Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Scheme—Forestry Conversion) Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Scheme—Forestry Conversion) Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon TODD McCLAY: I move, That the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Scheme—Forestry Conversion) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Environment Committee to consider this bill, and at the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 13 August 2025 and that the committee have authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting, except during oral questions, during any evening on a day in which there has been a sitting of the House, on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, and outside of the Wellington area, despite Standing Orders 193, 195, and 196.

The bill amends the Climate Change Response Act 2002 to limit whole-farm conversions to exotic forestry from registering in the New Zealand emissions trading scheme (ETS). The bill delivers on the action in the Government’s second emissions reduction plan and action 24 of the quarter-two action plan to introduce this legislation to the House. The bill takes a balanced and practical step towards protecting our most productive farmland while still supporting our climate goals. It’s about preserving choice—the choice to farm, the choice to grow, and the choice to sustain rural communities for generations to come.

The primary sector is vital to the success of our economy. Our farmers feed New Zealand and the world. I also acknowledge the significant role forestry plays in contributing to regional employment and helping us meet our emissions targets. But the current settings in the emissions trading scheme have tipped the scales too far. We’re seeing entire farms converted into exotic forests under the ETS, from Invercargill to Ruatōria. These are not marginal lands; these are productive farms supporting families, communities, and local economies. Once they are planted into exotic carbon forests, they are, effectively, lost to food production for decades, if not permanently so. This is not balanced land use, it is not sustainable, and it is not fair to the rural communities who bear the brunt of these conversions.

The bill introduces targeted, sensible limits on whole-farm conversions into exotic forestry under the ETS. It does not ban forestry. It does not undermine our climate commitments. What it does is protect our best land for food production while still allowing farmers to diversify and to participate in the ETS where it makes sense. There is still a great deal of land that can be utilised for forestry, of course.

The bill introduces four key changes to the ETS forestry planting in New Zealand: (1) restrictions on exotic forestry ETS registration on actively farmed land-use capability (LUC) classes 1 through 6, our most productive land; (2) an annual ballot allowing 15,000 hectares of exotic forest on class 6 land, providing planting opportunities while managing planting scale nationally; (3) a 25 percent cap allowing farmers to plant up to a quarter of their land in exotic forest for ETS purposes to maintain flexibility and income diversity; and (4) temporary transitional protection for those who invested in good faith before December 2024.

These changes are grounded in the land-use capability classification system, a well-established tool that reflects the productivity of our land. By focusing restrictions on the most productive classes, we ensure that on low-quality land, native-forest planting and planting on certain types of Māori land remain viable options. To support those who made legitimate afforestation investments before this policy was announced last December, the bill includes temporary transitional exemptions for new restrictions. In order to qualify, a potential ETS applicant will need to provide evidence that a qualifying forestry investment, as specified in the bill, has been made in relation to that LUC 1 through 6 land they seek to register in the ETS. This will both allow for affected investors to proceed with planted forest projects, recognising investments already in train, while also ensuring qualifying forest investments demonstrated genuine investment in relation to a specific piece of LUC 1 through 6 land.

For instance, the purchase of land and ordering of trees together would be an example of proof of a qualifying forestry investment, as long as it took place before 1 December 2024, whilst each of these actions alone would not demonstrate that. Investment must also have been made between 1 January 2021 and 4 December 2024 so that we are only allowing those exemptions for recent investments and real intentions. These exemptions will be assessed on a case by case basis by the regulator at the point of ETS registration, but the conditions for transitional agreement arrangements have been published previously and are clearly set out in the legislation.

This is not about pitting farming against forestry; it’s about maximising land use for our whole rural sector. Both agriculture and forestry can coexist in a way that is sustainable, strategic, and fair. Whole-farm conversions don’t just affect landowners; they affect entire communities. Schools, local businesses, and services all depend upon the steady year-round activity that farming provides. Exotic carbon forestry, by contrast, offers short bursts of economic activity, often decades apart. These bursts can be significant, especially when spread across a region with staggered forest ages, but they cannot come at the total expense of our farming communities.

Let’s not forget that this is also about New Zealand’s global reputation. We are known for high-quality sustainably produced food. That reputation is built on the back of our farmers. If we allow productive farmland to disappear under a blanket of trees, we risk undermining that brand and the livelihood that depends on it.

We as a Government have publicly committed to the legislation taking effect in October 2025. Forestry remains a vital part of our climate response and rural economy, providing jobs, carbon sequestration, and export value, but it must be integrated in a way that complements, not replaces, our food-production systems. By continuing to provide planting pathways, we are offering a balanced approach to maximising production on farms. This bill is about balance, it’s about choice, and it’s about protecting the future of rural New Zealand. Let us back our farmers, let us back our regions, and let us preserve the right to farm for future generations. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

The Labour Party will offer very cautious support for this bill through to the select committee. It is cautious because of the very short report-back date, because we think some of the issues that need to be worked through are quite significant, and it is cautious because, in some ways, this bill just doesn’t go far enough; in some ways, it maybe goes too far. There’s a whole set of issues that we need to work through very, very carefully.

So let me, first of all, tackle one way in which the bill may not go far enough. This bill will limit the amount of land that can be converted to forestry for emissions trading scheme (ETS) purposes, but there is a huge question around whether or not we should have forestry in the emissions trading scheme at all—a question that was really highlighted by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment recently in his report on examining the drivers of forestry in New Zealand. This is an issue that needs to be examined in depth and considered. Of course, this particular bill starts to work around some of the issues in forestry but by no means all of them. That sort of issue we do need to have a look at.

In the Labour Party, we are fully cognisant of the effect on rural communities, of the impact of afforestation, of the extent to which particularly remote rural communities are being affected. We’ve spent a bit of time with Federated Farmers recently. A lot of us went to Fieldays, and we heard some of the stories about what was going on in rural communities. This is why we do actually support some of the intent of this bill, because we do recognise the need to protect those communities. We’ve heard that and do that. Nevertheless, there are, as I said, questions that need to be worked through.

Let’s just talk about some of them. One of the things that’s sitting in the regulatory impact statement (RIS)—which was, incidentally, quite hard to find, because it’s not actually on the website yet—is the assessment of the options that have been chosen by this Government. There has been a whole lot of consideration of the costs of the preferred option on ETS forestry participants—good people to consider—on farmers, obviously; on foresters; on Māori land owners; of the effect on the regulator; of the effect on others. What we haven’t got is an assessment of the cost or the impact on the emissions trading scheme. This will introduce some distortions into the scheme. Now, maybe that’s a good thing, but we are going to need to work through that very, very carefully at the select committee as well. There’s a whole set of questions around that.

Then there’s something which I’m just trying to puzzle my way through—and again, it needs to be examined—and that is the ballot system for category class 6 land. Under this bill, as it’s come to the House, land categories 1 through 6 will only be able to have 25 percent of the land planted up in forestry. But category 6 land—there’s a special category in there to say that more than that can go for forestry: you can do whole-farm conversions or significant amounts of forestry conversion, up to 15,000 hectares per annum. Whose 15,000 hectares? Well, it turns out that’s going to be decided by a ballot. Everyone who wants to convert some of their farmland over and above that 25 percent will need to go into a ballot. That, of course, means that their land, by virtue of a ballot, may become more valuable for the purposes of sale. I’m going to want to understand whether the permission to plant forest applies to the land or to the farmer and if it’s transferable. That’s a set of issues that, in the short time we’ve had the bill available to us, we haven’t been able to work through, but I’m sure that we’ll find that out in due course. Nevertheless, using a ballot like this has its advantages and disadvantages. It’ll be interesting to work through that as well. There’s a lot to work through in terms of this bill.

The Minister introducing the bill spoke of the need to balance and complement our productive farming, our food production systems. I agree. We need to do that, but we also need to balance what we are doing with respect to climate change as well. It’s not just to do with the ETS or with our Paris commitments or with our emissions budgets; it’s to do with the real existential threat that climate change poses for us and our farmers, and that’s an issue we most definitely need to examine.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. We have a major challenge in this country, in that we are losing vast hectarages of farmland to pine forestry, and this is because of a distortion through the emissions trading scheme whereby it is cheaper to offset emissions to pine forestry than to actually cut gross emissions. For understanding that, in the climate change context, the only meaningful way for us to deal with climate change globally is to cut gross emissions, which is real-world emissions. The fiction of offsetting has the same practical impact of an alcoholic paying somebody to drink water and thinking that they have solved their drinking problem. That is the distortion that we have in this country to this day, and what’s more, the person who’s drinking all the water is making a lot of money and thinking that they’re doing something about alcoholism, but they’re not at all.

The worst effect of it is that we are not solving climate change but, actually, we’re sacrificing some of our least-emitting farmland, because a sheep and beef farm produces about a quarter of the emissions of your average high-intensity dairy farm. It seems like the effect we got with He Waka Eke Noa, in which sheep and beef were thrown under the bus to protect the dairy industry. That is the distortion that still exists. To give you an example of one of the worst effects of that, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment did modelling on the current settings, which showed that by the middle of this century that we’re presently in, we could face a situation where land use was dominated by only two types: pine forestry and dairy farms.

Now, that is a major challenge for us in terms of our resilience. It is a major challenge for us in terms of the fact that many of those pine forests in the high country will become the tinder dry fuel for future forest fires as the impacts of climate change hit. Let’s be clear, the major threat to humanity in terms of climate change is in large part how it impacts our ability to produce food. Globally: erratic seasons, prolonged droughts, greater floods, extreme weather events—these are the things that farmers are, on the front line, being impacted by. It’s a sad denial on the part of the farming industry with some many years of climate change as a problem, and it has, actually, really undercut farmers and undermined farmers’ longevity.

We think it’s important that the Government is acknowledging this problem. I think, however, this bill isn’t biting the bullet. The Green Party policy is to remove forestry from the emissions trading scheme to stop that distortion. That is the actual solution to the problem. The risk with this bill, whilst it is a step in the right direction—and, Minister, we will be supporting it to select committee because we want to see it developed more thoroughly and we would actually like to see it given the proper time it deserves because there are some real risks with it. One is that there’s a risk that you actually get with the ballot system, a continued loss of that high country land. I note that Kate Acland from Beef + Lamb said that “Land Class 6 is the foundation of our breeding farms … 15,000 hectares every year coming out of this will add up over time.” Toby Williams, from Federated Farmers, said there “is a huge amount of land … going into pine trees … that’s what farmers will currently be using as breeding country—we can’t afford to lose 150,000 hectares in the next decade.”

The other distortion that we risk is that we have adjacent bits of land, one that might be dominated by land class 6 where you won’t be allowed to plant pines except through the ballot, and another dominated by land class 7. It could be that you invert the value of those land areas whereby the land class 7 becomes higher value because you can now plant pine trees on it. That’s another unhelpful distortion. What is more, farmers—and we hear this all the time—need the ability to have long-term planning in their land use. Being in a lottery to know whether they can plant a forest is the opposite of giving certainty to farmers in terms of how they can plan their land use.

The other exciting thing that’s happening in the sector is the likes of agroforestry and silvopasture and tree intercropping. These things are not recognised for their valuable use of combinations of diverse mosaic landscapes where you’re planting trees and you’re raising livestock and you’re producing crops and food.

I don’t see that this bill addresses those challenges. I look forward to debating it at the select committee. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Hon Andrew Hoggard: Madam Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): The Hon Mark Patterson.

Hon Andrew Hoggard: Andrew Hoggard.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Sorry! You’re in the wrong seat.

Hon Andrew Hoggard: No, he’s down there.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Yeah, I know. Sorry—the Hon Andrew Hoggard. My apologies.

He’s got sheep; I’ve got cows. OK, thank you, Madam Speaker. Yeah. Look, I rise on behalf of the ACT Party to support this bill. We’ve had some challenges about it, but I do think it is an elegant solution to quite a complex problem. This problem has been around for about six-odd years now; people have been debating it and talking about it and proposing solutions. We need a solution, and I think, you know, this is the solution that is here now. It is a solution we should be backing because it will create change. Now, you may argue it doesn’t go far enough, it goes too far, or whatever, but let’s get started with something, because if we do nothing, like what happened with the previous Government, then more land will keep going out of farming.

I want to talk about what the problem is here—we’ve sort of missed it to a degree in terms of some of the speeches. The problem really has been identified by rural communities in terms of large swaths of land being moved out of farming and into forestry and communities being decimated—a point that’s well known to me. A neighbour of mine had moved here to my area recently. They had previously been out farming on the East Coast, and, basically, they had to leave because their entire valley up to their property had been planted out, all gone into forestry. They were the last farm left in the valley. There was not going to be a school to send their kids to. Quite frankly, they were worried about their lives if it ever caught fire, because how were they going to get out of the valley. This is the challenge that’s been recognised by rural communities, and this is what we’re trying to solve.

In terms of the solution, as the Minister of Forestry mentioned, farmers really have a problem with anyone telling them what to do on their land—usually, much more unparliamentary language is used than that—but then they also want to tell their neighbour what they can do with their land, and we run into quite a conundrum there as to how we balance that up. This is why I think it’s a very elegant solution: we’re not telling anyone what they can do with their land, but we’re saying, “If you make this choice, I hope the log prices are good, because that’s how you get the return.”, and people will not be getting the emissions trading scheme credits. So, basically, it’s not telling people what to do, but it’s removing an incentive that’s creating this distortion as to farming moving into that. This is, I think, a really elegant solution.

I have heard concerns from the rural community around the transitional measures. I don’t know how true it is, but I’ve heard concerns raised that some forestry companies are diverting seedlings that were going to be replanted into land they’d bought after the ban. Hopefully, that isn’t the case. My suggestion to anyone thinking they’re going to try and weave their way around this is that you might find out the hard way that you can’t actually get around it and you might lose out in money.

I fully commend this bill to the House. It’s been a long time coming, and I thank the Minister for bringing it.

The Hon Mark Patterson—take two.

Thank you—yes, it is I! Thank you, Madam Speaker. Look, I could not be more pleased to be rising to support this bill, which is the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Scheme—Forestry Conversion) Amendment Bill, and I thank Minister McClay for progressing this. It is part of the New Zealand First - National coalition agreement. In my view, in having the honour of being the Minister for Rural Communities, this is the most consequential bill to come before this House in this term of Parliament for our rural communities. Whole-of-farm conversions of some of our most productive land, if left unchecked, are in the process of shuttering large swathes of rural New Zealand. Action is both necessary and overdue.

The emissions trading scheme creates a mismatch of profitability for land-use options. The current pricing for a tonne of carbon—it’s around $59 a kilo—is somewhere near five times more profitable than sheep and beef farming, and sheep and beef farming is going pretty well at the moment. It is now estimated to be competitive with dairying. I know: I planted some myself; I’ve taken advantage of this scheme. Why would I not? It would be looking a gift horse in the mouth. This is not about vilifying forestry. It is $6 billion worth of export earnings. It is a legitimate and valuable land use, and we do have large areas of less productive land that we can plant in forestry and utilise the scheme. It’s very much a right tree, right place strategy that we’re trying to get back to here. It does create opportunities to integrate forestry in with sheep and beef farming primarily, in a mosaic-type approach, and it can help cash-flow farm succession. It’s not all downside, by any means, for our rural communities.

When whole farms are planted out, livestock are culled—some 2 million stock units estimated since 2017 that’s here, is gone. Farm labour is gone. Stock agents, gone. Food and seed reps, gone. Vets, gone. Contractors, gone. Truckies, gone. That’s families gone. That’s the viability of our rural communities, our schools, our local pubs—wide-ranging impacts. It is flowing into our provincial towns. The closure of Smithfield meatworks in Timaru and the loss of some 700 jobs is the canary in the coalmine, and there will be more. If we’re doubting the consequences of what we’re doing here, when Governments are pulling levers like this, this week’s Farmers Weekly, I think, shows it all. There is a quote here from Bayleys Gisborne director Simon Bousfield, who estimates the average value of hill-country farmland has dropped by $5,000 per hectare on the current market, in relation to, and as a direct result of, us bringing these measures in.

Decisions we make in this place do have consequences; we’re not doing them lightly, but we are doing them for good reason. They are inflated values, and what we’re looking to do is return farmland value to its productive value as both sheep and beef and forestry land. We need the sheep and beef sector, which is doing really well at the moment and has great potential—and I’m so focused on the wool for this reason. We need to get sheep and beef farming profitable again so that they can be a competitive land use. But they do deserve a fair fight. We can’t plant our way to net zero. The burden is falling disproportionately on rural New Zealand and our sheep and beef sector, and we will not allow them to be collateral damage.

This bill is sensible. It rebalances the drivers of land-use change. It seeks to protect the viability of rural New Zealand. I do take note of some of the Opposition speeches. I do think, within the select committee—it is quite a complex bill—we should be open to sensible changes around some of the settings. But New Zealand First strongly commends this bill to the House.

Tēnā rā koe e te Pīka, otirā tēnā rā tātou e te Whare. E tū ana ahau ki te waha i ngā kōrero a Te Pāti Māori i te pō nei e pā ana ki ngā pae āhuatanga e hono ana ki te taiao.

[Thank you, Madam Speaker, indeed greetings to us in the House. I stand to convey the statements of the Māori Party tonight regarding the features connected with the environment.]

Te Pāti Māori note that this bill provides for exemption of certain Māori lands from emissions trading scheme (ETS) restrictions in this bill, principally Māori land held under Te Ture Whenua Maori Act 1993, Māori land in which the status was changed to general land under the Māori Affairs Amendment Act 1967, and land to a Treaty settlement.

Te Tari Whakatau and a small number of Māori stakeholders were consulted on identifying the types of Māori land that fall within these categories. Officials conclude that the exemptions provide, certainly for Māori land owners, an opportunity for Māori to exercise rangatiratanga. In developing the policy for the bill, Ministers and officials considered the interest and effects of the proposal for Māori throughout the analysis. Māori and iwi stakeholders were also consulted alongside the public on this policy as part of the second emissions reduction plan. The Māori entities that were spoken to were in favour of this exemption and in agreement with specific exemptions included in this bill.

However, Te Pāti Māori considers also the concerns: placing certain restrictions on farm conversions, limiting the volume of hectares available for conversions per year, also setting out provisions for farmland planting and ensure flexibility and choice, setting out protections for Māori-owned land in line with the Treaty obligations, also creating time-limited exemptions for certain people who were in the process.

Also, protections for Māori land do not outweigh the negative impact on taiao and reduction of the broader environmental protections. In fact, Māori land only accounts for a very small number of land-use activities in Aotearoa. In that context, Te Pāti Māori considers the bill to also undermine the integrity of the ETS and weakens it further by removing methane, which only limits the scheme further.

We support efforts to assert kai sovereignty, but we are not totally convinced that this current proposal is effective enough in providing and ensuring that all our whānau in Aotearoa have access to kai. Nō reira, tēnā rā tātou.

Look, I rise to support this bill tonight. It’s great to see some cross-party support on this, and I am looking forward to it coming to our Environment Committee, where we can navigate it further. Look, it’s heartbreaking to see some of our large Hawke’s Bay stations absolutely blanket covered in pine trees. This is a huge issue for the East Coast, where I am from. These sheep stations used to be the jewel in the crown of Hawke’s Bay. We are now seeing them blanket covered in pine trees. This is our good, fertile soil, good land—good food-producing land—that’s been gobbled up in trees in the race for carbon credits. Well, this is ending under our Government.

National campaigned on putting a stop to this, and this bill is going to put a stop to blanket covering our beautiful, fertile, food-producing land in pine trees. Enough is enough. This bill is a practical approach—it’s a right tree, right place approach. It’s good to see that farmers are diversifying. Fine. Plant the really, really steep stuff, but not the good, fertile, food-producing country where we see our sheep and our stock numbers going down. We’re seeing our rural communities being decimated. I’ve been out visiting the meat works in our community, and they are seeing the stock numbers going down, so they’re not processing. We’re seeing shifts getting less. This is jobs and opportunities for many of our families in our rural communities. We cannot stand by and watch this good food-producing land being blanket covered in pine trees. I am really pleased to see our Minister acting on this and delivering on it, and I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Noting how the last speaker, Catherine Wedd, said that enough is enough and that this bill will fix everything, I think that’s slightly ambitious, but we’re all agreeing there is a problem that needs some fixing. We think that some more fixing will be needed in addition to this bill.

The problem is that we have too many carbon emissions and we have too much pollution from carbon and also methane, and this is a problem, so, some time ago, the emissions trading scheme (ETS) was established. It was thought that it was better to give people an avenue to offset rather than to really focus on that decarbonisation. Rather than changing our vehicle fleet from oil-based, petrol-based cars and trucks to electric or hydrogen, the focus became about planting these pine trees, that people could make money from. Of course, that focus on offsets has made people make sensible financial decisions. We heard the Hon Mark Patterson speak before about a piece of farmland that he owns where he planted some trees because that is what the economics were telling him to do. He didn’t have to do it, but it made good financial sense, and people will follow the incentives.

That is a problem with the ETS and with our focus always on these offsets. Of course, that is why we’re interested in this change to disincentivise these carbon forests on farmland—farmland that, as the Minister said, is good food-producing land. I think it’s important to also note that, here, we’re talking about carbon forestry and only exotic carbon forestry. These are pine trees that are planted to stay put. They might be harvested once, but then they’re going to stay in the ground. It’s different from plantation forestry whereby foresters are out there planting the trees and then planning to cut them down and to make other things out of them or to export them.

That’s an important thing to note, as well as this: offsets versus decarbonisation, the net versus the gross. The bill is interesting. It sets up some things that I wasn’t expecting to see in a bill like this—like the ballot system that my colleague the Hon Dr Deborah Russell has talked about. A lot of the bill—maybe about half of the bill—is about that ballot system. There’s also a lot in the bill about mapping. Mapping is something that I probably was expecting to see in a bill like this.

There’s also a lot of regulatory powers in here as well. These are all things, along with the transitional provisions—and we heard the Minister say, “Well, we made the statement back last year that we were going to stop whole-farm conversions to carbon forestry.” That feeds into the transitional provisions that are found right at the back of the bill, but it does seem that these transitional provisions are not nearly as clear as they could be, and that is something that we will want to explore in the select committee.

I want to, here, speak briefly on the fact that it is going to the Environment Committee, and that is good—the Environment Committee normally deals with climate change issues. However, the report back is only 30 August, which is not much time, but it is better than all stages under urgency, which, of course, this Government likes to do. I’m not sure why there is so much need for a rush at this stage of the process when the bill is going to be at select committee. That is because we see, in the appendix to the regulatory impact statement, that there was a regulatory impact statement in October of 2024. I acknowledge that Cabinet made decisions later in March 2025, but this has been in development for some time, yet the select committee is only going to get it for a very short period of time so that it can come into operation by October 2025. I think that speed is problematic because it is more complicated than it might sound at first.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. One of the saddest things I’ve had to experience driving around the electorate of Northland and the rural parts of it is seeing all the beautiful rolling hill country that has been converted into carbon forestry. I want to make a quite distinct difference here. There’s production forestry, which we fully support—it’s an important part of the Northland and New Zealand economy. It’s the carbon forestry that’s been causing the problems. It’s the carbon forestry on good, easy country that has led to rural communities quietly disintegrating as more and more schools end up closing as people move out because of the carbon forestry.

This was an issue that was highlighted for a large number of the last few years—highlighted by members on this side of the House, particularly the National Party. We highlighted this issue. And what did the Government of the day do—the Labour Government? They did nothing. They ignored it. They let it carry on. Consequently, we are dealing with the issues here now today. The only party in the last—

Hon Damien O’Connor: That’s bullshit!

GRANT McCALLUM: —campaign that stood up and said, “We will do something about this”—

Hon Dr Duncan Webb: It’s rubbish!

GRANT McCALLUM: —was the National Party. I’m proud of that and, believe me, I look forward to taking it to select committee, and I commend this bill to the House.

Now, before I call the next speaker, can I just remind members about the unparliamentary language coming there on my left. I know it’s an emotive topic for some, but just maintain it.

I was about to make a comment about peace almost breaking out in the House tonight until the speech from the previous speaker, Grant McCallum, where he quite inaccurately claimed that the previous Government had not taken steps on this. I do just want to acknowledge the work of my colleague Damien O’Connor, who has been very passionate about this issue and has done a lot of work on it.

I want to take some time to talk briefly about the bill, but before I get there, I just want to reiterate some of the position that my colleague the Hon Dr Deborah Russell laid out at the beginning, which is that we will be supporting this bill to select committee but there are some concerns around aspects of the bill. The particular concern that we have, which I’m sure we’ll get to when the next debate comes along, is actually having a short report-back time on this bill. It is a complex piece of legislation. It does have the potential for significant unintended consequences. Actually, I think, from the discussion in the House tonight, everyone that has been part of this debate tonight accepts there is an issue, but, actually, the role of the select committee is to drill into what are the unintended consequences of any legislation and to make sure those get addressed properly. I do just want to put on record my concern around the short report-back time frame on this bill.

Just to get to the crux of it, there are two essential issues from whole-farm conversions that we’re seeing, and that is where we’re seeing the conversion of productive sheep and beef land, particularly, being converted for the purpose of carbon forestry in order to participate in the emissions trading scheme. There are two issues around that. The first is the inaccurate use of land, essentially—I say inaccurate, but it’s the changing land use from using land in a productive way that supports the growth of our economy but also continues to support a really important sector for New Zealand. There is that part of it, and the second part is the distortion with the emissions trading scheme.

Now, I want to talk about that a little bit, because, on the whole—and I think my colleagues have made these points very, very well—there needs to be a greater focus on actually reducing emissions. That needs to be the bigger focus for our nation. However, there are also appropriate times when increasing the use of things like forestry in order to create alternatives for activities that create more carbon actually is helpful, so we have to be careful that we also don’t make so many changes to the emissions trading scheme that we end up actually undermining what we’re attempting to do. These are the kinds of things that need to be discussed in the select committee process.

I do just want to point out that it’s interesting hearing the ACT Party saying that they’re not taking away choice; the party that likes to promote private property rights above all else are making in their—and even nodding when I say that. This is an impairment on private property use. It is, essentially, banning carbon farms and stopping carbon farms, so there is an anomaly here from the ACT Party that I thought would be useful to point out to the House tonight.

The point is that we in the Labour Party do agree that using productive land in a way that takes away from its ability to support key sectors in our economy, particularly food-producing ones, is something that we should be turning our minds to, and we do support the House turning its mind to this particular issue.

In my area of Nelson and the wider area of Tasman, we have seen these issues presenting themselves—which I’m sure you will be aware of, Madam Speaker; just bringing you into the debate briefly—not only turning productive land into carbon farms but also turning productive land—and I’ll get this word in tonight—into large swathes of housing across urban—

Hon Rachel Brooking: Swathes!

RACHEL BOYACK: —yes—around some of our most productive land, is something that has concerned us as well.

I do commend this bill to the House. I do hope that the select committee will be able to get into some of the details of the bill and have the appropriate amount of time to ensure it comes back to the House in a way that will support our communities. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Look, this is such an important issue for the part of the country that I come from, Tairāwhiti, East Coast, home to forestry, farming, and fishing. I am delighted to stand in support of the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Scheme—Forestry Conversion) Amendment Bill. It absolutely makes sense for us. We in Tairāwhiti depend on forestry and farming, and the balance needs to be found. The balance is found through this bill, and I am delighted that now all of the farmers in Tairāwhiti who keep asking me when this bill is coming and when we are doing this and when we will get it through the House can now stop asking me, because it is happening.

I also just want to make a point that in 1988, after Cyclone Bola, we mass-planted pine trees everywhere because we thought that was the solution. That’s been found to not be the solution, and this bill now follows up on that.

I just want to say that it’s ironic that the Opposition has finally realised that the rural economy is the backbone of this country and that they have finally realised that it was their policies that ruined rural communities in the East Coast and ruined the schools. I am so pleased that they’re now supporting it and they’ve figured that out. I’m just so pleased that the 3 percent of farmers who said they supported them will be very pleased with that—good luck with that. National is the party for farmers. We campaigned on this, and we have delivered. I commend the bill to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

The question is, That the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Scheme—Forestry Conversion) Amendment Bill be considered by the Environment Committee.