Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the third and final reading of the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill.

It has been a pleasure to be part of the Primary Production Committee that had helped, in part, progress this bill through all stages in the House, now to be debated in its third and final reading. The bill as introduced would amend the Forests Act 1949, addressing the growing concerns around the international trade and the illegal harvest of timber and associated processed wood products, both here and from around the world.

For New Zealand, this bill means giving surety to those in New Zealand of both domestic and export products of timber, and an assurance scheme that New Zealand timber products are from legally harvested practices here in New Zealand; equally of the wood products, as we are a country that imports.

The bill would create a new regulatory system that enables the forestry and wood processing sector to provide domestic consumers and export markets with greater assurance that those timber products are sourced by legal means. The bill provides for the role of registered advisers and assessors, which frames their legal responsibility and obligations when working alongside industry to certify and equally give certainty to harvesters and consumers over information requirements when selling processed products.

The select committee listened to over 30 submissions—some written and many were oral. The issues raised were canvassed and addressed in further second stage reading in the House and at the committee of the whole House stage. The premise of the bill was well articulated, that New Zealand needed to respond to the calls for further consumer confidence in this trade. We know we would be impacted should such a legal framework not be put in place, damaging our reputational brand. It was well acknowledged that illegal logging is a massive problem. By Interpol estimates, illegal harvesting and processing amounted to $150 billion globally, as was surmised.

As previously mentioned in my first speech, I attended, several times, in travel across the likes of South America and Latin America, and this is a profound problem found in cities like São Paulo, Rio, Belo Horizonte, Santiago, and others. The profound knock-on effects to traders is well canvassed and articulated in those countries, displacing indigenous people and destroying the country’s natural flora and fauna in the process.

Countries around the world are embracing the need to address this significant and ongoing issue, with multiple jurisdictions seeking to legislate against the illegal timber trade. The World Bank estimates the global market loss of value from illegal cut forest products is over $10 billion per year, amounting to a sum total of nearly 30 percent of the global timber trade.

New Zealand has a substantial timber export market, but equally has a substantial import market—an import market of nearly $2.4 billion in processed timber products was imported in the years 2021 through to 2022. Suffice it to say, bringing New Zealand in line with our major trading partners and other trading nations for the protections and assurances needed over timber products is imperative to give surety to New Zealand’s forestry industry, which contributes some total of $6.7 billion annually to our economy and employs near on 35,000 people.

Recently, the new Minister presiding over this bill ushered in Supplementary Order Paper 349 that addressed many of the concerns laid out by previous speakers and submitters in the submission process at select committee. I was gratified to hear, when I pressed the Minister on the potential of access issues culminated with ownership structures and existing agreements between harvesters and landowners, it was addressed, ameliorating my concerns and I am sure many of those raised by submitters.

Whilst the ACT Party acknowledges some individuals in the submission process raised concerns that were partially addressed—the likes of the credibility of weights and measures, definitions of legal harvest, and previously mentioned access issues—on balance, we feel that these issues have largely been addressed through the latter stages of the bill as it progressed through the House.

In such, it’s imperative that New Zealand continues to play a role—a very important role—as an international player at addressing this very salient issue, giving clarity to timber production, exports, and imports. ACT will support this bill at its third and final stage through this Parliament, and we look forward to seeing the certainty it brings to our wood and processing industries, both here domestically and abroad. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m pleased to take a short call on the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill. The scale of illegal logging internationally is enormous. It’s doing immense damage to forests, to plants, to wildlife, to indigenous communities who depend on and live in those forests, to rivers, to streams, to wetlands, and to the climate by destroying the planet’s lungs and the web of life which sustains us.

In 2021, just 9 percent of the world’s natural forests remained intact. So we need to be much more ambitious in protecting what remains from the scourge of deforestation, illegal logging, and other activities like illegal mining and the ecological collapse that goes with that.

It’s also because the proceeds of illegal logging support criminal activity, political corruption, and they strip indigenous communities of both their livelihoods and their rights. As Mark Cameron noted, the scale of the international trade is billions of dollars annually.

So this bill is well-intentioned, but it’s inadequate, given the scale of the crisis and the scale of action that’s needed. Where you have illegal logging, like illegal mining, short-term profits tend to trump everything else and you see some of the worst aspects of human behaviour and human exploitation of nature and a total failure to recognise the fragility of the web of life and our dependence on nature.

The Green Party is supporting this bill because it does improve on the status quo, but it could be so much better. It would have been much better if it had tackled the other commodities which lead to illegal logging and deforestation; not just wood and timber products but things like cocoa, palm kernel expeller (PKE), chocolate, palm kernel, palm oil—all of these products which also lead to illegal logging.

The bill certainly does provide a legal harvest assurance system for the forestry and the wood processing sector. It helps safeguard exports from Aotearoa New Zealand, enables market access, and protects our reputation as a safe trading partner. But that is just for imported timber and wood products.

It does take steps to improve the integrity of the supply chain, but this bill was promised 18 years ago by former forest Minister the Hon Pete Hodgson. The Green Party is disappointed that the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) did not use the intervening 18 years to have a system that is more like the European Union—with recent regulations there, which cover a much wider variety of forest products—and that we are stuck with something that just deals with timber and wood products.

Given that Aotearoa New Zealand is the world’s largest importer of palm kernel expeller—around 2 million tonnes annually to feed dairy cows and agricultural intensification—if this bill had dealt with palm oil and PKE, we would be contributing significantly to avoiding deforestation and protecting the original forest cover, which is burnt and logged in order to establish palm oil plantations, and the breach of the human rights of the indigenous communities that that involves. If this bill had been more ambitious, it would really help protect that habitats of orang-utans, tigers, and elephants, and it would really help to reduce climate pollution and protect the lungs of the world in the forests of the Amazon and South-east Asia.

It’s really disappointing that the EU’s efforts since 2013 did not inspire MPI to provide much more ambitious advice and legislation. So there’s a shortcoming with the limited range of commodities—only wood and timber—that it applies to. It’s also got a very narrow definition of what is legal, which relies on the concept of “legal harvest” and requires logging companies to comply with the national laws. That’s problematic, because in countries like Brazil and Indonesia, we’ve had significant deforestation which has been seen to be legal, in terms of the national laws of those countries.

As Greenpeace Aotearoa noted in their submission, the Indonesian Government scheme for wood and logging “ignores international laws and agreements such as CITES [and the] International Labour Organization and [it] does not deal”—really fundamentally—“with the illegal trade of wood and wood products.” The Indonesian Government has undertaken very few prosecutions against businesses operating illegally in the forest estate, even when well-resourced organisations, like Greenpeace International, are reporting those breaches.

Also, the wood that complies with the Indonesian Government’s regime is OK to be imported into New Zealand. So that very narrow definition of “legal harvest”, which relies on national laws, is too limited. We would have preferred to have seen a much more comprehensive standard where legality included a requirement that the rights of indigenous peoples were honoured and that their consent and the consent of local communities was obtained before any logging occurred.

There’s also no full traceability for wood and timber products, because the bill focuses on “legal harvest” and doesn’t really recognise that the timber supply chain often involves the mixing of illegally logged wood with legally harvested wood. It relies quite heavily on international schemes such as the Forest Stewardship Council, which doesn’t require full traceability of products in the timber supply chain.

So as Grant Rosoman from Greenpeace says—and I quote—“The bill will have a very limited impact” because of its narrow scope and these shortcomings and because 80 to 90 percent of the imported timber trade in New Zealand is already providing evidence of legality and sustainability through the requirements of the international tropical timber group. So there’s some added value, because it refers to “specified timber products”, which potentially includes things like paper and tissue, but it’s not clear in the bill what those specified timber products are.

We need stronger, more ambitious legislation. We need more Green MPs, because the Green Party hasn’t got the numbers to have a permanent member on the Primary Production Committee. This legislation could have been more ambitious and really tackled the issue of forest deforestation by focusing not just on wood and timber but also the range of other products like palm kernel expeller and palm oil. So the Green Party is supporting it, but it is an opportunity lost.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise as a member of the Primary Production Committee in the third reading debate on the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill. It’s been a lot of work that the Primary Production Committee has been doing on forestry, as has the Government, and this particular bill is about making sure that we establish a legal harvest system, which would require log traders, primary processors, importers, and exporters to be registered and do due diligence on the timber they are dealing with to ensure it is not being illegally harvested.

One of the things that I can say, having sat through the select committee process and as part of the select committee, is that there has been a lot of collegial support, including industry, to work in partnership and work together on ensuring that we do have a legal harvest protection mechanism in New Zealand. Now, this is something that the industry has been focusing on for over a decade, and it’s also something that’s in line with many other export trading partners, so it gives me pleasure to stand and take a call and to see this bill go through.

It’s also probably worth a mention, when we talk about forestry, that we’ve just completed our forestry slash inquiry report into what was happening in Wairoa and Tairāwhiti. Through that, the Minister of Forestry—as we go through and look at how we are harvesting our forestry—has also just announced $10.5 million in Budget 2023 to provide to local government to support the clean-up of slash and debris in Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti and implement short-term, medium-term solutions around how we do that, and also looking at $25.2 million for the next four years to protect 21,000 hectares of hill-country farmland across Aotearoa and New Zealand.

So, on top of the bill that we’re putting through today, there is much more work to do in the forestry space. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

This is a five-minute call—Nicola Grigg.

I can assure you, Mr Speaker, it’ll likely be two minutes, but I’ll give it my very best shot. Like my colleagues across the House, I too rise in support of the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill at its third reading. And like the previous speaker, Anna Lorck, I also sit on the Primary Production Committee and have had the privilege of seeing this pass on through the various stages, and now, hopefully, into law today.

I think, as has been broadly canvased across all sides of the House, illegal trade of wood products and timber around the world is a grave concern, and I think that anyone in this House, where possible and where we can, will do what we can to mitigate illegal activity and illegal trade and, of course, the impact that that has on various communities and societies and, of course, ecologies around the world. Illegal harvesting—as the member for the Green Party pointed out—is an enormous problem globally, and I think is continuing to grow. But on saying that, the select committee saw no evidence that illegal harvest was occurring here in New Zealand. So this is the kind of bill—it’s a belts and braces bill—that will at least start to implement some form of framework to start to measure. And, as we say, if you don’t measure, you can’t fix. So this is why we have chosen to support it through all stages.

It is a very real problem and, as has been rightly pointed out, the vast majority of these problems are occurring in the likes of the Amazon basin. We do see issues with deforestation over there that is severely impacting native wildlife, flora, fauna, and, of course, indigenous communities. We will do what we can to support prevention of illegal harvesting of these sorts of timbers, especially through trade mechanisms where we can. So we do encourage strengthening of our international trading reputation and relationships, with particular regard to market access, and we do think that this bill will achieve that.

One of the reasons that we think it is an imperative to take this stance today is to protect our own industry as much as anything from illegal trade, and particularly safeguarding the New Zealand reputation as well. So we have put various mechanisms in place to ensure that. And of those 21-odd submissions that we did hear through select committee, I think the seven key themes that emerged from all of those submissions were—the majority of the concern was around complexity and cost of compliance—the breadth of the regulatory powers that have been installed under this bill, the scope of the legal harvest system, looking at sustainability, rights of indigenous peoples, products, and the partial exclusion of indigenous timbers, and, of course, enforcement and compliance. And I think what’s key to this is the log trader registration.

So, ultimately, it has passed through select committee with some amendments, some of which were quite necessary. And that is why we in the National Party will stand up here today and support it. We do want to ensure that we as a collective pass legislation that will promote good New Zealand trade practices and remove the impact caused by any illegal and illicit trading. And that is why we’re happy to support this bill in the House today.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Forestry and wood products will play an increasingly important role in the New Zealand economy, across our varied and many communities, especially rural and provincial communities—this is the growing, the harvesting, the processing, and the trading, of course, of lumber and logs—so maintaining or enhancing the fragile social licence to operate is vital. This Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill provides this in the domestic and international trade space both to importers and exporters, so those who are buying timber through stores or who are exporting it know that the timber they are buying is legitimate, is from sustainable sources, and can be trusted.

We know that our global reputation as a country of integrity is vitally important. If we don’t get this right and work to meet, if not exceed, the expectations of global markets and international consumers, then we run the risk of becoming just another small economy at the bottom of the world, importing and trading in exporting commodities, and we don’t want that. This bill addresses international concerns around integrity of imports and exports, and that’s the reason why a number of other jurisdictions are also implementing similar regimes. It’s not to say that our current system or forest owners or importers and exporters lack integrity at all—far from it—but this just ensures we are meeting global best-practice codes of compliance.

There’s been a lot of work across the forest and timber industry to make sure we get this right and workable to ensure that the benefits far outweigh the costs. In fact, it’s my experience that anything that increases compliance and the integrity of a process and that weeds out cowboys is actually welcomed by the industry, because, as mentioned, it brings a level of integrity that is vitally important to the successful operation of our trade practices and our forestry business up and down this country. It’s the reason why we’ve supported this bill, it’s the reason why it’s important for our forestry sector, it’s the reason why it’s important for our international trading sector, and it’s the reason why it is supported by the vast majority in the industry and right across this House. Thank you.

It’s good to take a call on the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill, third reading. When I spoke on this bill during the second reading, I reflected on the 400,000 hectares of indigenous forest and some 238,000 hectares on Māori land. These lands contribute significantly to Māori socio-economic development. When I hear the word “forestry”, I think of my whānau. I think of my whānau, because this sector provides bread and butter—yes, bread and butter—for some of my whānau to survive.

In the 1960s, thousands of hectares of what was left of inaccessible, undeveloped Māori land were put into forestry leases, encouraged by Government at the time. I want to talk about one of those lands: Ngāporo Waimarino Forest Trust.

But before I do, I want to acknowledge, last Thursday, the passing of one of my whanaunga Robert Cribb, known back home as “Boy”, a humble, caring, soft, persistent man and leader committed to Māori land development from Kāhui Maunga ki Tangaroa, Te Awa Tupua o Whanganui [the Assembly of Mountains to the sea, the mystical river of Whanganui]. He dedicated his life to achieving the aspirations of his whānau, his marae, his hapū, and his iwi, and that was in land development through forestry and environmental conservation. This was always for the greater good of not just Māori but for the wider community that he lived in. E moe, e moe mai rā tōku kaihana. [Sleep, rest in peace, my cousin.]

This trust has 43 Māori land blocks located next to the Whanganui River. You can imagine, back in the 1960s, my kaumātua and kuia hearing about “Oh, you better do something about your land, because this is what might happen or what might not happen.” But, nevertheless, they got themselves together and they entered into lease arrangements. Half of the lands in this block, this trust, are in pine, and the remainder is in beautiful, plush, untouched, natural ngahere. I remember the stories of a time—actually, not too long ago—where blocks were stripped of their natural native trees, logs helicoptered out, tree poaching, illegal forest harvesting activities, and persistent contractors seeking harvesting permits to take our trees, to take our taonga, without permission. As the Minister said, illegal harvested timber has been debated in this House for over 10 years, and it seems even more. It is good to see this progress.

A newcomer to the Primary Production Committee, I acknowledge the culmination of a lot of the hard work that’s gone on, the former chair Jo Luxton and the committee at the time, and the committee now led by Steph Lewis, and also the Ministers involved over those times and years. I am grateful to them all for the hard work, for the diligence, and to see this bill commended to the House. Kia ora.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak on the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill at its third reading, and it’s one that the National Party supports passing into law. the illegal harvesting of timber is a significant problem globally, contributing to deforestation and ecosystem degradation, with wide-reaching environmental, economic, and social impacts on affected communities.

The question is: how does this relate to New Zealand? Well, forestry is New Zealand’s third-largest exporter. Its value at the year ending June 2021 was $6.3 billion; it’s anticipated that will be $6.7 billion by the year ending June 2023—this year. It employs around 35,000 people, and it’s a critical part of our economy. At a time when we have a balance of payments deficit that is the greatest in the developed world, it’s more important than ever that we are selling goods and services and products to the world and earning that foreign exchange. Forestry is a very, very important part of that.

So this bill is something we support as improving global confidence in the logs and the wood coming from New Zealand—having confidence in the integrity of the supply chain and the operators when the system is critical for both domestic processing and New Zealand’s reputation as a timber exporter to the world, and that important part it plays as the third-largest export earner for our country.

We also have a rising volume and diversity of imports into New Zealand, which increases the risk of New Zealand being seen as a conduit for the illegal timber trade due to a lack of mandatory assurance measures, something that this bill seeks to address and something that we support. And I should note that, globally, the world deforests around 10 million hectares of forest each and every year—10 million hectares; that’s an area the size of Portugal. Around half of that deforestation is offset by regrowing forests. So, overall, the world loses around 5 million hectares of forest each and every single year. In fact, 95 percent of that deforestation occurs in the tropics, something that New Zealand wants to make very clear that we want to have no part of and that our industry is not part of.

So while New Zealand has had voluntary measures in place since the early 2000s and there have been proactive initiatives by importers, the coverage has not been complete. New Zealand has historically relied on its reputation of being a low-risk producer of illegal timber products to ensure we have the market access to sell our timber into globally. However, more recently, New Zealand exporters have been required to demonstrate the legality of their timber products in a growing number of export markets. This bill, which shortly will become law, is something that can assure those markets globally that New Zealand is taking this seriously and does have an assurance programme in place to make sure that we are not exporting illegal timber to the world.

So I would just make the point, also, that the plantation forest area in New Zealand peaked in 2003 at 1.83 million hectares. It declined for the next 16 years, at just under 1.69 million hectares. Over the past two years, the area has increased by 43,000 hectares to 1.7 million hectares, and it would take roughly another two years of forestation at current rates for the estate to recover to the area of the early 2000s.

But as my colleague across the House Soraya Peke-Mason said, forestry is also very important for the Māori economy and Māori communities, providing both employment opportunities for rangatahi and to provide economic opportunities in our regions. So this is a very important—very important—industry for New Zealand, for Māori, for all New Zealanders. So this is a bill that we do support, and we’ll be pleased to see it shortly passed into law. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Ni sa bula vinaka, Mr Speaker. As always, it’s an honour and a privilege to take a call in this House of change, as the member of Parliament for the Ōtaki electorate.

While I wasn’t on the select committee who heard the submissions and worked on this bill, I do want to thank the Primary Production Committee for their mahi on the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill as we come to the third reading today.

Our Government has been working and focused on addressing the issue of illegally logged wood for over a decade now. Under this bill, Aotearoa New Zealand is committed to trading only in legally harvested timber. This bill will establish a legal harvest system that will require the log traders, the importers, and the exporters to register and to ensure the timber that they are dealing with is legally harvested only. This bill brings us into line with other trading partners in other countries—for example, Australia, the US, Indonesia, the Republic of Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and China.

When countries around the world trade with us here in Aotearoa New Zealand—particularly in the timber industry—they will know that they are trading with a country that is doing the right thing, that is ethically right in the way that we harvest and trade in terms of our legal timber. Like the member Stuart Nash talked about earlier, that is really important for the way people perceive us overseas and for our import and export business.

So just a short call today. This is a great piece of legislation and I commend this bill to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a third time.