West Coast Wind-blown Timber (Conservation Lands) Bill

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.