Forests (Regulation of Log Traders and Forestry Advisers) Amendment Bill

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Good morning, everybody. This bill, when we look at it, doesn’t actually look like there’s much to it. We’re dealing with a registration process for those that are trading in logs and forestry advisers. On the face of it, that doesn’t look like it means a hell of a lot.

But when you look at the speeches that you get from the Minister that introduced the bill, the Hon Shane Jones, he made it very clear that this bill wasn’t just about a register. That’s a nice thing to have and a part of it, but it’s all about dictating to business what they can do with their product. It’s all about the New Zealand First Party believing they are better business people than the people that actually plant these forests. It’s actually about the New Zealand First Party believing they know more than what the market knows. [Interruption] Now, I know their leader is infallible. I know their leader walks on water in their party, and I know they all go, “Our Dear Leader” when he talks, but the reality is he does not know what the markets are going to do. He cannot tell what’s going to happen in the future. He will not know exactly what’s going to happen there. He cannot dictate.

💬 Greg O’Connor: At least they’ve got a leader.

And then we’ve got the other member over there from the Labour Party, and I’ll come to your brother-in-law or whatever he was and his speech soon. But we get to the New Zealand First Party and what they were saying.

Now, the New Zealand First Party knows better than business—we know that! These are the smart entrepreneurs of the world that have never made a dollar in anyone’s life. They’ve sat in this place their whole life, sucking off the teat of the taxpayer. None of them have ever made a dollar, but they can come in here and they can tell us exactly how it all works. They know better—of course they know better, because they’re run by their “Dear Leader” and their “Dear Leader” knows everything. So we just have to follow their “Dear Leader” and his great economic advice.

We’ve seen their great economic advice already in the forestry industry. These are the guys that went around the country saying, “No more foreign investment. We will stop foreign investment.” Fifteen billion dollars has been sold to foreigners under this Government—to January this year. They have sold $15 billion to overseas investors. In 2½ years, they sold $15 billion. In Hamilton, they’re selling an $800 million ultrafast fibre company to overseas interests, and they will let that go through. And this is the party that—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Mr Bennett, you’re three minutes into your speech and it would really good if you could link your comments to the bill.

I’m getting there.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): No, no, three minutes is ample time to do that.

You need a build-up when you’re dealing with New Zealand First, because you’ve got to build up their party and their leader before you actually take them down and show the reality of their fallacies.

So New Zealand First went around the country telling us, “We wouldn’t sell anything.” Now they’re selling stuff, right? We know that. And they put this great bill in that would stop foreign ownership of land. That was the great idea. But then they realised that they wanted to plant a billion trees, so they had to give an exemption to foreigners to come in and buy land to plant trees. Now, that was the first start of New Zealand First’s attempt to dictate to the forestry industry. And that went really well! You’ve got farmers all over the country that are seeing prime bits of land now being sold to overseas interests to be taken out of more productive uses and to be put in forestry. That was the economic genius that we got from New Zealand First in the first instance.

Now they want to come in with the second part of their economic genius argument for the forestry industry, and that’s to tell forest owners who they have to sell their logs to. Now, this is going to be simply as successful as the last piece of economic genius we had from that party around the forestry industry. First of all, who are they going to sell it to? Most of the log processors are going under in some cases. You know, it’s hard work, because the Government is putting such high restrictions on them. They’re making them have to pay such high rates. They’re making the environmental aspect of their business so difficult to operate in, and yet they are telling forest owners, “You have to sell to them.”

So what they’re actually telling the forest owners is, “Do not take the market price. Do not take the best price available for your product. Take a lower price that will subsidise New Zealand manufacturing.” That’s, effectively, what New Zealand First wants. So not only are they going to cripple the decision making of those with land and forestry; they’re going to cripple the decision making of those in the business of processing, because we will get all these inefficient processes that will pop up and will be under Government subsidy, effectively, from a New Zealand First point of view. This is nationalisation of the forestry industry by stealth. We know they wanted to do it in other industries, but they didn’t have the guts to do it. And now they’re doing it in a de facto way in forestry.

The forestry industry is our third biggest exporter in the agricultural productive sector, and the Minister said that quite rightly. But what they’re doing to that industry is they’re constraining it. They’re going to make it inefficient. They’re going to make that industry make the wrong commercial decisions, and if you’re in any other industry, that gives you an example of what they want to do to you. So they won’t want milk powder being sold overseas. They won’t want kiwifruit just to be packaged and sold. No, you’ve got to cut that all up into little slices and have a little sticker on it saying “New Zealand First made you do this, and you lost money on it, but it’s for the best interests of our ‘Dear Leader’.” They’ll make you have to manufacture all these products that won’t sell in the international market, that will be inefficient and not in the best interests of New Zealand.

There is a reason the New Zealand primary sector is the best in the world, and the reason is because we are the most efficient and market-led in the world. If the price of beef is bad, we have to stick it. If the price of milk is good, we get the reward. If the price of logs is going to be manufactured into a certain price because of our “Dear Leader’s” decision making, that will mean an inefficient industry. And the history of the world is littered with Governments that have tried to indicate what an industry should do or shouldn’t do, and they have all failed—they have all failed.

💬 Hon Ron Mark: Name one.

Name one—New Zealand First wants us to name one. OK, car manufacturing. We used to do car manufacturing here. We used to subsidise the guts out of it. And how did that go on? It went under. Even the Australians tried it. It went under as well. You know, the Government made it subsidised because they looked at the price of cars. You couldn’t import cars and have a competitive market. So the Government changed that, and it does that all the time. So there, Mr Ron Mark. But before I finish, I’ve got one little comment from Mr O’Connor’s brother-in-law. He said we can’t create wealth out of trading. Well, get real. The whole world is about trading. The primary sector is about trading. We need to trade in a fair market that doesn’t have rules set by “Our Dear Leader”, who has never made a dollar in his life, and has said in this place and told other people how great he is.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The member from Hamilton East should do well to actually look after the things that happen in Hamilton East, and forestry isn’t one of them. If you want conversations around forestry, what you should do is talk to members of this House who actually have electorates that are covered in forests—that’s right. The member should do well to actually listen to the industry, because this is something that many players have been calling for for quite some time. What he’s saying is completely out of step with the people back home that I talk to that are calling for more domestic processing of our logs. So when he says that we don’t want it, he’s wrong, and the member would do well to actually talk to some people that know something about it, because I’m pretty sure in Hamilton East they haven’t got a big focus on forestry.

In the Waiariki electorate, we are born from the trees. We are people that were absolutely—my grandfather, actually, was one of the workers at the Waipā sawmill. We know forests. We know forests really well. So when people talk about the regulation of log buyers and forestry advisers, they see it as a good thing.

This is about something that has been a long time coming. To be able to create Te Uru Rākau, as this Government has done; to be able to put a focus on forestry, like we haven’t, as a country, done for quite some time, is truly significant. To have big ambitious goals to plant a billion trees is absolutely what this country needs and what we need to be able to do to address our goals when it comes to climate change, as well.

This bill is going to strengthen the integrity of our forestry supply chain, and that can only be a good thing. When it comes to forestry, of course, we’ve seen that there have been logs flowing offshore for quite some time, and we’ve got to make sure that when we do that, we make sure that we take into account the interests of New Zealanders first. When you come to a place like Rotorua, which is built from the forest, we are reliant on our forestry industry—we’re reliant on the strength of our forestry industry. We haven’t scratched the potential of exactly what our wood, our timber, can do for New Zealand.

So this is one part—this bill is one part in a major plan to be able to strengthen our forestry sector here in New Zealand, and I’ve got nothing but support for it. So I recommend this to the House.

The question is—

💬 Hon Amy Adams: Mr Speaker—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): —that the motion be agreed to. I’m sorry?

Tim van de Molen: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Standing Orders quite clearly state that a member can seek a call until the time you’ve finished putting the question. You were still using those words when she sought the call.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Yes, and I want to encourage all members to be vigilant when members before them take their seats and I look around the Chamber and no one is seeking the call—I have to start the question. OK. So will someone seek the call?

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I am very delighted to be given the opportunity to take a call on this Forests (Regulation of Log Traders and Forestry Advisers) Amendment Bill. I want to reflect, before I get into the substance of the bill, that we’re sitting here today in Budget day urgency—because in this House it’s still Budget day—in the middle of the biggest economic crisis this country will see, I suspect, in any of our lifetimes. We’re sitting here on the day that the finance Minister told us he needed to borrow another $140 billion to get us through because of the scale of this tragedy. Yet the bill that he brings to the House for us to debate, in Budget urgency, is for the State to dictate to foresters what they can do, who they can sell to, and how to run their businesses. That, apparently, is such a critical part of the Government’s recovery plan from COVID that it had to be rushed up the Order Paper, rushed into a select committee with barely any time for the industry—and, in fact, I was appalled to learn that the industry themselves and the Forest Owners Association had no idea of this bill until we sent it to them. That speaks volumes about the respect and professionalism of this Government in the way they treat business.

In fact, the speaker who spoke just before me—and if I was a little amazed when he concluded his speech, it was because I couldn’t quite believe that Mr Tamati Coffey stood there and had the audacity to say, “We know what’s best for forest owners. We know what foresters need. You should all be quiet because we know best.” That is probably the most accurate and honest self-reflection on the way the Labour Party views business, and that exact ethos is represented in the bill in front of us.

In the bill in front of us, you have clauses that allow the Government to dictate to foresters what can be in their supply contracts. That is pretty chilling stuff. Again, if you reflect back on the context that we’re sitting in, putting this through under Budget urgency is all part of the Government’s—well, part of the Government’s recovery plan; as far as I can see, it is the Government’s recovery plan. That should be chilling, because that tells us that this Government is going to pin its recovery hopes on a view that Government knows best and Government will be telling every business up and down this country how to operate and how to come through this. The last thing we need is for this Government to be dictating to the people who actually get up every morning, invest their money, and put their own assets on the line to create jobs and create the tax revenue that pays for every member of this House, every member on the Government benches—for those members to sit in this Chamber and have the arrogance and the audacity to say, “We know what’s best for these industries and we will tell them what’s in their contracts. We will tell them who they can sell to, and, by the way, our idea of an economic recovery strategy is to pile a whole lot more cost and compliance on to business.”

Let me give the Government a bit of economic advice for free. I don’t say this as a member of Parliament; I say this as someone who has run many businesses, employed many people, and actually done what so few of the Government Ministers have done, and that is I have been in the private sector. Let me give you a piece of advice for free: you don’t help any business by more cost, more compliance, more red tape.

Now, I know that’s pretty much the only tool in the Labour Party tool kit: Government will take over, Government will dictate, and we will have more bureaucrats telling businesses what to do. But I tell you, it does not work. If you don’t believe me, you can read any economic history text. You can look at any example in the world where Government has thought that it taking charge of businesses and sectors is a good step forward. It isn’t. It will fail and it will hurt the very people that this Government pretends to care about. They’re very good at standing up and talking about caring and compassion and kindness. You don’t help anybody, I say to the Government members, when you destroy their businesses, you tie them up in procedure and cost and regulation, and you start creating structures that dictate how they can operate.

We heard from the speaker before last, David Bennett, who made the excellent point that our primary sector is the best in the world because it was deregulated and it was forced to stand on its own two feet, but it was given the flexibility to adapt to market conditions. It was given the opportunity to work out how to compete and then was left to get on with it. It didn’t become the best in the world by being run out of Wellington. I don’t care how good the Ministry for Primary Industries or any other ministry is. If they think they will improve business by taking it over, they are wrong, they are misguided, and it is dangerous thinking.

I can’t believe that a bill that purports, on the face of it, to be wanting to protect minor forest owners thinks that it does that by miring them in massive cost and bureaucracy. There is only one reason that we are prepared to have this bill go to a select committee, and that is because National wants to give the forest owners the chance to give their feedback that this Government denied them. This Government denied foresters any chance to feed into this bill, it denied them any opportunity to be part of framing this up, and it wants to now deny them any sort of opportunity to be heard, through a woefully inadequate select committee process.

Now, we will oppose the short—unbelievably and unacceptably short—select committee process, and we’ll get to that debate shortly, but I can tell you: we at least want to make sure that the forest owners have an opportunity to have their say. I can assure this House that members on this side are going to be doing everything we can to make sure that they know of that opportunity and that they take full advantage of that opportunity. Our members are going to be listening very, very carefully to the feedback of those foresters about exactly the damage that this will do.

It is not economic recovery to be dictating to business, and yet this Government wants to do exactly that. I do believe that this is the first we are going to see of many attempts by the Government to impose more and more State control on industry under the guise of COVID recovery. I tell you now: it won’t work, it will do damage, and we will oppose it all the way.

This is a split call. I call the Hon Eugenie Sage.

Kia ora koutou. Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Why does the National Party hate forestry so much? Our third biggest primary sector, generating $6.9 billion last year. It was under National that we saw thousands of hectares of forest removed because of their hopeless administration of the emissions trading scheme, failing to provide the certainty of a decent carbon price. We saw thousands of hectares in the Waikato converted to dairying, away from forestry. And now all we have heard from the Opposition in this debate is a litany of undervaluing of the forestry sector, failing to recognise that this bill, in putting in place a registration system for log traders and forest advisers, is seeking to improve the quality of advice through the sector. It is something that the four regional workshops that Te Uru Rākau organised highlighted was an issue for those small growers—which, over the 520,000 hectares of the forestry estate in New Zealand that those small growers have, are 30 percent of our plantation estate. Yet when they go to sell logs, they are often disadvantaged because they are not abreast of all of the markets. We are seeing them potentially not earning the revenue that they deserve for that investment in growing those trees and in providing logs.

So what this bill does is establish a registration system. But then the National Party hates regulation. It much prefers a laissez-faire system so that the big corporates can benefit and smaller people can’t. So this is about improving the protection for those small growers so that they’ve got access to good quality advice from people who are registered. In the current voluntary system, only 10 percent to 12 percent of forestry advisers are registered through the Institute of Forestry.

This bill is yet another example of this Government’s belief in the forestry sector. As Tamati Coffey noted, this Government has set up Te Uru Rākau to promote and advance the sector, to give it the recognition that it deserves, not just a small unit within the Ministry for Primary Industries as the forestry unit was under National. This Government is ambitious with the billion trees programme, planting not just exotic species for timber but also native trees. It recognises the benefits that trees have for sequestering carbon, for protecting our soils from erosion, and strengthening protection around our waterways.

So this Government has an ambitious plan for forestry. This bill is part of it because it is ensuring that those smaller forestry growers that will make up at least 40 percent of the wood supply from the 2020s onwards actually have access to registered advisers and registered traders. And one of the key things the bill also does is ensure that there is log supply going to domestic processors. A lot of those small growers are trading and having all those logs go overseas, those big piles of logs that we see on each of the wharves and the ports. We need more wood processed here in Aotearoa. Red Stag Timber has shown what it is possible to do with sophisticated processing.

We need more houses built. This Budget is delivering another 8,000 houses. We can build those out of wood. It is a good product for sequestering carbon. This Government wants a healthy forest industry. This registration bill is about helping to achieve that. It’s interesting that the Opposition criticises it, but at the same time it’s going to vote for it. I commend the bill to the House.

This is a split call. I call David Seymour, five minutes.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. What an extraordinary speech we just heard from the Green member the Hon Eugenie Sage. I can only speculate that she may have had a bit too much kombucha before she got up and gave that one. It’s really nice to be back here on Friday morning in urgency, and great to see the Hon Amy Adams back in the House again after not seeing each other and being away for quite a while.

I should just reflect on a few comments that have been made. One is that this bill is being debated under urgency on a Friday after a Budget where the Government just committed to borrow $70,000 for every household in this country, and we’re here debating the registration of people buying and selling logs. If that gives you a sense of this Government’s true confidence, organisation, and urgency, then I think New Zealand is in big trouble with this Government.

But that’s not in any way to diminish the importance of forestry, and that’s the first error in the speech we just heard from the Green member. The assumption throughout her speech is that if the Government is making rules and regulations for a sector, then the Government must value the sector. But that’s not right. The question should be: is the Government making quality rules and regulations for the sector? And the beginning of making quality rules and regulations is actually to define a problem.

I have to say, looking at this regulatory impact assessment, having been Parliamentary Under-Secretary for regulatory reform in the previous Government, that this is terrible. Under problem definition, we don’t have a problem to be solved given anywhere. All we’re given is a list of the Government’s intentions and aspirations. So that’s the first problem. There’s not actually a correct problem definition. If the Government doesn’t know what problem it’s trying to solve, then it’s not going to get very far in coming up with a solution. Then it says, well, what if the difficulty is that the solution actually creates more problems than it ever solved?

In so far as I can tell, all this bill is going to do—at a time when we need the forestry sector to be efficient and productive—is introduce yet another layer of bureaucracy that people in that sector have to follow. This is actually a problem throughout the New Zealand economy. Every time there’s a problem—such as the Government feeling the need to be seen to be doing something—politicians come up with another set of rules. It works for them because they are seen to be active, and they can say, “We love forestry because we’re making rules.” no matter whether they’re good or bad or effective or ineffective.

Then the people that actually do the work end up finding they spend more of their time getting permission to do work, measuring if they’ve done work, confirming work’s been done, complying with a Government department monitoring them doing work—leaving less time to do actual work. That is what makes this country less productive than it would like to be.

I think we know the politics of this is that—and we heard it come out a little bit in the Green member’s speech—the Government is trying to scratch the old itch of: why can’t the logs be processed in New Zealand? Why are they going overseas? I’ve actually worked at a sawmill, TDC Sawmills in Whangarei, for 60 hours a week. I know a thing or two about it. What I notice is that the people that want more logs to be sawed in New Zealand have never actually worked at a sawmill. If they’d had that experience, they might be a little bit less keen on it.

But what I also know is that the Government has no idea whether a particular log should be milled here or overseas. There are so many variables, and the people that know are the people that actually own the property rights. So the Green member said that this is going to make sure logs are milled in New Zealand. No, it doesn’t. It just means that there has to be an offer for each log to be milled in New Zealand. Then it’ll go where it was going to go anyway, with additional bureaucracy along the way.

So this is a terrible bill. I’m not going to stand up and say I support it, because people should have a say. It should just be gone. It’s shameful the Government is introducing a bill of this poor quality in urgency after a Budget.

Five minutes—I call Michael Wood.

Well, thank you, Mr Speaker, for an opportunity to speak on the Forests (Regulation of Log Traders and Forestry Advisers) Amendment Bill, and at the outset I’ll just give a shout-out to my dad, actually, whose company made debarkers and chippers that supported much of the central North Island logging industry. So like the member who just resumed his seat, David Seymour—part of the former Under-Secretaries club of which we are elite members—I have some connection to this industry.

I just want to say that I am very pleased indeed that the arguments made by the Hon Amy Adams and other members opposite did not hold sway in the mid to late 1930s, when the Minister for Works, the Hon Bob Semple, and the first Labour Government were setting up New Zealand’s forestry industry, because if those arguments did hold sway and we accepted that it was inappropriate for the State to ever have any role in the structure and guidance of important strategic industries to New Zealand, we probably wouldn’t have a forestry industry in this country.

What I also urge the members opposite to do is to actually—

💬 Hon Amy Adams: How arrogant—“It wouldn’t have happened without the Government.”

There’s little arrogance involved in that statement, Miss Adams. It’s a statement of historical fact.

What I would also urge the members opposite to do is to actually read the bill closely. Now, I do acknowledge it’s a bill that’s been brought to the House in urgency so there hasn’t been that much time. But from the statements of the members opposite, one might think that there is a significant burden that has actually been brought down on the forestry owners. That is entirely incorrect. What this bill actually seeks to do is to ensure that those people who supply incredibly important advice and support to forestry owners are properly regulated and actually have to supply advice that can be provided to an appropriate standard, given the significance of the advice, the valuation, and the financial support that they provide to those forestry owners who are seeking to operate in a domestic and international market place.

That advice that is provided by advisers and log traders is exceptionally important if you’re a forestry owner, so my question is a simple one to members opposite: when you take financial advice on your financial affairs, do you think it’s a good thing that the people that you take advice from have to be registered, that they have to be fit and proper persons, that they have to operate to appropriate standards, that they have to have professional training? I rather do, and I rather think it’s good that, actually, the previous Government that those members were a part of did ensure that the financial advisers that each of us seek financial advice from do have to operate to a set of standards. And I’ve yet to hear a single good argument as to why it should be the case that a forestry owner operating in New Zealand shouldn’t have access to advice that is held to the same standard as advice that those members would get for their financial affairs. And that, quite simply, is what this bill seeks to do.

This is a sensible bill. It ensures that the good forestry owners of New Zealand can have confidence in the advice that they get from their advisers and from log traders. It’s an important part of a multi-faceted approach to lifting value in our important forestry sector. It’s an important part of this Government’s plans to back our forestry sector. I commend it to the House.

That is an example of this arrogant Government. Mr Wood has the cheek to stand up here and lecture us about our own financial affairs, telling us how to get our own financial affairs in order. To be honest, if we look at the Government MPs over there, there are probably a handful of previous business owners. If I look at my party, the National Party, we would probably have close to half of our caucus who have successfully run their own businesses before. Looking at the Government members, probably three—three out of Labour’s 46 MPs have run their own business. That is an example of the arrogance.

If we look at the previous speech from the Minister of Conservation, she said this is just the first part of their forestry plan. If you look at what happened here last year, what did we have on their first part of the plan? We had thousands and thousands of people driving tractors through the streets of Wellington to Parliament—and I was fortunate enough to be in that lead tractor. But they had thousands of people turning up to Wellington, driving tractors through the streets of Wellington because rural communities across New Zealand are getting absolutely destroyed by the billion trees policy.

You only need to look at what’s happening in the East Coast. Down in Southland, a resource consent has just been given for a farm, 3,500 hectares—this isn’t any ordinary farm; this is prime, productive land. In a small community in northern Southland, about 5 or 6 kilometres down the road, you’ve got one pub, you’ve got a caravan that sells coffees, and two small tourism shops. Now, it won’t take too many more farms to be sold to be planted out in trees before rural communities across New Zealand—which they already are—are crippled.

Just a reminder to the Government—just to remind you—can you eat trees? No, you cannot eat trees. If the recent COVID disaster is not an example of why we need our productive land to be used for sheep, for beef—the most productive land in the country is supposed to be used for meat, for milk. It is farmers, after all, that have built the wealth of this country. And the lack of respect, especially from the member Tamati Coffey—he said, “You need to listen to MPs who have their electorates covered in forest.” Well, Tamati Coffey, I see 10 members of the Government over there. How many of those members represent rural electorates? None. On this side of the House, we have about 13 members, and by my count you’ve got six or maybe seven out of the 13 that represent rural electorates. And Tamati Coffey had the cheek to tell us, “You need to listen to your people.” Well, why aren’t they listening to the thousands of people that protested here at Parliament last year because rural communities are getting destroyed by the billion tree policy?

A message for the Government: rural communities tick slightly differently to urban communities. You lose one farming family from the district—often they’re involved in the rugby club. At rugby clubs you might have one person that’s the couch, the bartender, puts the flags out, and puts the padding up on the posts. Often that same person’s involved in the local cemetery, often on the board of trustees. You only need to look at what happened in the Catlins, south Otago, 30 years ago. There was a school there that had 30 kids; this year it’s got six. Now, why the decrease? That’s because valleys there were planted out in trees, roughly 30 years ago. So a school’s gone from 30 kids down to six. I’ve visited farms there over the last few months and they’re concerned. They’re concerned because their own community over the last 30 years has been losing population—farming family after farming family that’s left, especially in the 1990s, because a lot of that land was planted in trees.

Now, if the Minister of Conservation tells us this is just the first part of their forestry plan, what’s next? That’s my concern. Now, the National Party backs the forestry sector; it’s our third largest agricultural exporter, and it employs around 26,000, 27,000 people—there’s roughly 14,000, 15,000 small forestry owners out there. I was speaking to a number of those last night. None of them knew this bill was going through Parliament, yet we’re here the day after probably the most important Budget that any of us will see in our lifetime—unemployment expected to go to close to 10 percent, debt is supposed to balloon out to $200 billion, $50 billion of new spend yesterday, with $20 billion of that being a slush fund for the election, a thousand people a day going on to the jobseeker benefit, businesses in my electorate in Queenstown going broke like there’s no tomorrow. Some of these business owners have built up their cliental, their customers, and their businesses over decades, if not generations, to lose it overnight.

The Government came out yesterday with a Budget that simply had no plans, no vision, yet here we are today—the day after the Budget day—debating a registration system for log traders and forestry advisers that strengthens the industry and improves the supply chain. This can be a really good bill, if the Government could just simply get their process in order, go through the proper process. A bill usually takes months, yet here we are rushing it through, the day after the most important budget, possibly, of our generation, to talk about traders. Now, I spoke to some of those forest owners and contractors last night, and had they known about it, they would have liked to get involved. Now, there is a shortened select committee process—I look forward to hearing from them.

Forestry appears to be quite simple, but it’s actually really complex. You’ve got a bit of land, you grow trees, you process the trees, you get them to the wharf or the processing mill, and you ship them overseas—sounds simple, but it’s incredibly complex. And if you look at some of the issues that they’ve been having over the years, it’s often the cowboys that get into the industry. Now, I can’t see anything in this legislation that’ll stop those cowboys. For example, I know of one chap—he’s been in the industry 20 years; he’s gone broke 13 times. Now, he owns logging trucks. Now, what he does is he goes in, he promises the world to the farmer or the person that’s grown the trees for 20 or 30 years, promises the world in terms of price, in terms of clearing the site, and often it’s the social licence that is at stake after a large flood in a region, where often on the news you’ll see a whole heap of logs just left there in the valley or on the hill. Now, the reason those logs are there is because the person processing the logs or cutting the logs down, all they care about is getting in there, cutting them down, and shipping them away—getting on to the next job.

So this piece of legislation has the ability to help many, many people out there, but because of the rushed nature of this, I don’t think we’re going to see the full extent. But I encourage all those people out there to please submit to the select committee. I also ask for all those people who protested down the streets of Wellington last year to protest the billion tree policy, which is literally crippling and destroying rural New Zealand, I encourage them to come in to tell people like Tamati Coffey, Michael Wood, and the Minister of Conservation what they think of their forestry plan to date, because, at the moment, all it’s doing is destroying rural communities across New Zealand and, at the same time, destroying the livelihoods of the people—the farmers, the ones who have built this country up over the years, the ones that will get us through the COVID disaster, and the ones that will get New Zealand back on its feet again.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I find the narrative that we’ve heard, or, rather, the narratives that we’ve heard, from speeches across the House incredibly confusing. It seems like they’re in disarray and quite disunited on their view, because some speakers claim that the forestry industry is important; others claim it’s not important enough to discuss today. We on this side of the House beg to differ: it is incredibly important. This work has gained urgency with the pandemic situation that we’re in, because processing and forestry companies need to differentiate themselves in a post-COVID environment. The forestry industry is the third largest exporter in the primary sector. Our Budget is about rebuilding together, and that includes the forestry sector.

This is a bill that absolutely shows that the Government backs the forestry sector, because it allows log traders and forest owners to have confidence in the advice that’s provided to them. That point has been made time and again from this side of the House. That side of the House just has completely disunited narratives. They can’t make up their mind on whether it’s important or not and whether they should have confidence in advisers. This is an excellent bill; it’s part of our plan to rebuild New Zealand’s economy together, and I commend it to the House.

on behalf of the Minister of Forestry: I move, That the Forests (Regulation of Log Traders and Forestry Advisers) Amendment Bill be reported to the House by 5 June 2020 and that the committee have authority to meet any time while the House is sitting (except during oral questions), during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, and outside the Wellington area, despite Standing Orders 191, 193, and 194(1)(b) and (c).

COVID-19 has highlighted the need to increase the resilience of the forestry sector to support regional economies and jobs and help ensure the security of supply for domestic processors; something that we have noted in the Wairarapa region, in particular over the last nine years, and tried desperately to get the Government of the day to correct, and they didn’t. That’s why we’re doing this.

The bill will provide some of the critical foundations to help supply chain stakeholders to navigate what is anticipated to be a more volatile and uncertain trading environment during the COVID-19 recovery period. COVID-19 has had a huge impact on the New Zealand economy. The forestry sector has been one of the hardest hit. This bill will help the sector to restore itself, and it is important that its provisions are put in place as early as possible.

Budget 2020 is, above all, about jobs. By protecting the integrity of the chain of supply in the face of COVID-19, as the bill will, it will safeguard existing jobs and will support the creation of new jobs. At this time it is essential that this happens as quickly as possible to support the rebuilding of the economy, particularly in the regions. It is all the more important as we emerge from the immediate crisis that smaller investors, who make up more than a third of the ownership of commercial forests, have sound advice on which to base their commercial decisions if maximum value is to be extracted for them and the wider community.

The improvements that the bill makes in terms of the quality of professional advice in this area will help address—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): I’m really sorry to interrupt the Minister, but the debate is about the instruction to the select committee, not the content of the bill. The Minister has made a couple of references to why the shortened period but is now leading into debating the content of the bill, and I’m just going to ask that—

Thank you for your guidance, Mr Speaker. I would say in commenting on—and we have noted the debate from the Opposition and the expressions of concern that the bill has got a shortened time period. I guess there’s two things. One, we’re giving, through the statement around how the committee can meet, a method by which the committee can determine itself to meet on Fridays or other days and to ensure that it gets wide overage and ensure that the sector is consulted. Rest assured that there has already been good consultation with the Minister—

💬 Todd Muller: No, there hasn’t.

—pre-empting—and I think the member in the House needs to know that this is a crucial matter. For nine long years it was not addressed. COVID-19 has exacerbated the problem exponentially, and so we wish to move the legislation, knowing full well the quality of the select committee, how capable they are, how they will give full due diligent examination of the bill, and they will work studiously the long hours that they’re paid for to do this job thoroughly. I have total confidence in the committee to do that.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, that is the most threadbare and pathetic recommendation for a bill to a select committee that I’ve heard in the time that I’ve been here. I mean, we sat last night listening to the Minister stepping through the rationale for this bill, and he made some very clear statements that in his view he had been consulting widely with the sector, and this would have broad support. As you’ve heard from my colleague Hamish Walker this morning and the contribution that I made to the House last night, nothing could be further from the truth. This sector has no idea over the detail of this bill.

They are framing this up as if this is legislation that needs to be heard in urgency and has to be sent now for a quick three-week turn-around, when it has a fundamental reframing, as we’ve heard from our side, on the impact of forest traders and for forest advisers. This is a fundamental change in terms of how the sector is to be re-orientated. They have signalled that the sector’s been well consulted; they haven’t. The leading organisations haven’t been told about the bill. It was made very clear last night that they’re going to hear about it for the first time in detail this morning. It is outrageous, firstly, that they have not been involved in the way that the Minister has suggested, and, secondly, now, they’ve got only three weeks to report back on a piece of legislation which, as we heard last night from the Minister, in his mind, has great fundamental resetting of the forest sector in this country.

We hear from the Minister around how important he thinks forestry is, and how it’s important that we sit beside forestry right now as they recover through COVID. Well, where was he when in level 4 they were completely locked down, and every single one of them wanted to start safely, and they said, “No, no, no. Stay at home.”? I mean, that sector’s now on its feet. The export returns are the best they’ve been for two years as China recovers.

The whole construct of this has been flawed from the start. To be able to put this bill through in urgency and argue that we need to assess it as quickly as we have this evening and this morning, and now have the arrogance to suggest that three weeks—for a sector that hasn’t been consulted, a sector that hasn’t seen the bill that does have profound impacts on the way they operate—is enough for them to have a considered assessment and have the confidence that this Government actually understands their sector and the details and the impacts it’s going to have on them is a disgrace. From our side, we reject the time frame.

The fact that it is being sent to the Environment Committee, when the Primary Production Committee has only one bill in front of it, and has a history, to be fair, a cross-party history, of pragmatism—we’ve just dealt with the dairy industry bill where we wrestled very difficult and profound, challenging issues for a sector. We got it through, and we got an agreement and a position that was better. It took us many months, but the calibre of the contributions were significant. The idea that the forestry sector, which is part of the primary industry, our committee doesn’t get the opportunity to provide rigour and assessment of it, but it instead goes to the Environment Committee, and then only gives them three weeks, is a complete nonsense.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and I rise also to contribute to this debate about the idea that the bill that has just passed its first reading should be reported back from select committee, if I heard right from the Minister, by 5 June—in other words, in three weeks’ time. And this speaks to a chaos in the Government’s legislative programme, much of which actually came out in the Minister’s speech in favour of shortening the report back period for the select committee.

The Minister said something very interesting. He said that it wouldn’t be necessary to have as much consultation at select committee because there’d been a lot of consultation by the Minister. Well, that’s extraordinary for two reasons. One is that he’s saying that, actually, this is very urgent and needs to be done quickly, so one might ask when did the Minister start his consultation and who knew about it? Well, he didn’t say. You’d think that, if his argument was that all the consultation had already been done by the Minister, he could have told us. So I think we can dismiss that as an attempt at justifying this rush that doesn’t have any substance. But more important is the fact the Minister seems to think that, if he’s done the consultation, then Parliament doesn’t have to. He seems to believe that, actually, it’s not up to Parliament to make laws; it’s not the people of New Zealand sending their representatives to Wellington to reflect their views that are important in New Zealand lawmaking. So long as the Minister tells us that he has, in some unspecified way, gone about a consultation, then New Zealanders should be happy with that. That is a fundamentally undemocratic proposition.

And then there’s this question of it being so urgent to get this done, and another contradiction in what the Minister had to say. He used the hackneyed refrain of the Government, “Well, you guys didn’t do it before. Nine long years this legislation wasn’t introduced.” Well, let’s just remember that the current Government has had 2½ years and they didn’t introduce any legislation like this in that period either.

💬 SPEAKER: Order! I’m going to interrupt the member. I was listening to the debate from my room, and I will say that the Minister was quite wide of the mark in a number of the comments that he made with regard to relevance for this motion. The fact that he did that does not open it right up for everyone else to provide irrelevant comments. I’m just doing a warning now that the length of the debate will depend on people coming back to what is a very narrow motion and speaking to that.

Well, fair enough, Mr Speaker. I did feel that that was the case, but it was important to address his points.

I’ll now come back to some of the practicalities of the committee. A couple of things the Minister said—that, Mr Speaker, I hope you’ll agree were relevant—were about where the committee would conduct itself. He asked that the committee be given permission to meet anywhere in the country. Now, I think that’s a very good thing, because trees don’t all grow in Auckland and Wellington. In fact, forestry is probably the most widely distributed and remote industry in the country, with the possible exception of some farming and fishing. And so it makes good sense that the committee can travel and go to the places where the people affected by this legislation predominantly are. That makes a lot of sense.

He also said that the committee should be able to meet on Fridays, and I always think that members of Parliament should earn their salaries, and the idea that they shouldn’t be meeting and working on Fridays is absurd; so I give the Minister a big tick for that.

But, if it’s his intention that the committee is able to do this kind of wide consultation, well, there’s another way he could achieve that, and that is simply by giving it the due amount of time to go out and consult people properly. That’s important because the process that has to be gone through actually has a number of stages, and I think it’s really important that we actually just remind ourselves what those are before we whisk them away with a truncated select committee process.

First of all, people who have had this bill dumped on them under urgency—remember, no one in this House had seen the bill. The Minister says some people have been consulted; we don’t know if that’s true or not—

💬 SPEAKER: Order!

Presumably, no one had seen this bill until last night. And people who are going to be affected by it are going to have to form a view on the bill. This is the first formal opportunity that they’ve had to do that. Once they’ve thought about it, perhaps talked to their colleagues, perhaps come to a conclusion as a group or as a body within the forestry sector, or maybe many groups and bodies might have different and conflicting views, they’ve actually got to get together their submissions. And that takes some work; these people are busy—as we know, there’s a crisis on out there. And once they’ve done that, they’ve got to send them in. And for there to be any meaning to this process, we then need the MPs on the Environment Committee to actually be able to read and digest them and understand them, and then perhaps seek their own advice and say to people they may know in the sector, or in their electorates, or that their party has a relationship with, “Does this make sense? What do we think about this?”

Then they’ve got to hear those oral submissions that the Minister mentioned, perhaps on a Friday, perhaps travelling around the country as maybe they should. That’s all got to happen, but, of course, that has to be scheduled in. People are busy; they’ve got forests to plant, trees to chop down, logs to shift, things to mill. There’s quite a lot going on in the sector. Not everyone has time to drop everything just because a select committee wants to hear your view on what it’s about to do—what Parliament’s about to do to you—in this very shortened time frame. So that is another consideration. But even if they get to make the oral submission, you’d hope that the select committee is then going to deliberate and think of suggestions for how the bill’s going to be improved, so that the committee can report the bill back to this House. And I think people should get the picture: in the three weeks between now and 5 June, there is just no practical way that that can happen for one region, let alone if the committee plans to go to many regions. It’s completely impractical that there will be any kind of real consultation on this bill.

And then we come back to the question of the speed of changing the law in the context of a crisis, and the fact is that changing laws, while sometimes helpful, also introduces great uncertainty. So the Minister has argued that this has to happen quickly, and I think people should accept that that’s going to lead to lower quality lawmaking and trust in lawmaking than we’d get if there was time for the full process to occur. But also, the fact is that, even if we accept that the law may not be as good as it could have been, even if we take that and say that’s worth it, what is the effect of getting this law into place in the middle of a crisis? I would argue that, actually, when it comes to people being able to navigate through crisis conditions, it’s actually going to make it harder for them if there is a new legal framework put in place right in the middle of the very crisis that the Minister would have us believe this legislation is going to fix.

So, to conclude, I believe that the Minister has inadvertently made the case to take longer on this legislation. He’s right that there are people in a range of disparate locations affected, and it takes longer to travel and get to hear from them. He’s right that there is a crisis going on, and that there’s great uncertainty, and that people need to be clear on what is actually happening. And he’s right that forestry is a vital and critical industry for the wider New Zealand economy. But when you think about it, all of the reasons the Minister gave for a shortened select committee process are actually reasons why this Parliament should be doing full and proper processes to make good laws. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Mr Speaker, thank you. I also want to make a contribution on this issue of the referral motion to the select committee, and, in particular, but not exclusively, the three-week time frame. Following on from Mr Seymour, who spoke previously to me, I think it is vitally important, when we are in this House debating the adequacy of a referral motion and the adequacy of a report-back period, that we do so in consideration of the context of the bill, the scope of change that is being made to the sector, and, therefore, the ability for those affected to really understand and communicate adequately with the committee the impacts of that.

In that context, I want to refer the House to comments the Minister made when he was introducing the legislation, when he referred to the legislation as being something in the nature of a fundamental reset of the way forestry works. This isn’t a small change in excise duty rates or tax rates where, you know, we are making simple—none the less important—changes to our structures, which are the sorts of things we would see in Budget day urgency. This is, in the words of the Minister—and I apologise it’s not an exact quote; I don’t have the Hansard transcript in front of me—what the Minister described as, effectively, a fundamental reset of the sector.

Now, to undertake a fundamental reset of the sector surely should scream to members of this House: “OK. Well, that’s something we need to take pretty carefully, with great deliberation, and, certainly, involving the most fulsome consultation with those affected that we possibly can.” We’re all very mindful of the context that we’re operating in, with the nature of the economic impact of COVID-19, and we are mindful, I’m sure—every member of this House—that the last thing we would want to do is do more harm to our economy. But how can we possibly assure ourselves, unless we have the somehow misguided belief that we know everything and don’t need to have that communication with those involved in the sector, how can we possibly do our jobs as members of Parliament and assure ourselves that we’re not doing more harm to the sector when we’re designing a fundamental reset without giving a select committee—which I personally am of the view is an incredibly impart of testing and considering and working through the detail of legislation—without giving that sector that time to be involved?

I want to just take a moment of my contribution to outline the reality of what a three-week select committee process means in reality, because, I think, for people watching or following these debates, who maybe aren’t as involved in them as the members of this House are, they won’t understand. They might think, “Well, you know, gosh, in three weeks, if I work really hard, I can probably pull together a bit of a breakdown of this and make some input.” It doesn’t mean that at all.

A three-week select committee, effectively, means that the chair will call for submissions, I imagine, as soon as the bill is referred to them, and, I can only guess—obviously it’s a matter for the chair, but my expectation would be that that call for submissions will probably last in the order of a few days. I would be very surprised if a call for submissions was more than three or four days in length. That is the time that we would, effectively, be giving people to submit, because once the submissions come in, they have to be analysed by officials, reports have to be given to the select committee, there has to be time for the Parliamentary Counsel Office to work through any drafting changes that might be required, there has to be time for the select committee to deliberate, and then, at the end of that, there is a time for the committee staff to work through the report and draft it and debate it with members and prepare it for report back to the House. All of that has to happen and the report be back in this House by the end of that three weeks.

So the actual time that a report-back referral motion of this nature gives those who want to submit is in the order of just a few days—a few days for a piece of legislation that, in the Minister’s own words, fundamentally resets the way this sector operates. I want to use the words “woefully inadequate”, but the words “woefully inadequate” are woefully inadequate to describe the woeful inadequacy of that. I would hope that that is self-evident to this House, that you can’t possibly do the job we’re elected to do properly in that time frame.

It isn’t OK to simply say, “Well, we think it’s necessary, so we need to get on with it.” This is not our livelihoods that we’re talking about. These are not our businesses. This is not our capital that’s invested. These are not our jobs. These are the jobs of the people who work in the forestry sector. These are the businesses of the people who have invested time and money in that sector. They deserve the respect of a chance to, at least, let the members of this House know what they think about this legislation.

We’ve heard already today of many, many people in the forestry sector who have indicated to us that they had no idea of this bill. So it isn’t as if a lot of this work has been done, a lot of the thinking has been done, and they can simply add it into the process. Despite the representations that we’ve had in the referral motion, I know personally of large-scale forestry associations who had no idea of this legislation until we gave it to them yesterday. These are businesses that are deep in the throes of trying to get back on their feet after the lockdown—and we all understand the context of that. But to say at that time, “Actually, drop everything. Get your legal advisers in the room, get your experts in the room, get your bankers in the room, and figure out what this is going to mean for your business, and then get a considered, detailed breakdown into a select committee within the next couple of days.” is an appalling abuse of the powers of this House—it is appalling.

I cannot accept the Minister’s argument as to why this sort of shortened time frame is required that we heard in the referral motion. It is important that we consider the rationale that the Minister gave us for the referral motion when we’re debating it. He said it was because it’s important for jobs and regional economies. But we can have no understanding of the impact of those matters when we’re not allowing the very people who are affected to have a say. It is arrogance in the extreme to think that we all know far more than they do and because the Minister has decided that it’s what’s necessary, that’s all the thinking that needs to be done, and now we just need to get on with it. Not only is it arrogance, it risks doing real harm to a sector and economy that is already in dire and desperate straits.

There’s one other matter of the referral motion that I want to address in this contribution, and that is the inexplicable request that it be sent to the Environment Committee. If this is indeed a bill, as we heard in the referral motion, that is critically important because of jobs and regional economies, why on earth is the Environment Committee considering it? If this is indeed a matter of jobs and rural economies, why isn’t either the Primary Production Committee or, at least, the Finance and Expenditure Committee, given the reference to export taxes, considering it? You cannot separate the justification that is being put up for the shortened select committee—

💬 SPEAKER: Order! Order! Order! That matter has been settled in a previous motion. It’s not relevant.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The bill deserves to have proper consideration by those that are affected, it deserves the members of this House getting that input before they deliberate on it, and it deserves, frankly, a full and proper process. No basis has been laid out by the Minister that justifies the shortened time frame. It is utterly outrageous that, under the guise of a COVID recovery package, this House is being asked to rush through what Ron Mark just told us is something that he’s wanted to do for years. This isn’t about COVID recovery; it is about them using the excuse of the situation that we find ourselves in to ram through what their ideology tells us, which is that they know best and that they’re taking the opportunity to ram that down the throats of the industry—and it’s appalling.