Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a short call on the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill. Can I begin by congratulating the Primary Production Committee and their former chair Jo Luxton for their excellent work on this bill.

The objective of the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill is to establish a legal harvest system to assist in combatting global trade in illegally harvested timber, to safeguard and enhance market access for New Zealand timber exporters, and to assure the legality of the source of timber imported into New Zealand.

As the member for Nelson, I just want to make the point that forestry is a very large part of the Nelson economy. It is important that it is protected for those who work in the industry in my region. This bill is also the right thing to do. Illegally harvested timber has an enormous impact on the environment. It has an impact on our biodiversity. It has a big impact on species who lose their homes when forestry is illegally harvested, meaning that species often lose the places where they have established themselves, and that can have an enormous impact on species loss across the world. It also has an impact on communities. There are human rights issues. There are issues in terms of access to economic development that occur in those areas. And one in particular that is important to my community is the community of Myanmar, where I visited, and where there is illegally harvested teak timber. And I know that it is an issue that people in Nelson, former refugees from Myanmar, care deeply about.

This is an excellent bill. It has been well looked at by the select committee with some excellent changes made to it, and I commend it to the House.

Te Māngai o te Whare, tēnā koe. I’m pleased to take a call on the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill, and it is what it says on the tin. It provides a legal harvest assurance system for forestry and the wood-processing sector, and it’s supposed to strengthen the integrity and resilience of the commercial supply chain. The Green Party is supporting it, but, as I said in the first reading, the bill is a lost opportunity because of its very limited scope, its narrow focus on timber products, and its lack of ambition in protecting the diversity of life in our forests from the scourge of deforestation and illegal logging, whether that is for timber or for other products like palm kernel expeller, or to convert those tropical forests into palm oil plantations, or whether it is to deforest to convert them into soya plantations.

The Green Party is not represented on the Primary Production Committee, and this bill is a real representation of why we need more Green MPs, so that we can cover all select committees fully and so that we can improve on legislation, because this bill is outdated. It was first promoted by a former Labour Minister—Pete Hodgson—18 years ago, under the fifth Labour Government. The world has moved on since then, and both the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) and the Government policy which is expressed in this bill haven’t caught up.

It is far too timid, given the huge scale of deforestation in tropical and temperate forests and the urgent need for action. As in 2021, a mere 9 percent of the world’s forests remained intact—just 9 percent. So, as others have said, the scale of illegal logging is enormous, and it’s doing immense harm to the lungs of the planet in places like the Amazon, to forests themselves, to plants, to wildlife, and to the indigenous communities that depend on forests for food and for their livelihoods, and as their home. It’s destroying the planet’s lungs and it’s destabilising our climate, and illegal logging contributes to corruption and criminal activity, it helps support corrupt Governments, and it means humans suffer and nature suffers.

We have in Aotearoa a history of forest destruction and loss, and maybe because of that we are late to regulate illegal logging. In terms of the United States, it has had law banning illegal timber and the trading in it since 1900.

This bill could have looked at what the European Union is doing. The European Union has recently had its environment Ministers pass regulation which both prohibits the placing of illegally logged timber products in the market, and is much more extensive in addressing legal and illegal deforestation and is much more expansive in the scope of the product that it requires to be legally harvested. This bill should include things like soya, cocoa, chocolate, beef, leather—all commodities which can lead to deforestation.

The departmental disclosure statement said that MPI consulted with environmental NGOs. They raised these concerns. The Green Party raised these concerns last term, in 2019-20, when the bill and legislation was being discussed. Those concerns and the need to widen it to these other products which cause deforestation were not heeded, nor were they heeded in submissions. We had submissions from Environment and Conservation Organisations of Aotearoa, Greenpeace, and our Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, all highlighting the need for having a more expansive bill for it to do anything serious about deforestation. While the select committee did make a number of changes, it has kept the bill firmly focused on timber products.

One of the other issues with the bill is that the definition of legality is too narrow. There is no recognition and requirement in terms of the definition of legality that the indigenous people and local communities should have provided free and prior informed consent to any logging. It does refer to property rights in clause 77, I think, but it doesn’t provide that assurance that there has been consent by indigenous peoples and local communities.

The bill relies quite heavily on a due diligence system for an assurance that timber has been legally logged. One of the issues with these due diligence systems and requiring those that are doing the logging to have such a system in place is that they often rely on certification systems such as the Forest Stewardship Council system—they potentially allow illegal timber to be mixed with timber that’s been legally logged. So it’s not going to be totally watertight in that regard.

But one of the big issues is that the variety of life on the planet depends on healthy nature. Healthy forests are our lungs, and yet this bill is only focusing on timber, not the variety of other commodities—palm oil, soya beans, cocoa, chocolate, coffee, rubber—that we need to regulate to ensure that they are being legally managed and that they are not coming from areas that have been deforested.

So, yes, it’s good that Pete Hodgson’s original ideas are finally being implemented, but we could have followed international practice in the EU, could have been much more expansive, and could have done something serious to really restrain and prevent deforestation of our tropical and temperate forests.

This bill also covers log exports. How can we, when we’ve had such extensive damage being caused by forestry in Aotearoa, in Tai Rāwhiti, with all of that slash that has ended up on beaches, on farms and crops that at this moment is legally allowed—this bill doesn’t do anything to actually improve the regulation of forest management.

Hon Todd McClay: It’s not meant to.

Hon EUGENIE SAGE: Mr McClay says it’s not meant to, but it’s just showing how weak the legislation is that we can export those logs. The system can provide an assurance to importers overseas like China, where the bulk of our export logs go, that they’ve all been legally harvested. Yet, there is huge devastation that has been caused to communities throughout Tairāwhiti, from poorly managed harvested logs where you’ve had whole hillsides that are cleared, slash left behind in huge quantities, and that is still legal and they can be exported with the assurance that this is all being done legally.

So there’s an urgent need to improve our own forest management and regulation under the National Environmental Standards for Plantation Forestry and under the Resource Management Act because, at the moment, the damage that that slash causes is legal and it doesn’t face any penalties under this proposed regime. So the bill is a slight improvement on the status quo, but it won’t do anything serious to actually prevent deforestation. Kia ora.

Look, I’m speaking here this afternoon on behalf of ACT MP Mr Mark Cameron, who sits on our Primary Production Committee. The ACT Party will be supporting this bill. We’ve heard from submitters who have pointed out some flaws, some potential issues that need to be resolved, and so when this bill gets to the committee of the whole House stage, we’ll have questions for the Minister and we’ll be seeking further answers from officials.

Now, New Zealand’s forestry industry is our fourth-largest primary sector export earner, creating over $6 billion in revenues for the fiscal year 2020-21. The operational certainty, the integrity of the supply chain for forestry operators, for investors, and for their customers, both domestically and internationally, is vitally important to New Zealand, to our economy, and to those communities which absolutely depend on forestry for their income as well as for other things.

As noted by previous speakers, such as the Hon Eugenie Sage, this bill does create a legal framework to help futureproof the legal harvest of timber products, although this bill has taken a long time to get to this stage. However, the original problem that the bill was designed to solve—how can we be confident that the timber products that we purchase from the local merchant or that a builder supplies on to our project or into our home have been harvested in a way, and from a place, which meets a minimum level of environmental and socially responsible outcomes? So the ACT Party supports this bill, but we also want to raise some of the issues that submitters identified. There is an overlap with other regulation, such as the log traders regulation, which was introduced through the forest advisers amendment bill last year, and that may create some confusions between those administering the bill and all of those involved in the forestry industry who are tasked with submitting to the regulations.

That’s where the ACT Party differs from the Green Party in many ways. We heard from the Hon Eugenie Sage a very passionate articulation of the concerns that many of us have about the way timber is harvested, particularly in developing countries. If we think about the Asia-Pacific region, where large trees are taken from environments where threatened species live like Borneo, where I recently travelled, where species like sun bear, like orang-utan, like pygmy elephants—habitats are threatened by the removal of forest and the conversion of that land to other uses. So it is vitally important that we do have a regime which protects the habitat of places that those communities identify as special to them in the same way as in New Zealand we identify those habitats like national parks, for example, those places that are so special to us that we wouldn’t allow the trees to be harvested from those places.

But where ACT differs from parties like the Green Party is that we don’t think the regulation that applies to dealing with a specific problem like harvesting trees from tropical places should also be applied to drinking cocoa, for example, or the oil that ends up in our two-minute noodles. There is such a thing as regulatory overreach and an excess of red tape, and I think we heard the Hon Eugenie Sage articulate a vision that the Green Party has that the ACT Party fundamentally disagrees with.

But there are some economic issues that are raised by illegal forest harvesting, particularly in developing countries, that we don’t necessarily face here in New Zealand, and it’s where communities are forced to make terrible choices, where they’re faced with wicked problems.

It may well be because they have a less transparent democracy than New Zealand has, where the incentives to do bad things are much greater than the incentive to do good. So if a community is faced with choices between “Well, there’s some illegal logging going on, but that provides income; that provides resources for other things that we do, like building homes, for example, in our community, and maybe some of that timber is exported and we get cash for it”, but the alternative is “Well, imagine if we could actually exploit our natural resources, like through mining, for example, or oil and gas”—that many countries like the province of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo, where I visited recently, do have access to. If the option was to say, “Well, we could exploit those resources and generate wealth from those activities, then instead of this incentive to cut down old-growth forest and destroy the habitat of those threatened species, we could actually use the money we earn from developing our other natural resources, to protect that land and to give better economic and social opportunities to our people”—so, while the legislation we’re debating today provides for certification of timber, particularly from places where we might be concerned it’s not sustainably harvested, causing severe damage to the environment through those practices, the fundamental problem that this bill attempts to address is that, in those countries, the economic incentives are skewed, because, in many cases, local people cannot benefit from the development of their natural resources.

That’s why, when we think about New Zealand, the great opportunities that we have through our natural resources, whether it’s minerals that lie under the conservation estate, in what’s called the Schedule 4 lands, or those lands that were dumped into the conservation estate in 1987, during the reform of the State-owned enterprises, those lands that should be available for development of our natural resources—or whether it’s our oil and gas resources, which New Zealand has a bounty of but which the current Government has decided to make off limits through banning exploration offshore for oil and gas and, more recently, stopping the issuing of any more onshore permits. So, while this bill addresses a significant and real problem of where timber is harvested and how do we know that it’s been harvested in a way that is sustainable and protects the economic and social interests of the communities where that timber is taken from, also this bill underlines that there is a much more significant problem, not just for developing countries that have orang-utans but also for countries that still would like to consider themselves First World, like New Zealand, must address.

Concerns were raised by submitters about the size and the scale of the bureaucracy—the red tape this would impose on their industry—particularly for small forestry plot holders, who might have invested in a forestry block potentially as a future retirement income or a nest egg. They are not typically managing the forest on a daily basis; they’re certainly not involved in its logging and its marketing. They leave that to independent forest managers, and many of them pointed out that, by the time they have paid for certification for their small forestry block, they may well be barely in a break-even position. So any legislation that this House passes must also take account of the red tape and the cost on small business and small land owners. There’s about 14,000 of those small forest owners in New Zealand, whose economic sustainability may be put at risk through excessive red tape and regulation. So ACT will be continuing to focus on that when we consider the subsequent stages of the bill. However, other submitters have pointed out, in fact, that there are many jurisdictions we supply timber to, like Japan and others, which have a range of regulatory standards that we are required to meet in order satisfy the demands of that market, and so we should be prepared to accept some additional certification and controls so that they can be sure that timber harvested in New Zealand has not come from a place that it was not lawfully taken from.

So, look, this bill appears to be complex, but it certainly has a fundamental rationale—a problem-solving piece of legislation that ACT will get behind and support. ACT will support this bill. We will be voting for its second reading. We’ll have plenty of questions for the Minister and officials at the committee of the whole House stage, but we do support its intention.

It is a pleasure to rise and take a call on the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill, not least because I spent many, many summers in the Rai Valley and in Havelock on my grandfather’s sawmill. There’s a long history with distant relatives, who may be Brownlees, who have, for generations, worked really hard in the forestry sector in the Pelorus and Rai Valleys. I acknowledge those pioneers who worked so hard. It is really interesting to be in the House today and continue to do what we can to support our forestry industry, which we’ve already heard about being so important and so valuable, to be progressive and continue to be world-leading.

This piece of legislation is important for two reasons. It is about ensuring that our trade agreements and our trading partners—we keep up and we make sure that we can hold our heads high on the international stage. But it also means that we are contributing to that global network and the attempts globally to do better—as we’ve heard, we must do much better to protect our planet.

We’ve heard about the Primary Production Committee submissions. It was a great process to be a part of. We got expertise at the table and they really helped us to grapple with the complexities and make sure that we could look to those global challenges, but also make sure that we didn’t forget the implications for our local forestry sector. They helped us to streamline, to strengthen, and to give some coherence to the issues in front of us and the bill. We heard about the need to align with other pieces of legislation, and I believe we managed to do that. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and a happy Thursday afternoon to everyone in this House. I rise to stand and speak in support of the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill at the second reading.

Hon Kieran McAnulty: Ah, reading’s getting better!

SAM UFFINDELL: Now, we know—I just wanted to get the bill right, Kieran. I think I did.

Hon Kieran McAnulty: You nailed it.

SAM UFFINDELL: Thank you very much.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: We use full names in the House, please, Mr Uffindell.

SAM UFFINDELL: Certainly—the Hon Kieran McAnulty. I wanted to make sure I got the bill right.

Now, we know that illegal harvesting’s been a problem and we’ve seen the degradation that’s occurred in many parts of the world. Simon Court, before, was talking about his wonderful trip to Borneo and all of the issues he’d seen there. We all would have seen and heard stories about rainforests and forests which have been felled, causing significant devastation to the ecosystems and the cultural and societal aspects there. New Zealand is not immune from that. We have a significant forestry sector here in New Zealand. I think it’s our fourth-biggest exporter, about $6.3 billion, and we do import a considerable amount of timber as well—if my memory serves me correctly, 2.35 billion from June 2021. So the thing to note there is that it is sizable and that does increase the risks that we face. So it is good that we are in agreement on this, in that we are wanting to put in safeguards to ensure that harvesting of timber products is done in an ethical manner, and ensuring that the supply chains involved are all acting appropriately.

This bill amends the Forests Act 1949 to establish a new regulatory system, which assists in the prevention of international trade in internationally illegally harvested timber, and strengthens the international reputation through doing so. We need to safeguard and enhance our market aspect. As we have kept talking about on a number of different things, it is important for New Zealand to make sure that it’s doing its part to uphold ethics and make sure that supply chains are fair and equitable, to make sure that illegally sourced timber is not exported from New Zealand, and, just as importantly, is not imported into New Zealand. So this amendment to the bill will help address that.

Forestry, as I’ve noted, is a key part of the New Zealand economy, and this bill will help reinforce the integrity of New Zealand’s timber as a legally sourced product on the international market. The National Party supports this. We abhor illegal forestry activities. We worked and we did support this through to the Primary Production Committee. I wasn’t on that select committee, but I understand that it did work well and everyone noted the key points and we did support it through, and that’s why we are supporting it at the second reading. That is all I have to say on this matter. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you. I’m pleased to take a call in support of this piece of legislation that we seem to have a lot of collegial support across the House for—for very good reasons. This is something that’s really appalling that we have put up with for so long—the bringing in of wood and the sending out of wood, without really any restrictions. And we will be in line with a whole lot of APEC economies—Australia, the United States, Indonesia, the Republic of Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and China—when we do this.

What we’re bringing in is the introduction of a legal harvest assurance system, and so everybody will know where that outdoor table comes from. And Simon Court’s quite right: it’s going to protect a lot of wildlife, it’s going to be a better option for people, and it’s going to be a big step towards making sure that we are environmentally sound in our choice of products. And I for one will be greatly relieved for that, because it is, as Simon Court has said, a pressure on people in other economies if this is a source of funding for them.

So it’s very important that we actually support these kinds of standards so it is actually something that becomes a brand issue for people so that they’re actually supporting the harvesting of wood in a proper way in those economies and, in fact, in our own, because it’s going to be important to our brand, too, that we are actually abiding by these kinds of systems ourselves. So, with that, I commend this bill to the House.

Fakaalofa lahi atu, Mr Speaker, and thank you for the opportunity to take a call, albeit a short call, on this, the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill—I also wanted to make sure I got that right. It is a short call because this is a no-brainer—really good to get agreement across the House that this is a no-brainer.

Essentially, this bill is about ensuring Aotearoa New Zealand only trades in legally harvested timber. That’s it in essence, right? This is also about supporting the international efforts to kerb the trade in illegally harvested timber. This bill does that in a few ways, and we’ve heard a few of those today, but I will go through it again. One of those is having that registration system for exported, primary processors, importers, and log traders. This is also about providing thresholds and exemptions, especially for those smaller entities as well. This is about requiring registered parties to have due diligence systems to check that timber has been legally harvested. This is also about making sure that we have people—that our forest owners and their agents make sure that they have the right paperwork, so providing those harvest information statements to those buyers and keeping good records.

This is a no-brainer. We’ve heard from many others—who doesn’t want to make sure that we’re saving our forests? So I commend this bill to the House.

The forestry industry in New Zealand is extremely important to us. In my area, and indeed around Taupō where I grew up, forestry was such an important part of the local economy and remains so throughout New Zealand. It provides a huge number of jobs and investment for various people around the country, but also provides wood to our sawmills to add value so we can use it in New Zealand to build some of the houses the Government fails to build, but, at the same time, to export products with value added to them.

I just want to say, before I come directly to the bill, to the forestry sector that, actually, although there is an inquiry the Government has put in place, which I think is important, into what’s happened along the Gisborne area, the coast, and down towards Napier, they remain important to us and we want to look constructively at how we can give assurance to those that live in those areas and elsewhere where there’s forestry and, at the same time, make sure that the forestry sector knows they have a future in New Zealand and they remain important to us and they remain valued.

This legislation has much less to do with New Zealand and more to do with setting international standards. For a long time, it has been illegal to illegally harvest wood products in New Zealand native forests and so on, and our officials pay a lot of attention to this. So I don’t think we do have a problem in New Zealand in respect of this, but that can’t be said for every other part of the world—countries that don’t have the same regulatory regime or approach to sustainability of natural forests or native forests as we do.

What it does do for our forest owners or wood exporters is it gives them certainty that they won’t face barriers or delays when their products are exported to other parts of the world, because, for them to leave these shores, they must be certified as sustainable and sustainable practices, as under this piece of legislation. We don’t import a lot of wood into New Zealand that one might argue could fall within what is not allowed through this legislation, although there will be occasions or times when people want to add things to their decks or houses, where we could ask the question, “How do we know that the harvesting of this wood is sustainable and it hasn’t harmed a natural environment?” Well, a certificate would need to be produced for it to come to the country, so it gives us certainty, and that is an important thing.

It’s not that long ago in this House where we came together and passed legislation—well, actually, a previous Government—when there was a great wood fall in the West Coast of the South Island following a storm event. Rather than it sit there and rot, the House passed a law to allow it to be harvested and to be used rather than to be wasted. In that case, it’s important that this legislation recognises that there will be an occasion in time when a protected natural resource might well be used—not cut down to be used, but used rather than being wasted, and whether or not under such circumstances that product can be exported or it must remain in New Zealand, and in the case that it must remain in New Zealand, that the practices of felling trees in New Zealand is not called into question as a result of that. You know, it’s not sustainable for us to say if wood has fallen as a result of a natural event, that we can’t use it because it’s no longer planted. We should be able to use it where we can.

We support this legislation. It’s an important step forward and tells our foresters we value the work that they do. Although, the inquiry will look at how we can better work together.

This is a short call on the Forests (Legal Harvest Assurance) Amendment Bill. Interpol estimates the international trade in illicitly harvested timber is valued at between US$51 billion to $152 billion annually. It accounts for 15 to 30 percent of all timber traded globally. Māori own over 400,000 hectares of indigenous forest and some 238,000 hectares of planted exotic forest. These forests contribute significantly to Māori socio-economic development. Māori involvement in commercial forestry commenced over 50 years ago with the planting of pine forests under forestry leases involving the Crown, companies, and Māori landowners. Many of these forests are at a second rotation. Māori participation is moving from being principally a source of labour, to stronger commercial involvement. This is the reason why I support this bill in its second reading to the House. Kia ora.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.