stalking horse. It offers no hope of guaranteed jobs, let alone sustainable jobs for West Coasters. That is why I will be voting against it.
EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I would just like to explain to any of the New Zealanders who are listening to or watching this debate that normally by its second reading a bill would have gone to a select committee. The select committee would have invited public submissions. The select committee would then have heard those submissions. Submitters normally make quite constructive comments on the policy in the bill and on any of the deficiencies in it, and suggest amendments and how it could be improved. It is a place too where you pick up any major defects in the drafting. We have not had that opportunity with this bill, the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. That is another of the reasons that the Green Party is opposing it. It is being forced through under urgency, yet it concerns public protected lands—forests that New Zealanders campaigned about for 30 years or more to protect from native forest logging.
The public is being given absolutely no say in letting loggers, chainsaws, haulers, and skidders back on to what is supposed to be protected conservation land. The Department of Conservation is supposed to hold those lands in trust for all New Zealanders and manage them on all of our behalf. Yet by pushing this through under urgency and denying the public a say, it is highlighting again just how anti-democratic this Government is. One of the reasons I think that the Government wants to push it through under urgency is that it knows that when New Zealanders wake up to the major assault on our protected areas, they will oppose this law. The select committee, if we had had a public process, would have been inundated with submissions against the bill.
The Green Party wants more jobs on the Coast, but we want them to be well-paid, long-term jobs; not boom-and-bust ones as these logging ones will be. When Nick Smith was asked today what he would do to ensure that jobs stayed on the Coast, he would not commit to that. In fact, he has made it very clear that he is not interested in that. It is a very cynical manipulation for the Minister of Conservation to promise that this bill is about jobs.
I certainly agree with the scenario that Richard Prosser outlined in the first reading. That is because this bill cuts across the Forests Act 1949 and the restrictions that the Forests Act puts on the export of unprocessed timber. This bill allows the export of sawn timber and of stumps and roots and tree ferns. The timber use will not be restricted to New Zealand. Again, it was misleading of Minister Brownlee to claim that the bill is about allowing New Zealanders to enjoy the ambience of native timber. These logs will be exported with very little processing. The export of unprocessed timber will not create jobs in New Zealand. It will simply increase the market for native timber and that will increase the pressure on private forests on private land.
We have been here before, when we had the export of native woodchips. That led to huge forest destruction in Southland and elsewhere—in Nelson. This bill will not only see the market flooded with native timber; it will also undermine the prices that those private landowners are receiving for forests that they are allowed to log by what was the Ministry of Forestry under the Forests Act. If the Minister was really serious about restarting the native forest logging industry, then those loggers would need more than the 5 years they are going to get under this bill.
So I agree with Ruth Dyson that this is potentially a Trojan Horse for changing the law to allow much greater access to our protected areas to log them. So, Minister, come clean. What is it? Is it a quick and dirty law to allow loggers to opportunistically plunder West Coast forests or is this the first step in allowing logging across all of our conservation lands?
Hon Dr Nick Smith: The storm did the damage.
EUGENIE SAGE: The storm has done the damage. You are doing more damage now by allowing the loggers in, the skidders in, and the haulers in to create those destructive practices where you mess up quite large areas in order to extract the timber.
Hon Dr Nick Smith: Has the member been there and seen it?
EUGENIE SAGE: Yes, Minister, I have. One of the most disappointing times I have ever had is walking through logged forest and seeing areas that have been cleared.
Hon Dr Nick Smith: Have you seen the storm damage?
EUGENIE SAGE: The storm damage is natural. As the forest rots, those rotting logs are a natural part of the forest system. At the moment there are about 50,000 hectares of native forest that can be logged on private and Māori land and managed for sustainable management under the Forests Act. Before Cyclone Ita the logging of those areas on private forests generated about $5 million annually. It provided about 6,500 cubic metres of rimu timber. But those 6,400 cubic metres were just 30 percent of the volume of rimu that the Ministry for Primary Industries had approved for logging. The existing market had not even been able to absorb 70 percent of the timber that the ministry had approved for logging, so what this bill will do, by opening up conservation land, is flood the market with native timber. Where will it go? It will not be used in New Zealand, because it cannot be taken up by the market. It will be exported. Why are we exporting our forests—our cathedrals—offshore to be used however?
The Ministry for Primary Industries had KPMG do a value analysis of privately owned indigenous forests last year. It did not look at the forest value for ecosystem services, for preventing soil erosion, for regulating water flow, but it did look at the annual value for logging. KPMG said that for the logging industry to expand there needed to be a significant investment in kiln drying, because beech is useless as a timber unless it is properly dry, and there needed to be a significant investment in heavy-lift helicopters. The kiln drying was estimated to cost $1 million and the heavy-lift helicopters $4 million to $5 million. So what is this Government going to do? Is it going to hand out subsidies to the native forest logging industry in the way that it is doing to irrigators, to allow us to go back to the future, back to the 1950s, when native forest logging was expanding in New Zealand? Or is this, Minister, just a dirty little bill to allow the loggers to opportunistically plunder conservation land?
By promoting native forest logging on the West Coast the Minister is effectively saying that he has absolutely no confidence in the work of the West Coast Development Trust. The West Coast got $120 million in 2001 when native forest logging ceased, in order to invest in alternative employment and look at adjusting to the end of native forest logging. The trust has handed out over $56 million to 109 different commercial development opportunities, yet the Minister is saying no, that is not enough, we have to allow more logging.
So this is a very dirty little bill, but I suspect that it is a Trojan Horse for allowing much more logging on much wider areas of conservation land. Because, as I said in the first reading, it does not restrict the logging to helicopters, we will see highly damaging skidders and haulers. They will introduce weeds, they will damage existing healthy timber, and they will compromise the forest for further regeneration because they are heavy—they compact the soils, they prevent seedlings regenerating. One of the problems is that there are no heavy-lift helicopters operating in New Zealand at the moment, as I understand it. That means that with this bill the Minister is opening up conservation lands not to sensitive helicopter extraction but to the highly damaging traditional methods of logging extraction with haulers and skidders and the like.
This is a very bad bill because of the process that has been used to force it through under urgency with no opportunity for the public to have a say, and thereby opening up lands that are supposed to be protected to logging. It turns the Department of Conservation from an agency that was supposed to preserve and protect our natural resources into one that is about regulating logging, learning how forestry works, and giving approval to all of these skidders and all of these chainsaws to damage and desecrate our protected areas.
SHANE ARDERN (National—Taranaki - King Country): It is a pleasure to rise in support of the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. Can I say that it was interesting to listen to the Hon Ruth Dyson and then Eugenie Sage putting forward their views, particularly Ruth, who raised the issue of the accord between Labour and National in 1987, pre-MMP days, when it was agreed that the West Coast was able to continue logging in a sustainable way. What she did not say about that was that the Clark Government, after it moved away from its traditional Labour roots, which were steeped in working class people who ran sawmills and had a pragmatic and sensible approach to life, to the ideology of the Auckland-based Helen Clark, and trampled right over the top of the West Coast Accord in the early 2000s, all forestry milling on the West Coast virtually came to a standstill. I am reminded of a chap by the name of Kit Richards. Anyone remember Kit Richards? He was quite a popular name at the time and is someone who potentially may have a view on this; I am not sure.
Let us just have a look at what happened. Cyclone Ita came through the West Coast on 17 April 2014. It completely bowled over 20,000 hectares of native forest—20,000 hectares—and it damaged a further 200,000 hectares. I can understand that the members opposite who live within the beltway would not know how big an area that is—I can understand that. It is an enormous amount of destruction by a single weather event. So to suggest that that timber, beautiful podocarp—look at the building we are standing in. Look around you. I wonder what the timber on the walls in this building is. I wonder whether any of them on that side know what this is—what our desks are made of, what our chairs are made of, and what the wall panels are made of. I wonder whether they know. I bet they do not, and I bet they do not know where it was milled. I bet they do not know where it came from. So look at where we are.
All of that beautiful podocarp timber is lying there, and they would suggest it is better to let that rot on the ground than to provide opportunity for employment, for construction, and, actually, for the timber to be used in a way that it will be there for generations to come. It is a beautiful, beautiful asset and it would just be ridiculous, stupid, and absolutely ideologically driven to let it rot on the ground.
So what is the purpose of doing this now? The Minister of Conservation, the Hon Nick Smith, who has a huge amount of experience in this area, has clearly articulated why. It is because a large amount of that timber will waste if we do not get on with the job of its extraction—huge amounts of it. The value is unknown, I suspect, at this stage, but for sure it will have a substantial value. To suggest that extracting it and using it in a sensible way is somehow going to distort the market to an extent that that will cause all sorts of different behaviours is about as ill-informed as can be. Once you have extracted it, stabilised it, and processed it into a product that is usable, it is not necessary that that timber goes straight into the market. In fact, anyone who was sensible in managing this would put the timber into the market over the next few years, as and when the market could stand that being done. And, obviously, that is how you would get the highest commercial return from it. To suggest otherwise is to mislead about what is going on.
It has been interesting to watch the member for the West Coast, or the two members who represent the area, dancing on the head of a pin here over this issue, up until now. I know that the member for West Coast - Tasman was, last time round, dubbed the name “Chainsaw” in his own caucus because, of course, he supported sustainable milling on the West Coast. It is interesting to see the position he takes. So it is my pleasure to speak in support of this sensible piece of legislation and strengthen the arm of those who are going to salvage this wonderful asset. Thank you.
RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): There is no need for the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill to be passed under urgency. The excuse that it must be enacted before the beech trees that were blown down in the cyclone start to rot or the sap starts to run or whatever else is just that—an excuse. It is already too late for that. Those trees have been down for a couple of months already, and in another couple of months the rot will have already set in. There are, according to surveys from the Department of Conservation and the Ministry for Primary Industries, something north of 10,000 hectares of beech forest affected, and it will all be next to useless before even a tenth of it has been harvested. But beech is not the target here. Everyone knows that. No one is going after the beech, because it will be too difficult to get enough of it out quickly enough for it to be worth anything.
The real prize here is rimu—better than 5,000 hectares of it, including a massive block north of Karamea containing an estimated 105,000 cubic metres of recoverable rimu. At an average of $250 per cube, that is more than $26 million. You can take it to the bank, but as soon as they get boots on the ground up there, they will find there is twice that much—100,000 cubic metres, and maybe twice that. New Zealand currently manages to extract and process around 6,000 cubes annually. So straight away we have 15 years’ worth of rimu up for grabs and ready to hit the market. It is a market that cannot possibly hope to absorb it. It will not all arrive at once, of course, but that does not matter. There is no real urgency. Rimu does not go off that quickly. The biggest trees can lie on the ground for up to 5 years without being measurably degraded. Curiously enough, 5 years is the prescribed lifespan of this bill. What a mighty coincidence!
We are all for the extraction and recovery of this windfall timber resource. New Zealand First believes in the extractive industries. We believe in the clever use of selected resources. We believe in New Zealand sawmills milling timber such as this, creating jobs, and providing a source of export earnings. We believe in the West Coast, the people of the West Coast, and the businesses of the West Coast. We want to see them profit from this tragedy, and we know that if it is done right, the whole of New Zealand will profit, as well. But if it is not, then no one here will get anything out of this business, and all the profits will go overseas, as usual, and the environment will suffer into the bargain.
What will happen if this bill goes ahead in its present form is this. Fifteen years’ worth of rimu will hit the New Zealand market over the space of 5 years. It will drop the price through the floor and put the local processors out of business. The people who have been granted extraction permits behind closed doors by the Director-General of Conservation will hire the local mills to turn the trunks into sawn timber because that is all they are required to do, and the mills will take that business because they have no other option. The timber will be sent to furniture factories in China, and it will be sold all around the world, here and overseas, as New Zealand native timber furniture, and some foreign company will pocket the cash. There will be no additional jobs here for furniture factory workers, precious few for sawmill workers, and no guarantee of any more for forestry workers, because the overseas companies that get the job will be able to bring in their own specialists.
I hear the Minister of Conservation fearmongering about fungus and how the timber is going to rot, and that being why we must act quickly. Well, that is beech, Ministers. No one is interested in the beech. Everyone knows that the beech is going to rot, and no one is very interested, because it is worth only 60 bucks a metre. The El Dorado here is the rimu, and it is not going off any time soon. The beech going rotten is a red herring. What this is really about is red pine. It is about possibly 200,000 cubic metres of recoverable rimu, worth possibly $50 million. New Zealand First believes that it should be recovered and utilised, and that it should be a source of jobs, wealth, and export receipts for New Zealand and for the West Coast.
We believe that, but we do not believe that the protection we have in place around our rivers and streams should be chucked away to make way for bulldozers and logging roads. We do not believe that this justifies poisoning the rivers and the whitebait or cleaning out greenstone boulders with diggers to make culverts, because we do not believe that that is necessary. We do believe that roads and culverts should be able to be used if they can be put in, in accordance with existing protocols. If they cannot, then helicopters should be used—and they can be used, because this resource is worth enough to justify their use.
We do not believe that it serves the West Coast or New Zealand to allow no royalties to be paid and for nothing to come back to the Coast and for there to be no guarantees of jobs and businesses on the Coast. If the Government will agree to address these concerns, then we will support the bill, but if it will not, then we will oppose it. There is no reason for the Government not to agree, because all of this is in the best interests of New Zealand and of the Coast. If the Government will not agree, it is because it has another agenda and is being disingenuous. Let us extract this timber, let us harvest this resource, but let us do it in a way that profits New Zealand. To not do so would be to compound waste upon waste, and to turn one catastrophe into an ongoing series of them. Thank you.
IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): It is a pleasure to speak at the second reading of the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. I will not take a lot of time, because I think it has all been said. I have heard some very strange things tonight. It is always a bit of pleasure to follow the member for New Zealand First Richard Prosser, who speaks so fast I cannot keep up with him at times. None the less, he does speak a bit of sense at times.
I just want to talk very briefly about this Government and the National Party’s blue-greens policy and the way we deal with environmental issues. I think that this bill is just an extension of the way this party and this Government has looked at the environmental issues confronting New Zealand. I think that there are always opportunities for us to use different solutions to solve problems that come upon us.
I think that the tragedy that has befallen the West Coast forests is an opportunity for us to make use of that huge resource by applying some common sense to it. Everybody knows that you can store native timber in a sawn form for generations. Of course, in New Zealand we have got buildings built of that native timber that have certainly lasted for generations and generations and will continue to do so. I agree with the comments of Mr Ardern earlier on, who talked about the value of our native wood and the fact that we do not have the opportunity to access it as we did in the old days, primarily because there is not as much left as there should be and also because we have taken a large number of steps to protect it for future generations—not necessarily for their use but for their observation. This is an opportunity for us to utilise a huge resource for the benefit of future generations of New Zealanders. It will create opportunities for people on the West Coast. It will create opportunities for all sorts of people in New Zealand to have access to some of this timber. There is no reason why it cannot be stored, as I said earlier, for some generations.
I have a great deal of pleasure in supporting this bill. I think it is a hugely pragmatic and common-sense solution to a pretty significant issue that has befallen the West Coast. I support this bill.
GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): This is the second reading of the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. This would be the moment at which I would be picking up the select committee’s report to see what the people of New Zealand—and, in particular, the people of the West Coast—might have thought of this proposal. We would be getting interesting feedback from people on the West Coast within the timber industry, and those from regional government on the West Coast. I am sure Damien O’Connor and Rino Tirikatene, the members who represent the area, would have put their submissions in as well, asking what this bill means. We would have had Forest and Bird, and we would have had all the conservation groups.
This would have been the opportunity for New Zealanders to have their say. But the arrogant, out-of-touch National Government does not want New Zealanders to have a say on this. It does not want submissions that will say actually this will flood the market; it will depress the price. It does not want the private foresters to come in and ask how it is that timber from public lands is coming in and flooding the market and depressing the prices they get. The Government does not want the regional leaders on the West Coast to come up and say that the National Party has ignored them; the National Party has come in and told them what to do, one more time.
The Government does not want to hear that, and that is why there has not been a select committee process. It is quite clear that the Government does not want this, because David Cunliffe wrote to John Key and said: “Here are the conditions for the Labour Party’s support of this bill.” The first of those was a 2-week select committee process. It was not a long process. It still would enable the bill to return to this House before we rise for the election, but it was completely ignored and dismissed by a Government that does not want to hear from New Zealanders and does not want to hear from the people of the West Coast.
The people of the West Coast will see this bill for what it is—pure politics from the National Party. This is not about West Coast jobs. If it was about West Coast jobs, then Nick Smith would have come back to us and he would have said: “I support Damien O’Connor’s Supplementary Order Paper.” That is what he would have said, because that is what Damien O’Connor’s Supplementary Order Paper 476 does. It says West Coast people will benefit from this, and there will be jobs on the West Coast. That is what the Government tells us it is about, and it is not. It has got nothing to do with that, and everything to do with playing politics in the period just before the election.
This bill would have gone to a select committee. What is that Government so scared of that it would not send this bill to a select committee for 2 weeks, so that the people of the West Coast could have a say? It is a disgrace that it has not done that.
We are sitting here under urgency to debate this bill. Nobody on the Government side of the House has been able to explain to us why it is, with urgent legislation—it has got problems at either end. It has been 3 months since the storm, but suddenly it is urgent now. At the other end, it wants 5 years to be able to extract the timber. The Government cannot quite make its mind up. The bill is either urgent, or it is not. It either needs a lot of time, or the timber has to be taken out immediately. Again, if this was really about this one-off operation, then the Government would accept another amendment from the Labour Party, to give a 2-year window, not a 5-year window. But, again, it was arrogantly dismissed by the National Government because it does not want that.
I have to say that on this side of the House we do not trust Nick Smith. We do not trust Nick Smith. Nick Smith stands up and says: “Oh, no, this is just about this single event.” Well, if it is just about this single event, why are there 5 years? Why is there a dismissal of the Resource Management Act? Chris Auchinvole got up and began his first reading contribution on the basis of talking about 2006 and still carrying all the scars of the fact that he is really upset that they cannot do logging of native timber on the conservation estate. That is what he is really upset about. That is why on this side of the House we have no confidence that a bill brought forward to this House by Nick Smith, supported by Chris Auchinvole, is about just this event, because the way the bill is drafted it is clearly not just about this event. The way that it has been talked about in the House shows it is clearly not about just this event.
We have amendments on the table that, if they were supported by the Government, would allow the Labour Party to support this bill. We understand the issues on the West Coast. We have great representatives of the West Coast within our caucus, in terms of Damien O’Connor and Rino Tirikatene. As local representatives in the Labour Party, we support their right to vote the way they are. But what we on this side of the House will not do is allow Nick Smith to get away with pulling the wool over the eyes of the people of the West Coast and the people of the rest of New Zealand.
There is an opportunity for the National Party to show that this piece of legislation is actually founded in some real desire to support the people of the West Coast. That comes in supporting Damien O’Connor’s amendments. If they do not do that, then this bill is as disingenuous as it looks.
MELISSA LEE (National): I commend the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill to the House.
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: A 5-minute call—Hon Clayton Cosgrove.
Hon Dr Nick Smith: He’s voting against it! Why don’t you stand by your mate?
Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour): It is all right. The one who flew over the cuckoo’s nest over there, Nick Smith—who frequently, actually, flies over the cuckoo’s nest—needs to tell this House why he will not support Damien O’Connor’s Supplementary Order Paper 476. I have got to say that Gerry Brownlee led off this debate, but Gerry Brownlee forgot to tell the House a few things, because the old Brownlee family on the West Coast has some very, very interesting heritage. I did not know this. I knew he was a member of a band called the Minetti Brothers. I did not know that he was a sawmiller. Oh yes—a big-time sawmiller. He went from sawmiller to woodwork teacher. He is probably the most qualified person in this House to talk about rimu, cutting boards, and things like that.
What I did not know was the Brownlee heritage of being a big sawmiller on the West Coast, and that they took the money and ran. Oh, yes! They took the money and ran and they whipped straight over to Canterbury. I am told the only thing left of the Brownlee sawmilling heritage for economic growth on the Coast is a flash bach near Mr Auchinvole in Māpua. Oh, yes! Is it Māpua?
Hon Member: No, Brunner.
Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE: Brunner—I apologise; they all look a bit the same. It is Brunner. But I have to say that Nick Smith stood in the House and insulted West Coasters, and told them they were basically amateurs because they could not cut the logs themselves. The challenge for Nick Smith is that Damien O’Connor put up an amendment to say: “OK, if you are going to do this, and if the objective is to help out the West Coast”—and help them out, do they need it, after this crowd over there with Solid Energy ran it into the ground.
Members opposite talk about jobs. Nearly 1,000 workers have gone, but not the white-collar boys in the offices with the $23 million worth of bonuses. No, it was the people who were in the pit, in the mine, in the shaft actually keeping the company going. Mr Auchinvole over there—Captain Mainwaring and his ilk—stood there with the Minister for State Owned Enterprises and did absolutely nothing as 1,000 jobs went down the river and as $400 million of losses and debt went out. Mr Finlayson and every member over there just stood there and said: “Hear no evil, see no evil—we will do nothing.” But when there is a bit of opportunist stuff, and the logs go over, they say that they will do what they can to try to create some politics.
Again, when challenged by the member for the West Coast saying that if they are going to do it, they should accept his amendment that says jobs, economic growth, and the benefit are meted out and left in the West Coast, so that West Coasters get that economic benefit, the National Government says no. It is the Gerry Brownlee principle of take the money and run. Take the dough and run, as he did when he was a sawmiller. He is now a woodwork teacher, but you know; oh, how the mighty have fallen. They run from it.
So I challenge those members over there—including the new member beside Mr Finlayson whose name I cannot remember—that if this is all about helping the West Coast out, the challenge for them is to accept the Damien O’Connor amendment and say: “OK, we are going to do it. We’re going to mill it, and we’re going to make sure that that economic benefit is not trucked over to Canterbury, fair go, or helicoptered out to Rotorua.” Because that is where the guys will come from with the big helicopter, heavy lifting stuff, and the economic benefit will go elsewhere. If they are really serious—Mr Lotu Iiga knows I am right—they will accept the amendment. They will say that the economic benefit will reside where the benefit should be, and that is on the West Coast. Or they will adopt the Brownlee principle of a dash for cash. I have not seen Gerry dash many places, but it will be a dash for cash. He is a sawmiller who went over the hill, and all the economic benefit went over there. So that is the challenge. That is the challenge for these guys.
Damien O’Connor does reserve the right to vote the way he does, because on this side of the House we are not led by the nose like the lions and lambs over there. Mr Auchinvole talks tough about the West Coast but when it comes to the crunch, he is nowhere to be seen. Damien O’Connor reserves the right to stick up for his local area, because what he is actually sticking up for is an amendment that says that the economic benefit should reside within the West Coast. These guys on the other side have no credibility, as they let 1,000 coalmining jobs go down the pit. They backed the guys who were wasting money—23 million bucks—and the National members have the guts to come in here and talk about jobs, when they let a company that was an export award-winning company, which put masses of millions of dollars into the West Coast—
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member’s time has expired. [Interruption] Order!
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): In the short time left before dinner, I would just like to pay tribute to some people: the people in this country who, 27 years ago and since, stood up after many a battle to protect the trees on the West Coast so that they would not be logged. They stood up against logging—climbed trees, lobbied, wrote bills, submitted, educated others—and said that there was something more valuable for the future of this country than the commercial logging of those trees. The conservation estate did not set aside all the trees but it set aside enough. In that space, those trees rely on us. They rely on us to do the right thing tonight and make sure that that forest can regenerate—not through some bizarre manufactured scheme where we say “Let’s remove the wind-blown timber and then it will all be so much better.”, which is an ecological absurdity, but by allowing nature to take her course. I would like to thank Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons, and other giants of the conservation movement, including my colleague Eugenie Sage, for their principled and consistent stand that said that we actually need to protect the forests. This is an issue for the whole planet.
Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: Why are we here? Why are we here on a Thursday night watching the Government pretending to be acting in the interests of people and the environment? This West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill is a game bill masquerading as economic pragmatism, unattractive as that would be on its own. So read it and weep. We could be having an authentic and genuine conversation about the West Coast forests. We could be having an authentic and genuine debate about windfalls and about the use of those trees in relation to conservation and in relation to their role in the natural cycle. We could be debating that properly. We could be talking about the state of the native timber sawmill industry, which the Government has never cared about. But all of a sudden, under urgency, it cares about that industry so desperately, even though this bill will distort the market considerably.
We could talk about the place of the West Coast forests in the conservation of the planet. It seems to me that we have forgotten where we are in the 21st century and we have just leapt back to the 19th century. But the people of this country are not leaping back with the Government. We will not be able to destroy what people know and care about with some cheap pragmatic shot. It is not possible for people to forget what they have learnt after 27 years of the conservation consensus around not logging on conservation land. It will not be possible to persuade the people of this country that there are no values to protect on the conservation lands except expediency. It will not be possible to persuade people that, storm after storm, the job is for humans to intervene in the natural process and clean it up, somehow miraculously assisting the forests, which cannot do it on their own. Nature, of course, does not know what she is doing, but God and the Government do—let us intervene and let us make an industry out of a so-called disaster!
The planet is changing and we are in the face of the greatest threat to the planet we have ever seen: climate change. There will be ongoing storms. My own area has just experienced one. Is that an argument for greater exploitation of the forests that protect us from climate change? That logic is not going to wash. It did not wash years ago, which is why the people won the argument. It was not won in this Parliament; it was won by the people of this country. In the end we have to win these arguments. We have to recognise yet again that there are still people for whom money is the only motivation—that and political gain. This is not really about the money. This is not really about jobs. This is not really about making change. What this is really about is that this is an election year. If you wanted to drive a wedge between people, this was a good manoeuvre, but it does nothing for the status of the Department of Conservation or the status of the agreement that was made in this country to protect the conservation lands. It does not add up and people are not going to forget what happened here and in whose name and why. There is much more to say, but for now I would just like to acknowledge, as I did at the beginning, that many people fought to protect these forests and many people still remember and will fight again.
LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō): I am very proud to stand and speak in the second reading debate on the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. I commend this bill to the House.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill be now read a second time.
Ayes 72
New Zealand National 59; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; New Zealand Labour 2 (O’Connor, Tirikatene); United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Noes 44
New Zealand Labour 32 (Ardern, Beaumont, Clark, Cosgrove, Cunliffe, Curran, Davis, Dyson, Faafoi, Fenton, Goff, Hipkins, Huo, King A*, Lees-Galloway, Little, Mackey, Mahuta, Mallard, Moroney, Parker, Prasad, Robertson G*, Robertson H V R*, Shearer, Sio, Street, Twyford, Wall, Whaitiri, Williams P*, Woods); Green Party 11; Mana 1.
Bill read a second time.
In Committee
Part 1 Preliminary provisions
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I have just been perusing the Supplementary Order Papers that are attached to the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill and note that all of them had been made by individual members and tabled directly in the House. There are none that have been made by a select committee, none that have been made as a result of a submission, and none that have been made as a result of members of a select committee—probably the Local Government and Environment Committee—sitting around and constructively discussing the merits or otherwise of the bill. That is because this bill has not been through a select committee process. The bill debate started only a few hours ago. Not one single member of the public has had the opportunity to make their views known to a select committee, let alone have the select committee consider them and amend the bill.
I cannot recall a bill that I have been party to at a select committee, as a Minister, or as a contributing speaker in the debate where there has not been some change made by a select committee. It is a really smart part of our process. Actually, it is the time that I wish more members of the public would go and listen to, because it is the time when members do engage very well with each other regardless of their political party differences. That is what could have happened with this bill. That is what should have happened with this bill. If the Government is so determined to have this bill done and dusted before the House rises at the end of July, we still could have had, as Labour proposed and as I heard the Green Party propose, a truncated select committee process where members of the public could be invited to come and have their say, and members of Parliament would have been better off for it. But we have not done that.
We have ended up with quite a few Supplementary Order Papers, and I know there are some more on the way. I just want to draw the attention of the Committee to two. The first one is Supplementary Order Paper 475, which is in the name of Moana Mackey. She has got quite a few amendments within this one Supplementary Order Paper, but the two that I just want to comment on are those related to Part 1, which is what we are up to in the debate at the moment. The first is in clause 4—page 2, line 16—and that is to replace in the “Repeal of this Act” provision the words “2019” with “2016”. So instead of having the 5-year period for the life of this bill, it would compress it into 2 years. You know, that is quite a generous consideration, actually. That time frame is lot tighter than would be allowed under the current legislation. The Minister of Conservation has indicated that he is not going to have a bar of it. That is probably because he has not had quite enough time to reflect on it, let alone listen to any members of the public or let them have their say, but we are putting it forward in good faith, anyway.
The second amendment that is proposed in that same Supplementary Order Paper from Moana Mackey is in relation to clause 5. It is to ensure that the designated area and the maps that indicate the designated area are actually included as a schedule to the legislation. That is quite straightforward as a procedure. It is not unusual. It is something that offers some security and protection. I suppose the members of the public have lost quite a lot of trust in the Minister and his Government over the last little while, and this would give them some reassurance that the comments that have been made in public are ones that will be adhered to because it will be in the law.
The next Supplementary Order Paper I just want to comment on is in the name of Green Party member Eugenie Sage, and that is Supplementary Order Paper 474, in relation to clause 5. Again, the member has put more than one amendment on the same Supplementary Order Paper, so clause 5 actually has quite specific changes to the definition of “designated area” that have made it more restrictive in terms of the areas that are covered in terms of the legislation. It has got specific references to conservation parks, to national reserves, to nature reserves, to scenic reserves, and to wildlife management areas. I think, again, those are sensible amendments to try to make what would, I think, generally be regarded as a bad bill better.
The provisions that we are discussing at the moment in Part 1 cover the purpose of the bill. The purpose of the bill is to actually tear to pieces the 27-year agreement that has been in place between Labour and National, originally, and then with other parties as they have come into Parliament, to say that the logging of native timber on the West Coast—and in the rest of New Zealand as well, but, of course, particularly on the West Coast—is not something that we support. We ended that practice completely with the Timberlands agreement in 2000, and this really says: “Well, we have had enough of that. We think that logging on the West Coast is OK again.”
It is very surprising for the current Minister of Conservation to be leading this debate, because I am not sure whether he actually has his heart in it. He has indicated some courage in some of the decisions he has made. I have put it on the public record that I have supported some of the more courageous decisions he has made in regard to the monorail, in regard to the Milford Dart tunnel, and in regard to approving the marine reserve in Akaroa. Those were clear and courageous decisions, and he made them through a considered process, but here he is, trampling over a very longstanding agreement. So I do not think that his heart is in it. I do not think he believes in what he is doing. I think it is a cheap political stunt, and I am really disappointed in the Minister for doing it.
The purpose of the bill is to rip up the protection against logging native timber on the West Coast. It is proposed that this bill lasts for 5 years. There have been, as I have indicated, amendments to say that that should be less than that—that it should be only 2 years, if at all. There are a lot of definitions that are covered in this part, and then, of course, Part 1 concludes with the Act binding the Crown.
I was very interested in the second reading contributions that were being made, but one thing that really puzzles me—and I guess that if the Minister is going to take a call, he might like to address this one question that I have—is when we have a pile of logs on the back of a truck, how is it going to be determined that they are all wind-blown? How is that going to be determined? Is every tree going to be checked? Are we going to check that they are not doing any felling that is not permitted? Are we just going to risk it? How will we know that any trees that are on the back of the truck are not trees that have subsequently fallen down, rather than trees that have fallen down through the cyclone? It is just a nonsense, as the Minister knows. We know that there will be cheating of the system, and this is really the start of the slippery slope that I find so frustrating.
It is being wrapped up in a parcel that is designed to say: “We are supporting the West Coast.” Well, it is clear from the Minister’s rejection—and, actually, from Minister Brownlee’s attitude in the earlier stages of the debate—that that parcel of wrapping is absolutely untrue. There is no protection that any increased employment would be going to people who live on the West Coast or to people who are from the West Coast. Of course, we like jobs for other people as well, but you have to tell the truth, Minister, when you are presenting an argument to somebody and saying: “This is because the West Coast has been so badly done by.” Yes, it has, actually. A thousand miners have lost their jobs because of this Government’s incompetence and lack of oversight into the activities of Solid Energy. We know that the bottom is falling out of the coal market anyway, but those were high-paying skilled jobs that were lost to the Coast, and now in this legislation there is no protection at all that any new jobs that come from here in the take of the timber, the transportation of the timber, or the milling of the timber, let alone any subsequent processing of the sawn logs, will be of advantage to the West Coast.
All those amendments are before the Committee, and I hope that over the next couple of hours we are able to really consider them properly. I resent this bill not being given the opportunity to be presented at a select committee and for the public to have their say. This is a very, very important issue. There is the changing of the Conservation Act after 27 years, the dismantling of the agreement with Timberlands after 14 years, and the undermining of the deal that the then-Government made with the people of the West Coast for their compensation package of $120 million to go into local jobs. It is all now up in the air, and that was a hard-fought agreement. It was one that has been courageously taken up by the people of the West Coast, and now I bet that they are saying “Where does this leave us? What does that mean for our future?”. That is not the way that the Government should treat good, hard-working New Zealanders. We should not have all stages of this legislation being rammed through the House under urgency. I hope that we get some answers to the questions and some positive response to the Supplementary Order Papers that have been presented.
MOANA MACKEY (Labour): I have some amendments on Supplementary Order Paper 475 in my name on Part 1 of the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. I too would like to voice my concern that this bill has not gone before a select committee, even for a very short period of time. I appreciate that the Minister of Conservation wants to get this done quickly, but there was not any consultation with members on this side of the House. With regard to the grand statements that we have been hearing of “It would be so wonderful if we could get Labour to support it.”, well, maybe if Labour had been involved earlier on so that we could have asked some of these questions, then maybe that could have happened. But, of course, there was never any intention or desire to have cross-party support on this issue at all, which is why that did not happen. There was no consultation with the local MPs, and here we are in urgency having to put a bill through.
I have to say, with the greatest of respect, that having been through the Ruataniwha Dam issue with this Minister, I am afraid that I do not trust some of the things he says—bluntly. As my colleague Ruth Dyson said, there have been a couple of issues where the Minister has done a sterling job, and we will always give credit where credit is due, but then we have also been burnt a fair number of times by this Minister, and the Ruataniwha Dam was a classic example. So we have deep concerns over the accuracy of some of the statements that have been made. How many jobs and how much wealth is actually going to come back to the West Coast due to this piece of legislation? How much money from royalties is actually going to go to conservation purposes? Although that is stated in the documents, there is nothing in the bill that requires that to happen. I think we have just been burnt a few too many times by this Minister to be able to accept at face value everything he has said to us—to accept that there is no ulterior motive here—and support the legislation.
Once again, as we keep saying time and time again, if, as the Minister keeps saying, this was about taking a few logs out and bringing jobs to the West Coast, and if the proper protections were there, that would be absolutely fine. Why does the Government keep deliberately overstepping on all these pieces of legislation? There are provisions in here that do not need to be in here and that are deeply worrying.
We are being told “Well, you don’t need to worry about it. There’s nothing that members opposite need to worry about.” Well, if that is the case, then why do they need to be there in the first place? The provisions are obviously there for some reason, and that is why we have Supplementary Order Papers to remove and change some of the provisions in the bill.
The first amendment in my Supplementary Order Paper is to change clause 4 to reduce the time frame from 5 years to 2 years. The Minister gave us his reason in his first reading speech as to why that time frame was the case. Again, I would actually like to be able to sit down with officials and go through a lot of that stuff. I think that is what a select committee process, albeit truncated, would have allowed us—to hear from experts. As a scientist myself I know it is very easy to cherry-pick research. It is much better to be able to sit down with groups of people. I am sure there are divergent views on this issue, as there are on many things, but it is good to get that expertise at a select committee, to be able to sit with people who know a lot more about this than we do, and to be able to actually hear from them what they think an adequate time frame should be.
I was also concerned to hear the Minister during the first reading speech of my colleague Ruth Dyson, who was talking about the Conservation Act, turn round and say to one of his colleagues: “Oh, that means we can never change the Conservation Act, because it’s been there for so long.” It worries me—so we are now talking about changing the Conservation Act. This is the worry. The Minister nods. This is the worry: that this is actually a stalking horse for something more. If this was simply about what he has been talking about—taking a few logs out after a major weather event and bringing jobs to the West Coast—then that would be fine. But that is not what this legislation does. It goes so much further, and there must be a reason why, which begs the question: what is that reason? And when I see the Minister nodding to show that the Conservation Act might now be up for review and discussion, despite the fact that it has been settled since 1987, then that does make me concerned that this is, as I said, a stalking horse for something else.
We have reduced that time frame from 5 years down to 2 years, which we think is appropriate, but we clearly acknowledge that we are picking numbers out of the air here because we have not been able to have the advantage of expert opinion through a select committee process. Also we have an amendment to clause 5 to include the designated area maps in the legislation. It is a simple change, really, but they should be in there. They should absolutely be in there. I am not sure why they were not included in there in the first place. I think when it comes—[Bell rung] Mr Chair?
The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): The honourable member Moana Mackey.
MOANA MACKEY: Thank you, Mr Chair. I am not going to take too much longer.
The other area I would like the Minister to elaborate on is the issue raised by my colleague Ruth Dyson about the monitoring of this and how we will know that it is actually windfall timber that is being taken out and not timber that is actually fine. We have a definition of “irreversibly damaged” in relation to timber that is “dead; or damaged to the extent that it is likely to die within the near future”. “Damaged to the extent that it is likely to die within the near future” does seem to me a fairly subjective definition. Although “dead” is obvious, how are we going to make sure that the logs being taken out—where someone is making a judgment call based on the fact they can get a bit of money for that—are going to be likely to die in the future? Where are the belts and braces around who makes that determination?
How are we going to check that the logs being taken out are actually logs that were damaged or destroyed during that storm and are not perfectly healthy logs? I suspect, given the comments the Minister has made, particularly about beech, which deteriorates quite quickly, they might want to take a couple of healthier-looking trees because, obviously, if a tree was alive when they actually felled it, then it is going to be in much better condition by the time it gets to market. So I think, particularly in terms of those trees the Minister himself has identified as being ones that deteriorate quickly, there is a real risk that it is not going to be windfall timber that is taken but is actually going to be trees that have nothing wrong with them or are in a state where they would regenerate if they were left to do so. So I would like a little bit of comment from the Minister, because, obviously, that is not stuff that you would expect in legislation. Who is going to be checking this? Who is going to be monitoring it? And how are we going to know that we are not creating a massive loophole for people who want to go in and actually take healthy trees, healthy native timber, out of our conservation estate, as opposed to the timber the Minister is talking about, which is the excess stuff that is lying on the ground?
I think we have general consensus around the House that it is a normal part of the ecological cycle to have trees that fall, that die, and that degrade. It is all part of the nutrient cycle. It is part of the habitat. The Minister is talking about a level above that. I am not clear, from reading the regulatory impact statement, the departmental report, or the bill, about exactly what level the Government is expecting in terms of the timber take.
I note the comments from my colleague Damien O’Connor, which I thought showed his knowledge of the area around how much, economically, is realistically going to be able to be taken out and what the trees that are most likely to be targeted are going to be. What my colleague Damien O’Connor, who has on-the-ground experience of the West Coast in this area, is saying is quite different from what the Government is saying in all its documentation.
Hon Ruth Dyson: Yep, absolutely. Who knows the place better?
MOANA MACKEY: That is right. So my worry is that, in fact, this is not just about what my colleague Damien O’Connor talked about, which was that when going in and taking out some of those extra trees, it is not going to be a lot, and it is most likely to be rimu more than anything else. I am a bit worried that this is actually going to be about flooding markets that are already depressed with a large amount of native timber, despite the fact that the economics are not necessarily there for some of it.
Again, I come back to that very serious question around how we know that the timber we are taking is stuff that has been damaged in the storm and is not stuff that someone has just decided to cut down and say was damaged in the storm. I really just want to leave my comments on Part 1 there but I welcome the Minister’s clarification on those points.
EUGENIE SAGE (Green): We are dealing with Part 1, including the purpose clause, of the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill, which is to allow the Director-General of Conversation to authorise the removal of timber from certain conservation areas and reserves. I would like to make some general comments before going on to talk a bit about the specifics of Supplementary Order Paper 474, which is in my name. The Minister of Conservation should well know that one of the key aspects of the restructuring of environmental administration in the late 1980s under the fourth Labour Government was the recognition that multiple-use agencies did not work and that the Forest Service, which at the time was napalming rimu forest to plant pines on the one hand and trying to encourage recreational use and environmental forestry on the other, was utterly conflicted. So it was a decision of the Labour Government to bring together all of the green dots that existed in Lands and Survey and the Wildlife Service and to separate out the use and development agencies into the Forestry Corporation, which then became Timberlands.
This whole purpose clause is fundamentally changing the purpose of the department. It is turning the Department of Conservation back into a multiple-use agency. It is corrupting the core mission and focus of the department and its staff, because at the very time that the department is supposed to be focused on ramping up pest control to deal with the beech mast year and the huge eruption in pests in South Island beech forests—the explosion of rats and stoats, and doing a sixfold increase in control to tackle that—the department is now going to have to train up and appoint a whole team of logging supervisors in order to manage the logging that this bill allows. The bill is wrong, as Moana Mackey has alluded to, with its very permissive terms and the way in which it creates an environment where all of our conservation lands will be at much greater risk of illegal logging and poaching of logs by opportunists. Where you have got the department allowing logging in some parts of the West Coast, there will be others who will see it as a giant opportunity to go in and take timber.
I would like the Minister to take a call and explain how the department is going to know whether a log comes from one of the designated areas or from nearby conservation land, or any other area of conservation land for that matter, because by promoting this bill the Government is signing off on a huge increase in illegal logging on the West Coast. We already know that it is happening. Locals in South Westland report that they have seen roading contractors who were logging along State Highway 6 in the road reserve with approval from the Transport Agency and the local councils, sneaking on to adjacent conservation land to get the giant rimu trees out when they knew that departmental staff were not around and that they would not get caught. How is the Department of Conservation going to enforce this bill? How many staff are going to be turned from focusing on pest control and the management of biodiversity to supervising logging? That is the huge tragedy at the heart of this bill: it is taking New Zealand back into the 19th century, into that colonial attitude where wild nature existed for human use to be exploited by whomever could get in first and take the most.
The other tragedy is that 20 years ago the New Zealand Forest Accord was signed. It is different from the 1986 West Coast Accord. It was a voluntary agreement between environmental organisations and the forestry industry. The industry agreed not to clear native forest and convert it to plantations, while environmental organisations endorsed plantation forestry as a renewable and sustainable source of timber. This bill, with this purpose in clause 3, turns its back on that voluntary agreement and the philosophy that was at the heart of that, which was to protect our native forests and instead promote the use of plantation forests as the major source of timber. This purpose is taking us back to the bad old days, where the department becomes a promoter and a manager of logging, where we have deep conflict between those who want to protect the forests to safeguard their biodiversity, and where there are those who see forests just as a source of money and a source of timber.
If this Government was genuinely serious about jobs and regional development, it would not be passing this bill. It would be promoting much more processing of plantation timber. If the Government was serious about job creation, instead of the giant piles of raw logs that we have got on wharves around the country, which are shipped off without being processed, without creating jobs for New Zealanders, it would be investing in ensuring that plantation pine was used for manufactured products. The purpose in the bill is fundamentally wrong and it is a major attack on conservation legislation. What it is going to lead to is Department of Conservation staff being faced with a whole host of dilemmas. They know about predator control, about trap-building, about recreational maintenance, and about conservation planning. They are not forestry operators. We know that under this Minister we have seen political interference, so that a 32-page comprehensive submission on the Ruataniwha Dam project suddenly disappeared and was not lodged.
So are we going to get pressure from this Minister on the department to approve logging wherever someone seeks an application to take timber? This bill allows huge discretion to the director-general, in terms of making decisions on applications to log. The Minister’s press release included three maps. There are no maps in this bill that identify the designated areas where logging will be permitted. So, instead, it is just any area that people can say was affected by Cyclone Ita. There is a lack of specificity there, and there is huge scope, because of that, for illegal logging. Then, in the list of areas that was attached to the Minister’s press release, there were a number of areas, such as various scenic reserves, the Punakāiki Nature Reserve, and areas that the Nature Heritage Fund had bought for addition to the conservation estate, like the Ballyhooley Scenic Reserve on the Whataroa Flats, which is one of the best areas of totara forest on the Whataroa Flats. Those were all part of the areas that would be open to logging in terms of the Minister’s press statement, but there is no identification of them in this bill. That is why I have introduced Supplementary Order Paper 474, which would seek to exclude scenic reserves, nature reserves, scientific reserves, and Victoria Forest Park from the ambit of the bill.
One of the other areas that the Minister’s map showed was very close to the Lewis Pass National Reserve. National reserves have a status almost equivalent to national parks, and yet the Minister’s map was suggesting that that was open for logging. That is why in my Supplementary Order Paper we are suggesting that there be a wider range of areas that are protected from logging—not just the ecological areas, Waitangi Roto Nature Reserve, and the South West New Zealand World Heritage Area that the Minister suggested. This is because, Minister, we set these areas aside and they have been protected under the Reserves Act, with the provisions in the Reserves Act that control any removal of vegetation intended to protect those areas since the 1970s and some of them before that. This bill, with its purpose of giving the Director-General of Conservation the discretion to approve logging, is a fundamental change to the purpose of the department.
One of the other major problems that the regulatory impact statement identifies is the research that is going to be done on logging. Why is there extensive research being done if the logging is to end in 5 years? The Minister has not closed off the prospect of logging being allowed much more extensively on conservation land. Is it going to see Scion and other agencies doing this research in order to justify opening up conservation land around New Zealand to be logged? That is a question we would like some answers to. The other area that the Supplementary Order Paper addresses is the whole issue of ground retrieval of timber. If logs get dragged through streams there is major damage. There is nothing in the bill that prevents the use of diggers, of bulldozers, and of big haulers, and all of the problems that go with that and all of the destruction. That is why the Supplementary Order Paper provides for a restriction, so that recovery can be only by helicopter.
The bill is very uncertain in a lot of the provisions. It is very vague. It leaves a huge amount of discretion to the director-general, and, again, that highlights one of the major problems with the bill—that it is going through under urgency. It has not been to a select committee. There has been no opportunity for submitters to highlight changes to the bill.
DAVID CLENDON (Green): We are debating Part 1, the purpose, of this unfortunate piece of legislation, the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. Of course, as soon as one sees the statement of purpose, it is to allow the Director-General of Conservation to authorise the removal of timber. The process that we are undertaking tonight to endeavour to embed this legislation is an offence to the democratic process. This is a significant shift in a country where we highly rate our conservation estate, where the integrity of the public domain, particularly our conservation and wilderness areas, is very close to people’s hearts. Jamming this legislation through in one night, with no opportunity for the public to make comment, is an offence to the democratic process. It is also an offence to anybody with the most basic knowledge of ecology. The content and the propositions within the legislation are utterly offensive to stage 1 ecology students. No doubt they are laughing around the country when they read the provisions of this bill—the endeavour to rationalise it, and the claims that are made within this legislation. It is an offence at many levels, but I will confine my comments to the purpose for the time being.
In terms of the purpose, we have heard a number of propositions about why this legislation is going ahead—that it is ultimately a political act. It is difficult to refute that, because if one looks for a sensible, rational, logical explanation, it is extremely hard to find one. We hear a great deal from this Government about balance—needing to balance the economy and the environment. That is a false dichotomy at every level. Joined-up thinkers, nationally and internationally, know that environmental well-being and economic well-being are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. You degrade one; you degrade the other. If we cause harm to the natural environment, it affects us not only as human beings but there will inevitably be a negative economic effect. Joined-up thinkers know this. This notion of this split, that one must serve the interests of the economy or of the environment, is such dated thinking as to be laughable. Unfortunately, this bill embeds that sort of very dated thinking, which probably was never right but certainly is not appropriate. It is not acceptable in the 21st century in New Zealand.
So why then are we proceeding with this? We are told that there may be economic benefit. I wonder whether any members of the Government who have taken calls on this bill have actually read the regulatory impact statement. Anybody reading that document must realise that there is an underlying purpose to this bill, which is not the one that is stated. It is not about an economic well-being or an economic boost to an area where undoubtedly the economy is, and has been, constantly under stress as a result of centuries of extractive industries. The economic analysis is very brief because there is very little work that has been done. I actually have some sympathy for the unfortunate people who were obliged to write this document, because essentially they were obliged to make it up as they went along.
The document tells us, for example, that there is an attempt to estimate what the income from the entire project may be. Essentially, the question of what the income would be is virtually impossible to calculate, because the information is not there. They have looked at the volume of timber, the likely value of the timber, the cost of extraction, and the level of opposition to the extraction, which will be significant and will drive up the cost. This is a Ministry for Primary Industries figure, in fact. Its highest estimate of overall income is $8 million; its lowest is $810,000—a tenfold difference in its guestimates. Essentially, that is what they are. They are guestimates as to the likely income from this ludicrous project that has been proposed.
The author of the regulatory impact statement goes on to say “I am not aware of any work that has been done to set a limit on what level of economic benefit would justify new legislation, or new urgent legislation.” This is being made up as people go along. It is extremely unsatisfactory to propose that we intervene in a wilderness area, in a conservation area, in a way that we know will be destructive to the ecological values and the future economic value in terms of tourism. We know, for example, that the Ministry for Primary Industries has warned us. This is not the Greens or Labour making things up. The Ministry for Primary Industries has raised concerns “about the potential for a spike in supply to have negative effects on the sustainable forestry industry overall.” So the existing industry can be undermined. We have no idea what suddenly putting this volume of logs on the market would do to the price, but we can make some pretty bold assumptions. In Economics 101, supply and demand, dump an oversupply on the market and it will very quickly drop the price. It will drive down whatever economic value there may have ever been, which we know in any case will not compensate for the substantial ecological value.
We are told that this will provide a research opportunity. We will be able to research the effect of the removal of wind-blown timber from a forest ecosystem. What an interesting proposition that is! The research question would have to be one of how badly this ecosystem would be impacted on by the removal of these logs. It is not a question of whether there will be an adverse effect; it is how long the ecosystem will take to recover and whether it will be able to recover, in fact, to anything resembling the ecosystem that was there prior to the cyclone. It could, if we leave it alone, be restored in its own right. It is simply dishonest to suggest there is a need for such research. This document, the regulatory impact statement, flimsy though it may be, has two pages of references and commentary about scientific research and some recent publications.
We know very well that species, as it tells us, are resilient to wind damage. Although individual trees—and, indeed, many trees—can be knocked down, the ecosystem can come back. That is the nature of resilience. If you have sufficient diversity in an ecosystem, if you allow the system to work in its own way, to recover in its own way, it will restore itself. That is the wonderful thing about nature. It is self-restoring. An intervention of the scale that is proposed here will deny that ecosystem the ability to restore itself. You will be left with degraded land. We will take away the nutrients that are required for the regrowth. We will take away the areas where seedlings can be protected as they grow back. We will take away the habitat for the insects, for the invertebrates, for the bird species, for the mammals, which are, many of them, rare and possibly endangered. All of that we are going to take away for the spurious claim that it will derive or generate economic benefit. It is simply dishonest to suggest that there is any net economic benefit from such a bizarre undertaking.
The industry tells us again that clearing wind-blown timber is an extremely dangerous proposition. You do not put untrained, unskilled people into that environment, because you will have serious injuries and you will have deaths. To carry through this task to get that timber out would require teams of extremely well-trained, experienced, and well-equipped people. This idea that I think people might have in their minds—because the Government is trying to sell this—of a very light-handed intervention, large helicopters coming in carefully selecting logs and removing them, is a nonsense. This would be a major intervention with heavy machinery on very fragile, delicate ecosystems.
One of the works in progress, this consultation, we are told, with Ngāi Tahu—at the time that the regulatory impact statement was written, that was a work in progress. We heard an unfortunate comment earlier this evening that Māori would understand the pragmatic, practical benefit of removing this resource, so-called. I find that quite offensive. I think cultural harvest has a long-term place. In the long term there is a place for cultural harvest in our conservation estate. That is a contested notion, and I am willing to have that contest; I am not suggesting having it at this time. The idea that Māori would accept the notion that you can go in mob-handed and start tearing out massive volumes of wood, irreversibly damaging a very fragile ecosystem, denying it the right to regenerate naturally—to say that Māori would somehow be involved in that, would tolerate that or accept it, is simply offensive, again. Yes, I know that back in the day the tupuna, after a major storm event, might have taken advantage of fallen trees.
RINO TIRIKATENE (Labour—Te Tai Tonga): Tēnā koe, Mr Chair. Tēnā koutou ngā mema. Huri rauna i tō tātou Whare. I am really pleased to take a call in the Committee stage of the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. Before I get into the details of Part 1, I do want to mihi at this time to our leader, the Hon David Cunliffe, and to all of my colleagues in the Labour caucus. I would like to acknowledge them all for allowing my colleague the Hon Damien O’Connor and me the opportunity to vote in support of this bill, to act as local MPs for Te Tai Poutini, which is the area that we both cover. As my honourable colleague mentioned earlier, we have stepped out in faith today. It is not the norm, obviously, that we would be doing this. But we do listen and we do represent the good people of Te Tai Poutini, West Coast - Tasman. I know that we have searched deep within us. My honourable colleague was talking about his Catholic upbringing. He was clutching on to that. I myself was saying a few Rātana prayers. I do want to acknowledge my colleagues for allowing us to express our vote in this way.
However, we would all be supportive of this bill had the Government merely responded to some simple requests that our leader wrote in a letter to the Government yesterday. The amendments that are contained in these Supplementary Order Papers were outlined in this letter. It was a very genuine, sincere request we made in the context that urgency was called around this very issue. What did we receive? What response did we receive to this letter? Absolutely nothing. Nothing from the Prime Minister’s office—or the Minister’s office, for that matter. That was very disappointing, because there really was a genuine willingness from this side of the House that we fully support this bill. Be that as it may, it is regrettable.
Turning to the various provisions in Part 1—as we know, we are dealing with the clauses relating to the definitions, and the purpose clause. Thinking about what Mr Clendon has said in his contribution, Māori are very much aware of the values of conservation. We know the science of conservation. But we are also pragmatists as well. When Mr Clendon was referring to cultural harvest and the like, I think it goes all the way back to our wonderful legends and stories and kōrero, like when Rata carved the first waka. To be able to carve that first waka, it took him a few attempts, but he finally realised that he had to say the right incantations, the right karakia, because, otherwise, the children of Tāne, the insects and the birds, would put the tree back where it was. Try as he might to carve that waka, he did not do it the right way and therefore he could not complete his waka. But according to the kōrero, when he was able to say the incantations and the karakia and follow the right kawa and the right tikanga, he was allowed to extract that tree to carve his waka.
That is no difference, really, from this context. I do see merit in this bill, particularly for my whānau in Te Tai Poutini. I think of the likes of the Mawhera Incorporation and I think of the likes of the many Māori reserves that there are on the West Coast—and there are numerous. These are very historic blocks of land that were set aside way back in the 1860s and 1870s around the original purchase deals around the South Island. For many years, those blocks really have just been lying—well, nothing has ever happened on those blocks. But there could very well be opportunities that could be leveraged in terms of benefiting from the wind-blown logs that are lying strewn right across the blocks. There could very well be benefits to those whānau, to our whānau, from opportunities around the extraction of those logs.
I think I might leave it there. That was my contribution. I acknowledge my colleagues but I also support the Supplementary Order Papers that have been put forward, especially by Moana Mackey around greater specificity around the definitions in Part 1. I commend those Supplementary Order Papers.
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe, Mr Chairperson. I want to take just a brief call on Part 1 of the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill in relation to a number of issues, including the regulatory impact statement, which is indeed a fascinating document. At least it is not blocked out, like some of the times when we are going through urgency and you cannot read it because it has been covered in black ink.
But if I was the Government, I would wish that it was, because actually this is a pretty damning document. It has clearly identified the status quo, and there are major problem definitions around dealing with the status quo and this new idea. It is quite damning. One quote from page 2 is: “At some scale their removal would have negative effects on overall ecology and forest regeneration.” That is what the regulatory impact statement is actually saying. It is saying very clearly that native forests are subject to periodic wind events, which cause trees to fall, are major drivers of the distributions of trees within forests, and generate the variety of habitats needed to maintain the biodiversity in those forests. So far from saying what I have heard from the Government speakers—that somehow if we cleared away the logs there would be this wonderful opportunity for the forest to grow up—the reality, as my colleagues have said, particularly in David Clendon’s last contribution, is that it does not work that way in nature. The Green Party is, if nothing else, here to respect natural cycles, and it is a shame that other people are not.
The other quote I would like to give from the regulatory impact statement is in Appendix 1, which is the advice from the Department of Conservation’s chief science adviser, which tells you that it was not written by the department. This whole bill was not written by the Department of Conservation. It does not come from it. It is being imposed upon it. It was actually, obviously, the Minister of Conservation who insisted upon this. The chief science adviser at the Department of Conservation says: “Given the severe nature of wind-throw and defoliation in some places on the Coast, extensive regeneration and succession will need to be encouraged as much as possible—thus retention of a high volume of deadwood will ensure adequate release of nutrients for regeneration and suitable substrates for seedling growth.” Either this person, the chief science adviser, knows nothing, or the expertise is all on the Government’s side. But, actually, when the regulatory impact statement says that this is the advice of the Department of Conservation’s chief science adviser, it would be nice if it was heard—not only nice but it is really important for the future of our forests that we actually listen to the science and we actually take some cognisance of that science.
Part 1 is like the rest of the bill: full of interesting contradictions and things that cannot be monitored. I am really interested in this clause about the poor old Director-General of Conservation, who has to make sure that there is no irreversible damage in relation to the timber. You know, this is pretty much an impossible task, as others have mentioned. This person—well, it is Lou Sanson, actually, the poor thing—is going to have to be the authoriser no longer of what goes on in the Department of Conservation estate from a conservation perspective, but now of the new world, and, as Eugenie said, of the multiple-use world. When I first worked for the Department of Conservation in 1990 there were new people there who had come in from Lands and Survey and they had come in from the Forest Service, and there were the conservationists, and we had this tension between those traditions. But over time the Department of Conservation brought the people together and actually strengthened the conservation effort so that the Forest Service no longer wanted to cut down all the trees, and Lands and Survey no longer wanted to bulldoze things. What we did was build a conservation ethic that is the pride of our country.
So instead of supporting that, if you read the regulatory impact statement and if you read these clauses in Part 1, you realise that the director-general has been brought in to oversee the wake, to oversee the end, of the conservation ethic in the conservation estate. That is a great job to have for poor old Lou Sanson, who is a very genuine conservationist. He has been brought in, and I do not know whether he knew that this was coming at him. But if you look at the debacle at Bathurst, where they do not have $22 million and they cannot afford to mine, we have got the myth of net conservation benefit being fobbed off on the Department of Conservation. It is now having to sacrifice one of the rarest ecosystems that I have ever seen in my life at Denniston for a faux mining operation by an Australian company that actually does not have any money because the coal price has collapsed. But somehow we have got to accept that there will be this miraculous $22 million, because mining companies never fail and they never fail to provide the money that they promised! Somehow that is all going to happen magically, and now the director-general has this wonderful new job, and that wonderful new job is to license logging.
RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): I rise to take just a very brief call to speak to the issues contained within the Supplementary Order Papers on Part 1 of the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill.
With regard to Supplementary Order Paper 475, although we feel that the inclusion of maps may be a useful tool for some people, we do not support this move, because the time frame given of 5 years is probably the minimum needed in order to do this job properly, if it is going to be done at all. We certainly agree that, if we are going to do it, it needs to be done in a manner that is measured and not rushed. We do not want to go causing any further unnecessary damage.
With regard to Supplementary Order Paper 474 in the name of Eugenie Sage we do support this initiative, for two reasons. Primarily, the inclusion of wildlife management areas in the excluded zones may well be interpreted as including the management of areas of herds of national importance under the Game Animal Council, and we are certainly in favour of not disturbing them. The other reason, of course, is the idea of removing timber only by helicopter. Although I stated earlier in the debate that we are not opposed to the inclusion of new roads if they may be constructed in accordance with existing Resource Management Act provisions, it is unlikely that that may happen. In actual fact, the removal of timber by helicopter is more likely to have far less of an environmental impact, so we do support that.
I also give notice that when the House resumes I will be seeking to correct a vote on the second reading. We did give an undertaking to the House that we would be supporting this bill to Committee stage, and through error that was not done, so when that time comes I will be seeking to do that. Thank you.
EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I would like to take another call to talk a bit about the regulatory impact statement, because this is a very honest regulatory impact statement. It makes it very clear that the initiatives of this legislation, the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill, are totally and utterly the Minister of Conservation’s, and that the Minister has very clear objectives about the amount of timber that is going to be recovered. The regulatory impact statement, which you would normally get when a bill is introduced, has been on the Table of the House only since late this afternoon, so there has been very limited opportunity for people to read it thoroughly, but it is a very honest and direct document.
One of the options that the regulatory impact statement looks at is whether the recovery of windthrow timber could be done under existing legislation. It goes through the risks of that. One of them was that there would be a risk of judicial review. One of them was that there would be strong opposition because the existing law is seen as protecting conservation land and prohibiting timber recovery, and that people would see it as opening the door for a similar response to common windfall events, so making the risk of judicial review very high.
One of the other risks that the department identified is that the process in the existing legislation—that is, the Conservation Act—was not designed to cater efficiently and effectively to the type of recovery intended by the Minister, and nor would it be possible to allow that level of recovery. So what is the Minister intending here? The very nature of the legislation, which talks about designated areas but then defines “designated area” as “every conservation area and reserve within the West Coast region that is owned by the Crown and administered by the Department ...”, other than ecological areas, the South West New Zealand World Heritage Area, the Waitangiroto Nature Reserve, and national parks—that means that every bit of the West Coast other than those specified areas is open to logging. If the Minister is directing that there be a high level of timber recovery to maximise the potential for revenue gain by logging companies, that is exposing all of those lands to logging.
The regulatory impact statement is also very honest in saying that the reason for the research is that “He”—the Minister—“also wishes to use the event as an opportunity to research the ecological effect of timber recovery, to allow the potential for harvest in future to be better assessed.” So it is being very clear that this National Government is intending to open up all conservation lands for logging. The Minister is shaking his head. Why does the Department of Conservation’s evaluation of this legislation quite clearly say that this bill is all about what the Minister wants in terms of the level of recovery and the inability for people to challenge logging? It highlights some of the problems with the status quo—that there are lots of ecological impacts in terms of the scientific research that has been done, which shows how essential standing and fallen logs are to the whole forest cycle. Yet members on the opposite benches just dismiss all of that.
But this regulatory impact statement is very clear, and I would encourage people to read it, because it is showing that the Department of Conservation did not come up with this legislation. Once again, the Minister has his hands all over it, directing the department to compromise the purpose in the Conservation Act to allow logging not just on the West Coast, potentially, but in other areas of New Zealand as well. That is a travesty.
The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 475 in the name of Moana Mackey to clause 4 be agreed to.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the amendment be agreed to.
Ayes 44
New Zealand Labour 33; Green Party 10; Mana 1.
Noes 70
New Zealand National 59; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Amendment not agreed to.
The result corrected after originally being announced as Ayes 45, Noes 70.
The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 475 in the name of Moana Mackey to clause 5 be agreed to.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the amendment be agreed to.
Ayes 51
New Zealand Labour 33; Green Party 10; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.
Noes 63
New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Amendment not agreed to.
The result corrected after originally being announced as Ayes 52, Noes 63.
The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 474 in the name of Eugenie Sage to clause 5 be agreed to.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the amendment be agreed to.
Ayes 51
New Zealand Labour 33; Green Party 10; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.
Noes 63
New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Amendment not agreed to.
The result corrected after originally being announced as Ayes 52, Noes 63.
EUGENIE SAGE (Green): My apologies, but could I seek leave to correct the voting for the Green Party. It should have been 10 votes in favour.
The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Is there any objection to that course of action being taken? There is none.
A party vote was called for on the question, That Part 1 be agreed to.
Ayes 72
New Zealand National 59; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; New Zealand Labour 2 (O’Connor D*, Tirikatene); United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Noes 42
New Zealand Labour 31***NAMES TO BE INSERTED; Green Party 10, Mana 1.
Part 1 agreed to.
The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Before I move on to Part 2, I will correct the votes so that members are aware. Under the amendment to clause 4 on Supplementary Order Paper 475 in the name of Moana Mackey, the Ayes vote changes to 44. Under the amendment to clause 5 on Supplementary Order Paper 475 in the name of Moana Mackey, the Ayes vote changes to 51. Under the amendment to clause 5 on Supplementary Order Paper 474 in the name of Eugenie Sage, the Ayes vote changes to 51.
Part 2 Removal of wind-blown timber
Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): I do not like reading out the details of bills too much, but I think it is important just to clarify exactly what the Supplementary Order Paper 476 is that I am putting forward on the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. The Minister of Conservation was determined to try to mislead people. My amendment to clauo’se 9 basically puts in place an obligation on the director-general to consider a West Coast - registered company or operation prior to anyone else. The wording is: “A person may apply for an authorisation under section 10 only if that person—(a) is a West Coast registered company or operation; and (b) has been invited to do so by the Director-General.” It goes on to insert a new clause 9(5), saying: “The Director-General may only invite non-West Coast resident people to apply for an authorisation under subsection (3) if he or she has not received any applications from West Coast operations.”
The Minister in the chair, the Minister of Conservation, thinks it is a joke. In fact, regional development has been a long-held principle of the Labour Party—and Labour Governments, actually. The Minister would not know anything about that because he is a flat-earth, free-market ideologue who believes that development just occurs—yet he wants, in his electorate of Nelson, to get money from the Government to build a dam. Why do you not apply the free-market approach there, Minister? He cannot answer that. No, he wants to have his cake and eat it. I am not going to go on. That is the first part of the amendment I have put forward.
The next amendment is to clause 10. It simply says that one of the requirements that the director-general must consider when receiving an application under clause 10(3)(a) is that “(vii) the timber is released into the market in a managed way to avoid flooding the market;”—that is, that we do not sell or provide logs to anyone who is simply going to cut them up as quick as they can and dump them on to the market for a quick buck. It relates back to Part 1, where the issue of the time line for this legislation is a point of contention. My colleagues believe that it should be 2 years. It is indeed more economical and feasible to extract all those logs in a short time frame when we have the helicopter and the infrastructure and the skills on the ground. The logs need to be cut as quickly as possible, and then they can be stored, as the Minister from the other side said, for tens—if not hundreds—of years, literally, if kept dry.
So the objective is to get it out of the bush as quickly as possible, but the Government has contradicted itself by on the one hand demanding urgency in the House and then saying that there needs to be a 5-year time line. Had the Government come back to the 2-year time line and accepted the wise amendments put forward by Labour, then the whole caucus would have supported this legislation. I would have preferred that. In the meantime, I put forward my Supplementary Order Paper 476 to ensure that West Coasters, not other people, get a fair go at utilising this resource for the jobs and the people of the West Coast region.
The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): The question is that Part 2 stand part, but before we do that we have a number of—[Interruption] Oh, I am sorry. I did not hear the member call.
EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I am sorry, Mr Chair. I was not calling loudly enough. Mr Chair. Going back to the research programme, it is interesting that the Minister in the chair, the Minister of Conservation, has not taken a single call to answer any of the questions that have been put by Opposition members. The National members are not taking any calls, either, to defend this bill, the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. Once again, Government members are not committed to this legislation in the sense of being able to defend it. They are quite happy for our conservation lands to be opened up to logging without even echoing any concerns. That is why the Department of Conservation analysis in the regulatory impact statement is very telling.
Going back to this research programme, it is going to be quite comprehensive, across a large number of forest types, slopes, and geologies. It will have multiple research sites, with measurement undertaken over a long time period to track the changes. It is going to cover a wide variety of physical matters. So why is this comprehensive research programme being established unless the Government wants to open up conservation lands generally to logging? That is just the sort of philosophy we have with this Government. It fails to understand that for a healthy economy we need a healthy environment. The Government has got a whole history of opening up our protected areas to resource use. This bill is the very latest in that whole “dig it, irrigate it, mine it, drill it”—and now—“log it” philosophy.
This part of the bill, Part 2, has a lot of the detail around how the conservation lands are going to be logged. Certainly, there has to be an authorisation by the director-general, but this part allows anyone to apply for that. It cuts across the Resource Management Act. This bill is making it easier to log on public conservation land than it is for private landowners to log on private land. That is because on private land those forest owners have to satisfy the Forests Act, they have to have a sustainable management plan or a sustainable management permit approved by the Ministry for Primary Industries and the Secretary of Forestry, and they have to comply with any necessary provisions in the Resource Management Act—any requirements for a resource consent to clear vegetation and any requirements for land disturbance consents to control the amount of sediment that ends up in streams.
But what does this part of the bill do? It rides roughshod over that. It specifically excludes the provisions of the Resource Management Act from applying and it excludes the provisions of the Forests Act from applying. So you will get a consenting regime that is administered by only the Department of Conservation, without the department having any expertise in how to manage logging.
When you get to clause 10, that has some requirements that the director-general must be satisfied about before he grants an authorisation. But, again, these provisions are very vague. They have very general terms, such as “so far as is reasonably practicable,” that the safety of people working at the site is protected. Since when has the Department of Conservation had the expertise in occupational safety that the Ministry of Business, Employment and Innovation has? Why is the Department of Conservation going to be responsible for managing safety? There is a real risk here, given the huge number of deaths and serious injuries in the forestry industry, that we will get that compounded by allowing logging on conservation land, particularly because in the circumstances of windthrow you have a higgledy-piggledy, pick-up-sticks mess of logs that is subject to considerable tension. If you remove one, there is the risk of that tension being removed and other logs damaging workers, causing serious injury and, potentially, fatalities.
The other provision that the director-general has to take account of is keeping the adverse effects on the environment to a minimum. What on earth does that mean? This provision, with its lack of specificity, gives huge discretion to the director-general. Those powers are likely to be delegated, so you will get some staffer in the West Coast conservancy in Hokitika making a decision about whether forests should be open for logging. What will they do? They will be told by the loggers that they need to log healthy trees because they cannot get access to the windthrown timber by helicopter.
Chris Auchinvole: Oh, rubbish!
EUGENIE SAGE: Yes, that is exactly what happened with Timberlands.
Chris Auchinvole: You don’t know that.
EUGENIE SAGE: We do know that, Mr Auchinvole, because that is what happened with Timberlands. When we had the helicopter logging on the West Coast—
LOUISE UPSTON (Senior Whip—National): I move, That the question be now put.
RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): I am going to take just a brief call. I have some questions that I would like members opposite, or perhaps the Minister of Conservation, to answer in relation to clause 11(3), in particular, of the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill: “Despite section 67C(1) of the Forests Act 1949, indigenous timber removed in accordance with an authorisation may be exported from New Zealand if the timber is—(a) sawn beech; or (b) sawn rimu;”. My question is, why? We have had Government members earlier in the debate suggesting that timber removed could be stored, and Mr Damien O’Connor also has suggested that timber could be stored once it is sawed. We agree with that. It is a very good thing to do with timber that is harvested but surplus to immediate requirements. I would like the Minister, particularly, to answer why the bill makes specific provision for this timber to be exported, against the provisions of the Forests Act.
Further to that, clause 12(3) says: “The Director-General may, in the Director-General’s absolute discretion, refund or waive payment of all or any part of any royalty, fee, or charge paid or required to be paid under this Act.” Why? Surely we are harvesting a resource that is of great value. We are attempting to extract the greatest value that we can from this resource. Why does the bill provide specific provision for any royalties and fees to be waived or refunded? We want this wealth to go back to the West Coast and to stay in the economy of New Zealand. I wonder whether the Minister could tell us why this bill contains specific provision for these charges, fees, and royalties to be waived or refunded.
Over the page is clause 17, “Permitted activity not an offence”, which absolutely baffles me. I will read it. “A person who carries out an activity in accordance with an authorisation—(a) does not commit an offence against the Conservation Act 1987, Reserves Act 1977, or Wildlife Act 1953 (or any regulations, bylaws, or notices made under those Acts) in respect of the activity; and (b) does not require any authorisation…”, etc., etc. We have not really touched on this, but it baffles me as to why we are passing a bill that allows anybody who has an authorisation to go and collect wind-blown trees and wind-blown timber to do anything they like, regardless of any provisions otherwise covered in conservation, reserves, or wildlife legislation. Why? Why are we doing this? Why are we allowing people to go into the forest, do anything they like to the wildlife, and do anything they like to conservation for the sake of taking out trees, without so much as a “by-your-leave”?
Lastly is clause 19, “Certain sections of Resource Management Act 1991 do not apply”. It states: “Sections 9, 13, 14, and 15 of the Resource Management Act 1991 do not apply to activities permitted by an authorisation.” So by a simple act of an authorisation to go and collect some wind-blown trees, all the provisions of the Resource Management Act pertaining to land use type, to water take, and to putting rubbish back into the water do not apply. All the gains that have been made over 20-odd years are just swept away because—we do not know why. Can the Minister please tell us why? Thank you.
MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore): I move, That the question be now put.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the question be now put.
Ayes 63
New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Noes 51
New Zealand Labour 33; Green Party 10; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.
Motion agreed to.
The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 476 in the name of the Hon Damien O’Connor to clauses 9 and 10 be agreed to.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the amendments be agreed to.
Ayes 41
New Zealand Labour 33; New Zealand First 7; Independent: Horan.
Noes 62
New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; United Future 1.
Abstentions 11
Green Party 10; Mana 1.
Amendments not agreed to.
The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 474 in the name of Eugenie Sage to insert new clause 10(3)(a)(iiia) be agreed to.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the amendment be agreed to.
Ayes 51
New Zealand Labour 33; Green Party 10; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.
Noes 63
New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Amendment not agreed to.
The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 475 in the name of Moana Mackey to clause 10 be agreed to.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the amendment be agreed to.
Ayes 44
New Zealand Labour 33; Green Party 10; Mana 1.
Noes 70
New Zealand National 59; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Amendment not agreed to.
The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 474 in the name of Eugenie Sage to insert new clause 10(3)(c) be agreed to.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the amendment be agreed to.
Ayes 51
New Zealand Labour 33; Green Party 10; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.
Noes 63
New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Amendment not agreed to.
The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 474 in the name of Eugenie Sage to insert new clause 10(6) be agreed to.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the amendment be agreed to.
Ayes 51
New Zealand Labour 33; Green Party 10; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.
Noes 63
New Zealand National 59; Māori Party 2; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Amendment not agreed to.
The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 475 in the name of Moana Mackey to clause 16 be agreed to.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the amendment be agreed to.
Ayes 44
New Zealand Labour 33; Green Party 10; Mana 1.
Noes 70
New Zealand National 59; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Amendment not agreed to.
A party vote was called for on the question, That Part 2 be agreed to.
Ayes 65
New Zealand National 59; Labour 2 (O’Connor D*, Tirikatene); Māori Party 2; New Zealand; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Noes 49
New Zealand Labour 31***NAMES TO BE INSERTED; Green Party 10; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.
Part 2 agreed to.
The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 475 in the name of Moana Mackey to insert a new schedule be agreed to.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the amendment be agreed to.
Ayes 44
New Zealand Labour 33; Green Party 10; Mana 1.
Noes 70
New Zealand National 59; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Amendment not agreed to.
Clause 1 Title
EUGENIE SAGE (Green): This is a very dismal process. We have got a bill, the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill, being put forward by the Minister of Conservation that attacks the very integrity of conservation land. We have had a process that is totally anti-democratic. There has not been any opportunity for the public to have say, and in the Committee stage we had the Minister in the chair, Nick Smith, sitting there and not answering a single question posed by Labour members, New Zealand First members, or Green members. We have had Government members not engaging with the debate to defend the bill because they know that it is indefensible, yet we have got this bill, which should really be called the “Logging of Conservation Land (Opening Up Conservation Land to the Worst Sort of Damage from Chainsaws, Haulers, Skidders, and the Removal of Trees that are Part of the Whole Forest Ecology) Bill”. It is a very sad day for conservation when we have this bill being passed without the public having the ability to have a say on what happens on public conservation land.
The Minister, by not answering, shows that there are objectives here that he is not being honest about. It is very interesting reading through the departmental disclosure statement and seeing what consultation—or lack of consultation—there has been in developing the bill. There is no reference in that disclosure statement that I can see to the Minister seeking any advice from the bodies that are charged under the Conservation Act with providing advice, the New Zealand Conservation Authority and the West Coast Conservation Board. If he was not going to subject the bill to public consultation, at the very least he could have requested advice from these authorities. Yes, it was considered at a meeting, but it was just rammed through. He did not ask for their advice. So again, Minister, you had the opportunity to respond to the questions, and you have not done that. You have highlighted that we have not closed off the likelihood that this will be applied to other conservation land. What is the agenda here?
The very dismissive way that you have treated the amendments that were proposed by Opposition members—my amendments were suggesting that there be a ban on heavy machinery such as skidders and haulers and that there be a prohibition on new roads and vehicle access tracks being constructed—and the fact that you dismissed them without any comment means that the Government is not serious about minimising the damage from these logging operations. There has been no consideration of other amendments to prevent the spread of weeds. With the introduction of skidders and haulers and with new roads being constructed, we are going to be damaging the integrity of areas that at the moment have very few exotic plants and little weed spread, but the Minister will not even consider a small amendment to make sure that there is little or no risk of exotic plants being introduced.
That shows the contempt with which the Government is treating our conservation lands—that it does not even see it as important to minimise the impacts that logging will cause and that it is just prepared to go ahead with the bill as introduced, without any public process and without recognising the work that Opposition members have done to try to make a bad bill a little bit less bad by putting in a few more controls on the way in which logging can occur. As Mr Prosser from New Zealand First noted, the way in which the bill allows the export of sawn timber means that it will not minimise the amount of timber that is taken off these conservation lands and that it will be creating a big market overseas for our treasured native trees.
This is a very bad bill. From Mr Brownlee’s comments when he led off the speeches in the first reading, it is all about resuscitating an industry that should have died properly last century. But that is typical of this Government’s economic policies. It is not interested in sustainability, and it is not interested in long-term, well-paid jobs. It wants a short-term, boom-and-bust industry that perpetuates those cycles that we have seen on the West Coast of extracting resources, whether they be trees, coal, or gold—a boom-and-bust industry. That is what this bill will do, by resuscitating an industry that we closed off on public land and that people thought our conservation lands were protected from in 1999, when the Timberlands beach scheme was wound up and when those forests were subsequently added to the conservation estate. This Government is looking backwards in allowing native forest logging to restart.
Hon PHIL HEATLEY (National—Whangarei): I move, That the question be now put.
DAVID CLENDON (Green): Thank you, Mr Heatley, for taking your seat. Here we are, a mere few hours after this non-debate began, and we are already debating the title clause of the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. It is unfortunate that the Government does not have the courage of its convictions and that the Minister in the chair, the Minister of Conservation, is content to sit in the chair and smile benignly at the Committee. At no point is he defending this appalling piece of legislation. He is not endeavouring to rationalise it or to justify it because it is beyond rationalisation, and the justification is not one that I believe the Minister is willing to voice openly.
The title of this bill is the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. It could more correctly be called the “National Government’s Assault on Conservation Bill”. That would be an honest label for this bill. It would reveal, in fact, what is going on here. This bill has no rationalisation other than that it is chipping away at conservation values. It is chipping away at the legislation. Every member of the public who has ever stood up for conservation in New Zealand should be offended by this bill, and they will be in large numbers.
I am grateful to our colleague Rino Tirikatene for reminding us of that interesting kōrero from back in the day about the fellow who entered the forest and just mindlessly began cutting a tree in order to carve a waka. He worked hard all day. He went back to his village. The next morning he came and discovered that his work had been undone by the kaitiaki of that place, by those who genuinely cared for it. The teaching within that simple story is about respect for nature, because only through respecting nature and caring for nature can we respect and care for ourselves.
We are living at a greater distance from the natural environment in one sense than our tūpuna Māori lived, but the principles remain to the extent that when we inflict damage on the natural earth, when we degrade what is left of our wilderness areas, we reduce our own well-being—our spiritual, our social and, indeed, our economic well-being. That is what this legislation will affect. That was a simple story and I am grateful to Rino for reminding us of the learning and the teaching that is embedded in it.
So we could just as well call this bill the “Turning Our Backs on Sustainable Management Bill”, because there is a clause in the bill that suggests that the director-general can allow or authorise any removal of timber only if “the effects of activities within the specified site ... are not contrary to the purpose of the Resource Management Act ...”. I remind people that the purpose of that legislation, the Resource Management Act, is the promotion of sustainable management of natural and physical resources while, among other things, “safeguarding the life-supporting capacity of air, water, soil, and ecosystems;”. We have delivered ample evidence tonight. We have argued and revealed, and we have based that on information from the Department of Conservation and elsewhere, that there is no way that this intervention, this removal of timber, can possibly do other than almost wipe out the life-supporting capacity of ecosystems. We have the evidence before us, even in the very flimsy document that is available to us. I have no idea what the Minister in the chair is trying to indicate to me, but I will let that moment pass.
It is undeniable that this will destroy the ability of this ecosystem to restore itself to the canopy forest that was there before the cyclone hit. We have evidence in the information, sparse though it be, that the resilience of that ecosystem is dependent on it being allowed to restore itself. Nature will do that—it will restore itself. This bill could also be called the “Assault on Natural Values and the Assault on Nature Bill” because that is what it is doing. We pride ourselves and we base our economic well-being on this notion of being a clean, green country. It is an image that we enjoy and that enables us to meet our needs. It is only an image. This bill is a step towards destroying that image.
A party vote was called for on the question, That clause 1 be agreed to.
Ayes 72
New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 2 (O’Connor D*, Tirikatene); New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 2; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Noes 42
New Zealand Labour 31***NAMES TO BE INSERTED; Green Party 10; Mana 1.
Clause 1 agreed to.
A party vote was called for on the question, That clause 2 be agreed to.
Ayes 65
New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 2 (O’Connor D*, Tirikatene); Māori Party 2; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Noes 49
New Zealand Labour 31***NAMES TO BE INSERTED; Green Party 10; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.
Clause 2 agreed to.
Bill reported without amendment.
Report adopted.
RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): I seek leave to correct a vote that was made earlier in the second reading of the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. The vote for New Zealand First was recorded as seven opposed. I would like to change that to seven in favour.
LINDSAY TISCH (Assistant Speaker—National): Leave is sought to correct the New Zealand First vote on the second reading of the bill. Is there any objection? There is no objection. The bill will be corrected. The Ayes, therefore, are 72 and the Noes are 44.
Third Reading
Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister of Conservation): I move, That the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill be now read a third time. I am pleased to stand in the House as a practical conservationist and put the case as to why this bill makes good sense. I understand much about why New Zealanders value New Zealand’s clean, green brand, but that does not mean that we surrender our common sense. When trees are fallen and are dead, there is nothing wrong about saying that we should utilise that wood for people’s jobs and economic well-being. I say quite simply that we are not such a wealthy country that we can let valuable felled timber rot. I do want to run through just quickly and respond to a few of the reasonable points that were made between much of the invective directed at me in the Committee stage.
Firstly, there is a real contradiction from Labour members arguing in one breath that this bill should apply for only 2 years and then in the next breath arguing that they are worried about a flood of indigenous timber into the market place. Those two positions are not compatible. The reason the Government wishes to run the bill over a period of 5 years is that that is a reasonable recovery period for the timber. The more ridiculous demand from the member Damien O’Connor is that the Government must guarantee in law—this is exactly what he said—that West Coasters get the jobs and that West Coasters get the revenue from the timber. That is a nonsense. They are the exact words that the member said in his press release. That is a complete nonsense. We do not do that in any other part of the country. That would be as sensible as saying that with the billions of dollars that are being spent on the earthquake recovery in Christchurch, we have got to guarantee that the building contracts or the jobs go to Cantabrians. They need to go to those who are best able to do the work.
Members opposite said that rather than putting the bill through in a single day, it would be OK if we set it down for a select committee process over 2 weeks. I simply make this bet. If the Government had come to the House and said that it was going to refer this bill to a select committee for 2 weeks, there would have been cries of “Foul!” and “Horror!” that this process was way too constrained, and claims that there would not be time to publicly advertise and for people to be able to come before the select committee and have their views represented. I, very openly, published this bill a week ago to give members the chance to study its details. It is only temporary legislation, which will not be permanent.
I also note the amendments from Moana Mackey, in which she wanted to have maps put into the schedule of the bill. The reason the Government did not support those amendments is that they actually would have created more uncertainty. These were very broad maps, and there is no way in which the Director-General of Conservation, who has responsibility for administering this legislation, could have been able to reasonably decipher where it would have been acceptable to grant permits. It is more sensible to do so by using the description of the status of the land, as has been done in the bill.
There have been all sorts of spurious claims made about the fact that I have been quite open that as part of the recovery of the timber after this massive storm on the West Coast, it is the intention of the Department of Conservation to commission research so that we can see exactly how forests that have had some timber removed recover in comparison with those areas that have not had removal. That is being done with no secret agenda or anything other than to say that in the event that that research shows that timber recovery is quite reasonable in situations involving wind-blown incidents of the massive scale that we have seen on the West Coast with Cyclone Ita, then I would be open-minded about making a permanent change to the Conservation Act. One of the more extraordinary contributions in the Committee stage was members asking how I dare, as Minister of Conservation, amend the Conservation Act. Well, if we are going to adopt that ridiculous approach, why bother having a Parliament? Why would the Minister of Labour amend the labour legislation? The Conservation Act is not some locked-in, holy granite stone that we must never ever amend or rethink. This is a Government of practical conservationists, who think that if we can reasonably use timber, we should take that opportunity.
I do have to note the extraordinary event in this House that I have not seen in 24 years, which is that we have two members of the Labour Party voting against their party. That just shows the level of disunity, the level of division, and the lack of leadership in the Labour Party. I challenge any member of the Labour Party to tell me any time in the last 90 years when you have had two members of your caucus vote against your party.
Sue Moroney: Oh, actually, quite a lot of times.
Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Sue Moroney says that there have been quite a lot of times. When? No, not once. Not once, and that shows that the Labour Party, for the very reason that Shane Jones left, is in a mess. Those members do not know what they stand for. They are in no position to govern on their own, let alone attempt to govern this country with the other parties on the Opposition benches.
I want to conclude by saying that this is a sensible, pragmatic bill that does no more than enable the Director-General of Conservation to grant permits for the recovery of wind-blown timber. Eugenie Sage, when this issue first arose 4 weeks ago, challenged me and said that if we wanted to recover the timber, we needed to bring a bill to this House. That is exactly what I have done. It is the right way for the Government to be open with Parliament to make the law clear. I have got confidence in the Department of Conservation and the Director-General to make sure that this work is done in a sensible way that enables that valuable timber to be recovered without putting the core conservation values at risk.
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): The Minister of Conservation made it sound like it was Eugenie Sage’s fault that we are about to break a 27-year-old agreement. Shame on you—I thought you opposed the logging of timber from our native trees! But, no, Minister Smith managed to divert the responsibility completely away from himself when, actually, he is the Minister of Conservation. Tonight we have seen an extraordinarily arrogant, out-of-touch demonstration from Minister Nick Smith, from Gerry Brownlee, and, actually, from the entire National Government. It just rode roughshod over all the quite serious amendments that were proposed by the Green Party and by Labour. I think that this has not been an exercise in pragmatism; I think that it has been a cheap political stunt, and I resent having Parliament’s time being used for this sort of exercise.
We know that there is a risk of flooding the market and that this will harm existing businesses. The very purpose of this West Coast (Wind-blown Timber) Amendment Bill, as outlined by the Minister, is to improve job opportunities on the West Coast. We know—and it was demonstrated by the National Government’s rejection of our Supplementary Order Papers—that this will risk existing businesses, which is exactly the opposite of what the Government proposed that it is aiming to achieve.
We know that it will have a negative impact on the SILNA forest owners. For how many years has that group of people battled for what was rightfully theirs? Now it is at risk. Without any consultation and without any engagement, they would have heard this news over the radio or read it in the newspaper. There has not been any proper process for input from them.
There are no protections for West Coasters. Another amendment that we proposed to make sure that the people on the West Coast, who have had such tragic situations occur to them as a result of direct actions by the Government—hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of job losses as a result of the National Government’s action. They might not get any benefit from this, and if they do it will be by fluke, not by design, and that is not good enough.
The worst thing from my perspective is that this shows a blatant disregard for the longstanding agreement that we have had as a Parliament to protect our native trees from logging. The Minister is a disappointment to conservation values. He is a disappointment to the very values that underpin our identity. The fact that he is passing this bill through all stages under urgency, with not a single opportunity for input from the public, just makes a very bad bill even worse.
MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore): I rise to speak on the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. I commend this bill and I approve of it. I think that Labour ought to listen to two loyal members of Parliament on its side who represent the interests of the community that they represent. This would be a very good thing for the West Coast. I think that Labour ought to cut back on some of the colourful rhetoric and listen to the people who really, truly represent the will of the people on the Coast.
It is a great tragedy indeed that Cyclone Ita wreaked so much havoc on the forests. It is unprecedented—20,000 hectares of forest have been felled, and 200,000 hectares have been damaged. That is an awful thing to have happened, but why would we just let the timber rot? There is no good purpose served by doing that. It can instead serve the community of the West Coast. It can serve the people who need the timber, rather than causing us to import more timber. I think that on that level, and on many other levels, it is a very good bill. I commend it to the House.
Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): Natural events occur. They occur right through this country, on the East Coast and on the West Coast. We make changes to adapt to or to mitigate any of the effects of those things. On the East Coast we have had a major event, and the Minister of Conservation raised the comparison of what is going on in Christchurch in terms of managing contracts. He said it would be ridiculous to manage and oversee the contracts in Christchurch. I put it to him that perhaps if he had not handed over the contract to Fletcher’s and there was a bit more control over who did what, local people over there would have had a fairer go.
On the West Coast, he now wants to impose upon our region a possible contract and access to a resource that is one of the few things we have on the West Coast. We use it for tourism, we use it for our natural beauty and for the ecosystems, and, occasionally, under sustainable management, we use the logs in the timber industry. It is a very fragile indigenous timber market and any logs that come into that, particularly rimu, will potentially upset that market. One of the things that we attempted to do through my Supplementary Order Paper 476 was to ensure that this natural event, this one-off event, was not going to tip a fragile sustainable industry on its ear.
We also believe that our region deserves to have first go to deliver some job opportunities—not guarantees, as the Minister said, but opportunities—for West Coasters, almost 1,000 of whom have lost their well-paid jobs because a Government-owned company, Solid Energy—mismanaged by the National Government—simply had to get rid of them. Our communities are reeling under that massive job loss and we do look for opportunities wherever they might be. That is why the West Coast would like to see some of those logs taken for job opportunities. That is why I can understand that it can be done and I support my local community, as does my colleague Rino Tirikatene.
But what concerns me is that this Government was not prepared to amend this hasty piece of legislation, the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill, in order to give more assurance to our region that, indeed, we could be the beneficiaries. That is what concerns me most. The crocodile tears that come from that side of the House—when it comes to regional development and when it comes to areas up and down this country that have been suffering from unemployment, the Minister quite clearly explained the Government’s position: it would be ridiculous to have any kind of intervention, any kind of preference, or any kind of advantage for people who live and support those communities. That is a flat-earth, free-market ideology that comes from the National Government not just in this legislation but, indeed, across all its areas of governance.
I will support this legislation. I will be monitoring very closely the process of allocation of the rights to this timber, and I expect the West Coast community and the West Coast economy to be the first ones and the main ones to get the benefits from this. If not, this has been a cheap political stunt from the National Government and some pathetic attempt to try to get political advantage. We are talking about real jobs and real opportunities. It is now up to the Government to make them happen.
EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I think that the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill is certainly an exercise in pork - barrel politics—in trying to get votes for the National Party’s candidate on the West Coast—but I wish it was just a cheap political stunt. It is much more than that because it has very serious consequences for our conservation legislation. Clause 10 of the bill imposes a very different test on the Director-General of Conservation in respect of how he is going to evaluate these applications to log on conservation land. He is required to look at the effects of the logging and whether or not they are contrary to the purpose of the Resource Management Act. As David Clendon noted, that purpose is one of sustainable management. It is a quite different purpose from the purpose of the Conservation Act, which is about the preservation and protection of our natural resources. So this bill is a fundamental weakening of the Conservation Act both in allowing logging and in the criteria that the director-general must use in evaluating logging.
Cyclone Ita was certainly a tragedy for West Coast residents who had the roofs blown off their homes or whose businesses suffered damage because of the cyclonic wind, but it was never a tragedy for our forests. Native forests in New Zealand are dynamic. They are used to periodic disturbances. Disturbance, whether from big heavy snow events or big wind events, is part of the endless cycle of death, decay, and regeneration of these forests.
Where you get areas of wind-blow, you get more light, and that encourages the seedlings to regrow,and you get the recycling of nutrients. As the distinguished botanist Sir Alan Mark, who has spent decades studying West Coast forests, said in a letter to today’s Dominion Post: “Preserving and understanding natural processes, no matter how destructive, is a key reason why we have preserved these forests.” The timber is not wasted by being windthrow, and by disturbing the forests to log the timber, we are attacking the very reason why these areas are protected. So it is deeply saddening to be part of a Parliament where the Government and its supporting parties are prepared to pass legislation that overturns the consensus that we do not have logging on conservation land.
As the regulatory impact statement makes very clear: “The current legislation governing protected areas was specifically designed to prevent the harvest of indigenous timber from those lands.” That was because the department was set up as an agency that was charged with managing these forests for conservation, for recreation, and for allowing tourism where that did not have impacts on conservation values, but prohibiting the harvest of timber in virtually all circumstances except for customary purposes and some existing licences. So it is that legislation—that commitment to not logging on conservation land—that has protected our reserves and protected our conservation parks, and that is what this bill is overturning.
The Green Party is opposing this bill because we stand for protecting our natural heritage and protecting our native species, which help give us our identity and which are so special because many of them are found nowhere else in the world, and that means we have an international responsibility to protect them and their habitats. Logging is totally contrary to that. It is contrary to the protection and preservation purpose of the Conservation Act, and it is part of a very short-sighted economic policy that is focused on extracting the maximum dollar value from the exploitation of nature.
The Green Party wants a healthy environment. We think resource use has to be sustainable. This bill is not promoting that because it is winding back the protection of West Coast forests, which people throughout New Zealand thought they had achieved in 1999 when the logging chainsaws were finally stopped and the 100,000 hectares of forest that Timberlands was proposing for its West Coast beech scheme was stopped.
The Government is going back to the future. It is restarting an unsustainable industry by allowing the logging companies to access conservation land. It has been really disappointing that the Minister of Conservation has declined to consider seriously any of the Supplementary Order Papers that Opposition parties put forward to try to mitigate some of those impacts, to protect the forests from weeds, to prevent the damage that ground-based extraction would cause, and to restrict it to helicopter logging. It is really disappointing that all of these changes to the public conservation estate and to our protected lands are going through under urgency, with absolutely no opportunity for the public to have any involvement in this overturning of the fundamental protection provisions of the Conservation Act.
RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): I rise to take a short final call on the West Cost Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill. I am disappointed as this is a bill that we really wanted to be able to support, and now we find that we cannot. We support the idea of harvesting wind-blown timber, but we cannot support this bill. We do not want to leave this timber lying out there to rot. It is a waste. It is a double waste.
Maggie Barry: Well, then, support the bill.
RICHARD PROSSER: Well, Ms Barry, as I said, and as I have said all the way through, we would love to have been able to, but we had questions about the construction of the bill and about some things that were in it. We still do not have the answers to those questions. No one has told us why this bill has been set down in the way it was. I asked the Minister of Conservation during the Committee stage to answer some simple questions that we had, but he has chosen not to.
Maggie Barry: It’s politics.
RICHARD PROSSER: You say it is just politics, but actually it is a lot more than politics. It is economics and it is people’s lives. It is about being honest. If your Government had been honest about what it was doing and why, we might have been able to gain some more understanding. We look at the way this bill was written, and what it is going to do, and we wonder why it has been constructed in that way.
To start with, we wanted the application process for extraction permits to be open, transparent, and fair, but it is not. The bill stipulates that the application process for extraction permits can be anything the Director-General of Conservation wants it to be. He or she can put an ad in the public notices, he or she can run a tender, or he or she can simply just get on the phone to a logging company anywhere and say: “Hey, apply for an extraction permit. We think you’re up to the job.” Then they can go in, behind closed doors, and negotiate some kind of deal. Again, it is down to the discretion of the director-general. We would love to see this work go to West Coast companies and West Coast people, but there is no guarantee that that is going to happen, and the bill specifically stipulates that it does not have to.
We would like to see that the existing environmental protections under the Resource Management Act are maintained. Currently they are exempt for 5 years. Again, no reason for that was given. Why are the protections in the Resource Management Act that deal with water quality and that deal with land use just pushed aside? There is no explanation given. Why is that we are going to allow bulldozers to move on to conservation land—without any kind of consent and without any kind of regard for the environment—cut tracks, take logs out, push rubbish into the rivers, take water out for whatever purpose they like, destroy the whitebait, and destroy greenstone boulders with nothing so much as a by-your-leave and with no questions asked and no questions needed. It is laid down in the bill. It is allowed to happen, and we are not told why.
We wanted the West Coast to be the principal economic beneficiary in terms of jobs and processing. There is no guarantee that that is going to happen. It is not in there. Anybody can get this work. The way the bill is constructed, the contracts can be given to any company from anywhere in the world, which could bring in its own workers because they have to be specialists. They have to be able to work in the dangerous conditions, so they have got to be properly trained and qualified. Whoever it is who gets the contract during the negotiations behind the closed doors with the director-general, at the director-general’s absolute discretion, can decide that only its own people, from wherever else in the world, are sufficiently qualified, and they will come in and do the work.
We are very concerned that native timber that is recovered under the bill will be allowed to be exported in any form other than as a finished product. It is allowed to go out, under this bill. It is specifically allowed for, against the provisions of the Forests Act, in the most simple and basic processed form that there can be, being sawn timber. Members from the Government side made the point that timber processed in that way could be stored for future use. Yes, it could. We agree with that. But the bill specifically provides that it can be exported, even though it cannot be exported in that state at the moment. Why? We are not told why.
We wanted to see that the royalties paid to the Crown for the extraction of this valuable resource stayed in the economy in New Zealand and that a proportion of them went back to the West Coast. Instead, the bill not only says nothing about a proportion of the royalties but specifically says that the director-general can waive or refund any fees or royalties. Why? Why on earth is that happening?
The Minister did not answer any of those questions during the Committee stage, so I ran a scenario. I wonder if, when this process gets under way—and it is going to get under way because the Government has the numbers to pass it. Again, I reiterate that we want to see this timber harvested. We want to see this resource used. We want to see it utilised. We do not want to see it go to waste. We do not want to see it rot on the ground. We want to see people have good jobs, have work, earn money, get wealth, and have that wealth stay in the country. But when this process begins to unroll, as it will, and the contracts are let to foreign companies, the foreign companies will bring in overseas workers. They will cut down the trees, they will pull the timber out, they will give it minimal processing, and they will turn it into sawn timber. That sawn timber will then be sent overseas—there are no sawmill jobs in New Zealand, there are no further processing jobs in New Zealand, and there are no furniture factories. Our native timber will end up getting turned into furniture in other parts of the world, using slave labour, that we do not benefit from. Some of it will be exported back here and sold as—look—New Zealand native timber. Is not that great? The people on the West Coast will not get a dime. Will the Minister then front up to the West Coast people and tell them why he has established this bill in the way that he has?
New Zealand First does not support this bill. Thank you.
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): It seems that it is now easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the Department of Conservation to uphold its fundamental business. It is now easier under the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill to log conservation land than to log private land—talk about perverse incentives.
It is clear that the people who put this bill up have no interest or ability to talk about the cycles of nature and really do not care. During the Minister of Conservation’s last speech on the bill there was no reference to anything to do with nature, no reference to anything to do with ecology, and no reference to the impact of what happens when trees die and become part of the natural cycle. I am not sure whether it is because he is utterly uninformed—I find that hard to believe—or because he just does not care and that is not what this bill is about. This bill should be called the “Trojan Horse Bill”. This Trojan Horse, as he was happy to confirm, is about opening up the whole of the conservation estate to multiple uses and the potential further logging of trees in various states all over the country if his research shows it is worthwhile. There is a level of disingenuousness and there is also a blatant agenda that he is quite comfortable with.
What he is not saying is that he has broken the consensus. He is saying that he is allowed to change the Conservation Act 1987, but he is not prepared to go through a select committee process. Actually, no Minister has the right to just change the law without going through a select committee process. They have no right to do this and then say that they represent conservation. It is extraordinarily disingenuous to say that this bill will help the West Coast. It is full of deliberately loose drafting that cannot be monitored. It is going to create an incredible burden on the Department of Conservation and the director-general. As my colleague Mr Prosser pointed out, it may also lead to extremely dodgy and unfair decision - making behind closed doors. I fear for the department in its wonderful new role of trying to manage this purpose, because it has enough to do. It is going to cost it, it is going to distract it, and it is going to put it in an invidious position vis-à-vis its community and vis-à-vis the environment.
But that is no problem to the Government because there is a political game to be played here, and it is being played for the benefit for the vote in the election, not for the benefit of the environment or the community. It is also extraordinarily disingenuous for the Minister to say that the bill was shared with the House. Actually, that is a disgrace. The bill turned up a couple of days ago, and we did not see all the detail. There has been no proper process. We did not even get to debate Part 2 properly. We had a shortened debate on Part 2 because everyone else decided they were sick of it and they wanted to go home. Well, actually, we are not sick of it, and we do not want to go home. We want to fight this because it is wrong.
It is bizarre in the 21st century to attempt to set up an export business in native logging that relies on pillaging the conservation estate. That is bizarre. That is an odd thing to do. It is a terrible legacy for this Government. It is against the will of many people. All around the world I am sure it would be possible to convince people to buy rimu, because it is a beautiful timber, especially if you can say it is legal. Those of us who work trying to stop the illegal logging of indigenous timber are going to be even more undercut by this delightful piece of legislation, which is trying to manufacture a new industry. It is not about the people here. As the bill clearly says, this is about export—export to whom, for why, for what, and what about the consequences? There is no responsibility here. The Government is throwing up its hands and saying: “We are just nice people doing a nice thing with a bit of wood that is lying on the ground.”
Let us openly admit, Minister, that the bill is a deliberate act of sabotage—that there is a sabotage going on of the natural cycle, there is a sabotage going on of the conservation consensus, there is a sabotage going on of honest politics, and there is a sabotage going on of the processes of this House. Yet again we are in urgency because these people do not want to talk about this bill. They do not want to hear what anyone else thinks about it. They think that only the people in this room have the right to make a decision on this. Well, we do not. A really participative democracy would include the people who might want to participate, especially people who have been concerned about how we manage our forests and who might want to have a say on either side of the debate. They are not going to get the chance.
However, although there are so many things wrong with the bill that I could spend a lot of time on it, I would like to comment on just a couple of things. I think the drafting is extraordinary when you put it into the context of the regulatory impact statement. It is very clear from the regulatory impact statement that nobody believed the Minister that this bill was a good idea. It was drafted in such a way that it went against the recommendations of the regulatory impact statement. The statement is full of attachments from scientists who say that this is not going to work. To everyone in this House who is incapable of understanding that things that fall down and die are natural and who, therefore, thinks that we have to clean them up and sell them because they have not got a function, I say go back to your Ecology 101 class and do a little bit of study about how nature actually works and how forests regenerate.
If you really want to talk about conservation, let us talk about it. But nobody on the Government’s side has talked about conservation. There has been no authoritative statement, no willingness to talk about it, no commitment to addressing it, and no interest in discussing it. It has been all about whether we can make money out of this and whether we can ignore the 27-year consensus. The results of this bill are going to be a disaster for political relationships. They are going to be a disaster for the environment and also for the Department of Conservation, in its invidious position. No longer is it the guardian; now it has got a whole new role to play. And that whole new role to play, between the miners and the loggers, is going to be a great role for the staff in the department if they thought they had signed on to be commercial managers under a different Government department, but I feel sorry for everyone who thought they were here to do conservation, because that is over, and it is wrong.
But this will not in the end prevail. That will be, in the end, the people who laid down the kaupapa for this nation: that we value our environment, that we value our conservation land, and that we value the people who are prepared to stick their necks out—some who resisted arrest to protect those forests. Those people were not doing it for fun; they were doing it for mokopuna katoa—future generations. If we do not look after the environment, who are we? If we do not look after the environment for future generations, what are we? If we do not commit to recognising how nature works at a time when this planet faces the greatest crisis it has ever faced, what are we? We are the greedy, the short term, and the selfish, and the Green Party will never sign on to that.
We have a better vision, and we know it is shared by many citizens who are watching this Parliament tonight. They are noting the votes. They are listening to the rhetoric. They are checking who is talking about the conservation values and who is busy trying to count up money. They are checking who is busy trying to distract, and who is busy trying to make political capital as opposed to standing up for what is really important. There has been very little discussion of the real issues.
There was no select committee process to allow input from the experts in this country who have given their lives to studying the way the forest works. There has been very little respect for them. There have been lots of remarks in the most disingenuous manner possible about making things better for the people on the West Coast. One only has to read Rebecca Macfie’s dreadful tale of the betrayal of the people at Pike River to know that the corporate agenda does not look after the workers or the environment. In this bill there is a work plan required, but that means nothing. A work plan has always been required. Every single time environmental agreements have been breached in this country, it has happened under a work plan.
Let us get real. Let us give the power back to the Department of Conservation to do its job and give it back to the people of this country so they have that consensus that was fought for and treasured. We stand for those values. We know we are not alone. If you look at the polls—I am very proud to see our poll tonight—people are responding to us because we know what we stand for and we will not give up. I think that the Department of Conservation deserves an apology from this House. We are very sorry that we have ruined the mandate that this House once created for it. We are now in an invidious place. But the people of this country will not forget. You cannot force us back to the 18th century—we will not go. A tree is so much more than just the money that you can get from chopping it up. Kia ora tātou katoa.
A party vote was called for on the question, That the West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill be now read a third time.
Ayes 65
New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 2 (O’Connor D*, Tirikatene); Māori Party 2; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.
Noes 51
New Zealand Labour 32 (Ardern, Beaumont, Clark, Cosgrove, Cunliffe, Curran, Davis, Dyson, Faafoi, Fenton, Goff, Hipkins, Huo, King A*, Lees-Galloway, Little, Mackey, Mahuta, Mallard, Moroney, Parker, Prasad, Robertson G*, Robertson H V R*, Shearer, Sio, Street, Twyford, Wall, Whaitiri, Williams P*, Woods); Green Party 11; New Zealand First 7; Mana 1.
Bill read a third time.
The House adjourned at 9.55 p.m.