Forests (Log Traders and Forestry Advisers Repeal) Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Forests (Log Traders and Forestry Advisers Repeal) Amendment Bill.

That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the parliamentary website.

Hon TODD McCLAY: I move, That the Forests (Log Traders and Forestry Advisers Repeal) Amendment Bill be now read a first time.

It’s my privilege to bring this bill to the House. This bill supports the Government’s goal of getting New Zealand back on track through removing unwanted regulatory burden and making it easier for people to just get on with running their businesses.

The Forests (Log Traders and Forestry Advisers Repeal) Amendment Bill will ensure that the sector is not bogged down with unnecessary red tape. Forestry, including wood processing, is the country’s fourth largest exporter. Over the past few years, forestry has been hit by a perfect storm of falling sales to China, extreme weather, a collapse in carbon prices, and a weak economy and further regulatory burden. Passing these amendments into law as fast as possible has been an early policy priority for the forestry portfolio. A mandatory registration system for log traders and forestry advisers adds unnecessary compliance costs on to forest operators, has no purpose, and delivers no meaningful improvement in outcomes. Progressing this bill is one part of a wider forestry work programme that will restore confidence and certainty to forestry, support further investment, and contribute towards rebuilding the economy and getting it working for all New Zealanders.

The bill that originally brought in the registration system in 2020 has not achieved its intended outcome. These changes were brought in at a time when there was a perceived need to ensure greater professionalism and give more transparency to support equitable trading of logs, however, requiring a mandatory registration system is no longer needed and has only added cost to the sector.

The New Zealand Institute of Forestry operates a voluntary system of registration for individuals providing forestry services. This voluntary system enables a professional industry standard without the need for regulation, and I consider this to be a good pathway for forestry advisers to be registered. The bill acknowledges the extensive work of the industry to create best practice guides and to update practices where knowledge evolves.

There are some key parts to the bill that I want to draw the House’s attention to: firstly, the removal of the mandatory registration system or reporting requirements that have been put on our forestry sector. This removal of the system and associated fees and levies means the sector will be able to keep more of their hard-earned money, driving growth into forestry and wood processing.

I’m also proposing, through the bill, to refund all fees and levies that were paid by log traders and forestry advisers to the Ministry for Primary Industries to become registered. Registered log traders and forestry advisers gain nothing from the system, and I want to signal that this Government values the work they do and that we trust them to continue driving investment in growth in the forestry and wood processing sector.

As for the legal harvest assurance scheme, this has full Government support. This system will provide market assurance and signals to the world that New Zealand supports setting international standards for timber legality. This legislation aligns with our ambitions of doubling export value in the forestry sector over the next decade. The legal harvest legislation was passed just a year ago but will only commence once it has been enabled through secondary legislation, given that it relies on the definition of a log trader located in the part of the Act proposed to be repealed. I have made a technical change in the bill before us to ensure that the requirement to register for legal harvest is retained.

It’s essential that the development of the legal harvest assurance scheme is fit for purpose and does not add unnecessary compliance costs to forestry businesses. To ensure this, and that the system meets market access requirement, full engagement with the sector and trading partners is needed. I’m therefore proposing in the bill that the commencement date for the legal harvest assurance system be amended to August 2027.

Whilst the system is being implemented, I’ll ensure that the export of wood products to markets is supported through existing interim solutions, and I anticipate that these solutions will remain acceptable to the markets they have been negotiated with throughout this time. Amending this commencement date also does not prevent the system from being brought into effect sooner by Order in Council.

This is only a small bill in the context of the House, and I’ve touched on the key components. However, for the forestry sector, this bill will be important for bringing back autonomy to those providing essential services for the forestry sector, as well as having important cost savings for forest businesses. As I’ve said, this is only the beginning of a wider forestry work programme that will boost sector confidence and continue to grow investment in the forestry and wood processing sector.

Can I thank my colleagues in the coalition Government from New Zealand First and ACT for their support, and also the Labour Party for working with us to ensure that we’re able to bring this into place as quickly as possible, so that more people don’t need to register on 1 July this year. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Can I also endorse the words of the Minister, the Hon Todd McClay, when we think about the forestry sector and the impact it’s taken and absorbed over a number of years, certainly in my time in Parliament, and my mind right now casts to the East Coast and the Hawke’s Bay, and the East Coast, knowing full well of the long forestry history, the long forestry growth that happens on the East Coast and the impact that this devastating weather event will have on them. I do want to support the words of the Minister and say that, in order for the forestry sector to continue to thrive into the future, this particular bill is important.

It is important that, as we look towards the support of the sector moving forward, we make sure that the right levers are in place to ensure the forestry sector will continue to grow. It is a big part of our economy. It is a big part of making sure, in small places and rural places around the country, places like where I’m from in Te Tai Tokerau, where forestry does play a large part, that, one, we can continue to support the endeavours of those who are in forestry, and, two, we can also look towards incentivising those who want to get into forestry, by removing some of the burdens and some of the bureaucracy that might come with the forestry sector and is inhibiting those who wish to get into forestry. We also must make sure that there are a number of protections in place, and I want to acknowledge the Minister for reaching out over the past one or two months—four to eight weeks—to discuss this particular matter. It would be remiss of me if we didn’t go and contact the local forestry councils, those who are key stakeholders in the sector, to make sure that this is exactly how we can support them to make sure that the forestry sector thrives.

It’s important to remember that this particular bill was put in place, initially led by the Hon Shane Jones, when the Labour coalition Government came to power in 2017. He did a lot of work with the sector to make sure that, as more forests were coming online to be harvested and those logs ultimately exported, we could make sure there were safeguards in place to ensure that cowboys didn’t take advantage of those who didn’t have the skill level or didn’t have the experience to be able to trade their logs offshore. There was a number of so-called cowboys in the industry at the time, which is why the Hon Shane Jones brought this particular bill to the House. The Minister after the Hon Shane Jones, the Hon Stuart Nash, ushered this bill through, and, ultimately, it landed with me as the last forestry Minister in the Labour Government of the last term.

During that entire time, we continued to work with the sector to ask whether or not the changes that were implemented under the Hon Shane Jones met what they were intended for, and despite the good intentions—and why I want to be very clear here, though—that onus was put back on the sector to come to us about what might work for them. That was the predecessor to this bill. That’s what we’re repealing here today, because, after a number of years with that particular regime in place, as the Minister has already described, it didn’t meet its intention. So, with the support from the Minister and the sector, we want to, on this side of the House, as part of the Labour Party, make sure that we can continue to support the forestry sector into the future.

However, I will be very clear and put on the record here today that we still look towards continuing a strong forestry sector, one that will continue to respect the growers, respect the harvesters, respect the workers, and respect those that process wood locally. What we can’t keep having is thousands and thousands of logs just sitting at the ports here in Wellington, Tauranga, and Auckland. What we had endeavoured to do was to make sure we could process locally, and that was part of the solution to support those who were harvesting their forests who didn’t want to send their logs offshore—that we could process those locally, providing local economies local jobs, making sure that we could stop having logs traveling up and down the country on the roads and they could be processed locally and even manufactured and sold locally.

So we want to make sure that we put on the record that Labour still believes in that: making sure that we can process our logs locally and that we’re not exporting all of the logs that are grown here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Why? Because we believe it supports our economies, we believe it supports rural towns up and down this country, and we want to make sure that forestry continues to thrive into the future. We’ll make sure we put that on the record through the length of this debate. We support this bill.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. Well, I’m hearing a serious flip-flop—a flip-flop of the coalition Government and of my Labour colleagues—because this repeal right here undermines the good work of my Matua Shane Jones and the work of the officials of Te Uru Rākau. Almost four years since this legislation was put in place, we now have a coalition Government that undermines the good work of Matua Shane, who knew that there were cowboys, who knew that we had vulnerable landowners—those forest owners who were being taken advantage of by advisers who didn’t adhere to a registration. That’s why the register was set up. Moumou ngā mahi o Matua Shane—moumou ngā mahi o Matua Shane. And while Minister McClay laughs, it’s really disappointing, because it would be good to know what evaluation took place in the repeal of this legislation.

We attended the meeting as forest owners, we attended the meeting as stakeholders and those in industry, and, as I sat in the consultation in Kerikeri, it was a good, robust discussion between the advisers, us as forest owners, and the administrators, coming together to agree that “Actually, yes, we do need a register. We do need regulation.”. It was only four years ago that Matua Shane stood in this House to shepherd in this legislation that provided informed and transparent means for us, as the land owners and the foresters, to be able to engage with professionals who were impartial in order to give us good advice, because at that time, as my whanaunga colleague Peeni Henare has shared, there were cowboys in the sector, and we were vulnerable.

In July 2020, in the third reading, Matua Shane Jones stood in the House and he said that not all log-mongers historically have been rascals, but far too many have enjoyed, to the detriment of the good name of our industry, a laissez-faire approach to the way with which they had engaged with us. So this Government is anti-transparency and anti-regulation, because our Matua Shane—the Minister—brought this legislation through the Whare in order to support us so that we could access good, solid advice at the time. Now, the regulation is straightforward. It’s only four years in place. I can’t see an evaluation, apart from some opinions where there have been no further hui. I can’t see any hui with Māori land owners on this. Has the Minister engaged with te iwi Māori? Regulation was required for the industry to ensure that we were being given the quality advice that we needed, and Matua Shane shared in 2020 that real estate agents have a register, so why can’t the forestry advisers have a register? That’s what Matua Shane shared in this Whare. Give it a chance—give it a chance.

Now that we’ve got this flip-flop going back on the work of Matua Shane, we’re going to lose the opportunity in the sector and in the industry to continue that mahi tahi to ensure that we are getting the quality advice that we needed, because, to be fair, we have had some whānau who have been used to the detriment through the poor advice that they garnered before these regulations came into place. That was the benefit. As a landowner, when you’re seeking to harvest or you’re wanting to plan your forest, you can check that the adviser coming to your table is registered. At the time when this was a voluntary scheme, only 10 to 12 percent of forestry advisers were registered—10 to 12 percent—because when it was voluntary, nobody cared. They didn’t adhere to standards, and, in fact, there was so much work done in that space to bring the sector on board, the submission process was not rushed. We had meetings, we had webinar, we had a Māori land owners’ wananga, and a full committee sat and heard submissions.

This is going to be a rushed process. As I can see, we have the coalition Government and my Labour colleagues going to usher this through quickly, and yet we won’t even get a select committee process so that we can hear from the sector and we can hear from the forest owners. It would be good to hear from the voice of our people, but we’re getting this pushed through under urgency. I think that’s part of the moumou for Matua Shane, and the moumou of coming from Tai Tokerau and only spending last night with forest owners who shared, “Well, why are they doing this?”, and I said, “I don’t know.”

DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member’s time has expired. Please just finish the sentence, as then we can move on.

HŪHANA LYNDON: Kia ora. The Green Party oppose this legislation and will pursue a full process. Kia ora.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m taking this call on behalf of the ACT Party, and we are supporting the first reading of the Forests (Log Traders and Forestry Advisers Repeal) Amendment Bill.

I was listening to the previous contributor, Hūhana Lyndon, and I can see that the member is saying that something was done at one point and it was considered that that was the right thing to do so now we cannot change our position. That is not right. We have to assess things on an ongoing basis. At any point, if you realise that something is not working, we must change that, and that is what this bill about. Yes, the original bill, which this bill is repealing, was passed in 2020, and some of the regulations commenced in August 2022, but we know that over-burdening businesses with regulations doesn’t work, and the forestry sector is no different from other businesses.

As we know, the forestry sector brings huge revenue for us. It’s the fourth-largest export sector for us, and this Government wants to increase our export revenue—we actually want to double it by 2030. So we can double that only by supporting businesses. We want to see that businesses are able to do the things that they are supposed to do rather than just ticking some boxes and complying with unnecessary requirements. That is what this bill does. It gets rid of some of the compliances that we have enforced on the forestry sector and also forestry advisers. We want them to be able to do the work and produce the revenue for New Zealand and to support the lifestyle that we enjoy here.

What this bill does is it gets rid of the requirement of the register. That is, under the previous legislation, a registration system was set up where registered people were required to provide information, including their personal information. This bill will actually revoke all that requirement once it has gone through Parliament. That information that has been collected will be archived and will be secured from further use, which is important to note. Also, the levies and fees that the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) has been collecting will be refunded. Once the bill commences, if anything is due at that date, that will be waived by MPI. These are some of the changes that are really important to support the forestry sector.

On this side, we really want to get rid of all the red tape and unnecessary burden on businesses. We even have the new Minister for Regulation, the Hon David Seymour. So the ACT Party is really keen to get rid of unnecessary regulations and unnecessary burdens that the previous Government has imposed on businesses. We want to see that businesses are able to thrive, businesses are able to support the economy, and that is what the ACT Party wants to do. That’s why the ACT Party supports this bill and commends this bill to the House. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to speak this afternoon, and, particularly, it is a pleasure to hear from Hūhana Lyndon, my whanaunga from across the House, from Ngātiwai, for those words that were unexpected to hear of support of matua Shane—unexpected but delightfully received. It would just be a wonderful thing if you could also share that support on the fast-track bill.

In terms of the Forests (Log Traders and Forestry Advisers Repeal) Amendment Bill, I commend it to the House.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: It’s important to remember, for members, to stand and call, otherwise we might miss something.

Ngā mihi e te Pīka, he nui ngā pire i te rangi nei.

E tū ana ahau ki te waha i ngā kōrero mā Te Pāti Māori i te rangi nei, ā, e kaha whakahē ana i tēnei o ngā pire kua tae mai i rō Pāremata i te rangi nei.

[Thank you, Madam Speaker, there are many bills today.

I stand to give voice to the statements of the Māori Party today, and we strongly oppose this bill that has arrived in the House today.]

The Forestry (Log Traders and Forestry Advisers Repeal) Amendment Bill provides for the disestablishment of the registration system and all associated requirements for log traders and forestry advisers and the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) to refund any fees or levies paid to MPI under the scheme and waive any fees or levies that are due to not be paid on time.

Alignment with Te Pāti Māori tikanga: we oppose this bill to our mana motuhake. According to the departmental disclosure statement, Māori were not consulted and there is no information available on the impacts of this repeal on Māori. When it comes to our whenua, Māori should always be partners in the decision-making process. We oppose this bill due to our mana ōrite. The registration system was put in place to allow equity of access to timber for both domestic processors and exporters. Its repeal will be inequitable for timber processors in Aotearoa. We oppose this bill for mana mokopuna. This bill will remove the requirement for forestry advisers, log traders, and exporters to work to nationally agreed practice standards. Less standards means less protections for our whenua and our tangata whenua.

The regulations that are being removed will be detrimental to oranga tāngata and oranga whenua. Māori should at least be consulted on all matters relating to our whenua.

Koinā taku takoha ki tēnei o ngā pire. Tēnā rā tātou e te Whare. [This is my contribution to this bill. I acknowledge all of us in the House.]

This is a great bill, isn’t it? I love this, and I do want to acknowledge the support across the House from my colleague on the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, as we should, because you know, forestry is our fourth largest exporter in New Zealand. We have to be supporting them to power them up to get the best competitive advantage that we can. This bill is about getting rid of red tape for our forestry sector. Whatever the intentions may have been a few years ago when it first came in, ultimately, the end result was more red tape for forestry.

We are a Government, as this Parliament should be, that listens, that learns, and that can improve and ultimately will get rid of the red tape to get New Zealanders ahead. It’s about restoring autonomy to those that provide essential services to our forestry. It is signalling, I think, the wider intent of this Government to support our forestry sector, to grow investment in forestry, in fact, to grow our economy, and, for good measure, to get New Zealand back on track. I commend it to the House.

A couple of questions I have: firstly, where’s Matua Shane? Where’s Shane?

DEPUTY SPEAKER: It’s not appropriate to refer—

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: No, no, sorry—he’s in the House, but I hope he’s on the speaking list, because, actually, I was an enthusiastic supporter of this piece of legislation when it was brought in. A ute and a laptop was literally all you needed to trade logs. We had small forests owners, we had small investors, and we had small processors who were getting ripped off by people who would come and make an offer, people didn’t have good advice, and Matua Shane rightfully knew that we had to bring in a registration system so that people who were advising people new to the sector had some kind of credibility.

In fact, for the fourth-largest export sector in our country, it is absolutely essential that we have credible systems in place. So we are going to support this. But the question is, can we get guarantees from the Government that they will ensure that logs that are harvested come from areas free of disease? Because if that disease is identified offshore by any of our markets—say, India, for example—the risks are that those logs and our log trade will be shut down overnight.

The second thing is that we are now seeing increasing obligations around deforestation. There are countries around the world that simply cut down their forests, do not replant, and there’s growing concern about biodiversity, about carbon sequestration, all the rest of it. So there’s an obligation to ensure that the sustainably managed and harvested forests that produce the vast majority of radiata in our country, just what we’re talking about here, are actually replanted and run in a sustainable manner. If we can’t prove that and we don’t know that the logs that are going on the ship or they’re going to a processing system have come from a sustainably harvested forest, then we too could be shut out of international markets. Then there’s the one of ensuring confidence for those who invest in or own small forests that they can be protected against road traders, someone with a ute and a laptop, because that’s what we’ll be going back to now.

One of the primary drivers for the Hon Shane Jones—I guess, the obligation to place on these traders some credibility, some systems that offered some certification—was to ensure that the processing sector in our country, if they were signed up to a contract for supply, indeed had that supply delivered. These are companies—small, some of them are larger—that are employing New Zealanders up and down our country to produce the high-quality timber that we all rely on for our housing market. The Government says it wants to build more houses; it will need more timber.

When the log price goes up—and, at the moment, it’s low; the export log prices. So there’s lots of timber available for local processing. When the log price goes back up, which we hope it does, then the ability for those sawmills to compete for logs gets constrained and the traders will simply shift the logs to the highest place. If there’s no comeback on them, if there’s no registration, no certification, no proof of integrity or credibility, then the risk is that those rogue traders, as they did in the past, will just shift the logs to the highest market and leave our local sawmills at risk. So the question to the Government in passing this—and the costs are actually relative to this being the fourth-biggest export sector in our country.

The cost for individual traders was not that great. These are people dealing with millions of dollars, coming and going in terms of logs and supply. The money that the Government has decided it will hand back—like it is to landlords, it is now handing it back to some log traders—probably won’t be that great, but it will leave a gap in terms of Ministry for Primary Industries’ ability to provide oversight in this crucial area. This is a really important area out of our economy. It’s a growing one. People are looking to invest in the forestry sector. The Government needs to give them an assurance, those small forest owners, that they will be protected, given that the passage of this legislation will remove one of the obligations around registration that provided that protection.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker, and I stand in support of the Forests (Log Traders and Forestry Advisers Repeal) Amendment Bill, and I commend it to the House.

Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to take a call on this bill. This is a bill which Labour supports, but it’s moving through the House’s urgency now through all stages so it’s really important for parliamentarians around this House to be able to appreciate the decisions that are being made here and also for the Minister to take full responsibility for those concerns, which my colleague the Hon Damien O’Connor has raised. Because this is an incredibly important sector for New Zealand.

We want our foresters to do well. I came to this House from a role in a large corporate group which owns the Woodhill Forest, and that forest was an important strategic asset not only for that group and its intergenerational commitments to those people who are shareholders in it, but also to the wider Auckland region. The economic impact of that forest, the way that it is used—it also has a big tourism element in the forest—is all really important as part of the economic engine room of that region. So we want these businesses to absolutely thrive and it’s important that they aren’t burdened with unnecessary regulations.

However, when we have a piece of legislation like this going through all stages, we need to know from the Minister that he’s got the right kind of safeguards, the right kind of checks in place to make sure that those businesses that will be now operating without the oversight of something like the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) are fully equipped to take into account those considerations that the Hon Damien O’Connor has raised.

I think it’s going to be really useful for us in the committee stage to hear from the Minister on his intentions around the conduct of those businesses and to make sure, particularly around those questions of rogue trading, that we’re not going to see that in our market. Although I think it is really important to acknowledge here that the sector has changed since that legislation was brought in, and so we have some comfort there around the kind of operators that we’re seeing in New Zealand forests.

I also want to make sure that the House knows of Labour’s intention here to always be scrutinising the forestry industry in relation to those interests of Māori forest owners. We know that forestry is a big part of the $40 billion Māori economy. Māori are very over-invested in forestry and so anything that would damage the performance of that sector and the ability of that sector to return gains to the shareholders who are actually iwi members—many of whom have benefited from settlements which involved Crown forest which has been returned to their iwi—that is of utmost importance to the Labour Party and is something we will watch closely.

We know that the Māori forestry sector is also poised to do incredibly well in the next two decades, and so we want to make sure that this House is enabling legislation which gives a real framework for that. We want to see a forestry sector that changes; that delivers good jobs, highly skilled jobs, in our regions and in places like North Auckland for the Woodhill Forest. We need to make sure that—

Hon Member: Safe jobs.

ARENA WILLIAMS: —exactly: safe jobs that have the right kind of checks and safeguards around them and the right kind of oversight from something like MPI and from a health and safety perspective where everyone in the sector is empowered to sort of unlock the economic potential of that asset.

Māori as investors in that—whether it’s through the post-settlement governance entities that have received Crown forestry assets through the settlements, or whether it’s through their own investments in rural forests like, say, the Mangatu Blocks that have had, since the 1930s, a policy of buying back forestry land out of private hands to restore their tino rangatiratanga over the realm of kaitiakitanga. In both of those scenarios, we want to make sure that they are not only able to realise the economic gains out of their forestry but also to realise the gains for future generations of owning the whenua, of having a relationship with it, and tying up into commercial agreements which are not advantageous to those iwi is something we would be concerned about. Because iwi members need to be able to not only realise the commercial gains that forestry allows for but also the access to their land, the access to their hunting rights, access to their wāhi tapu [sacred sites] which are often in these forestry areas.

So working with good foresters who also know those obligations and who are interested in their obligations in New Zealand—when, of course, Madam Speaker, you will know that many foresters are overseas-based, many of them are US operating here in the New Zealand market. We need to make sure that our provisions in here that we decide on are the kind of empowering legislation that Māori need to realise the benefits of their forestry asset. With that, and with no notes, I commend this bill to the House.

With no notes, I commend this bill to the House.

Bill read a first time.

The result corrected after originally being announced as Ayes 102, Noes 21.

This bill is set down for second reading immediately.

Second Reading