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

I move, That the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Scheme—Forestry Conversion) Amendment 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 on 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 the Wellington area, despite Standing Orders 193, 195, and 196.

The committee will consider the bill for seven weeks. This reflects the urgent nature of the bill to limit whole-farm conversions of exotic forestry in the emissions trading scheme (ETS) that are negatively impacting rural communities and the economy. The policy has been well signalled to the public through the second emissions reduction plan and our announcement on 4 December of last year.

We acknowledge the bill necessarily adds some complexity to the emissions trading scheme registration, and, therefore, we value the scrutiny of both the committee and the public of the bill.

We’ve made a commitment to the public to have the legislation in force from October 2025. As part of the process to meet that deadline, we require the bill to pass through the House with sufficient time to establish the associated regulations and the IT system to manage new registration processes in the ETS.

Delivering this legislation on time will also provide certainty for foresters on land-use capability rules and their ability to plant for the next season, reduce regulatory uncertainty for the forestry sector, provide certainty for farmers seeking to plant parts of their farm and diversify income, and continue to support confidence in the emissions trading scheme.

As a result of the announcement last year, a number of companies and others involved in forestry have not been able to make considered decisions about what they would do for this season. The reason we are to get this in place so quickly is so that they, too, will not lose another season next year, given that when people make a decision, they can’t plant straight away. I commend the bill to the House, and thank you.

Point of order, Madam Speaker. Could I just get the Minister to clarify, please. I didn’t quite catch it. Was the report-back date 13 August or 30 August? I didn’t quite catch it, Minister, I’m sorry.

Thirteen—13.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Here we are under urgency with a bill that’s—to be honest—been on the boil for a while, as the regulatory impact statement shows, and the Minister has now just moved that the report-back period be truncated, with a series of other restrictions. I think that the Government throws those in just out of an excess of caution, and it’s sort of belts and braces. For example, he has moved that the committee is authorised to meet at any time that the House is sitting, other than question time, and I just can’t see why that needs to be included.

Also, I honestly don’t see the urgency for this. On this side of the House, we see the policy reason for this bill, and I note that that’s been very clear in the speeches, but this is a problem which has been well identified and which has been thrown around. Even whilst we were in Government, I know that we were looking at issues like this, and to suggest that there’s going to be some kind of rush and, in the next seven weeks, our hills are going to be filled with pine seedlings just doesn’t hold water.

The other thing is this, and this is really important: this Government, or at least one of the parties in this Government, is big on regulatory process, and, once again, we have a regulatory impact statement which identifies flaws in the regulatory impact procedure. I want to identify them because it just shows that this Government says one thing and does another, and we know what that is.

It says in the regulatory impact statement, under the quality assurance section, that “The costs and benefits of the preferred option are qualitative, due both to the final design decisions not [being] known and lack of public consultation”—so there are two things in there. First of all, when they say that the cost-benefit analysis is qualitative, they mean that they haven’t done quantitative work, and we need time so that people who care and who want to speak to the select committee can have a reasonable length of time to look at the proposals and provide evidence to the select committee.

I want to say that I’m always impressed that within the usual six-week period for submissions, parties come with very well-thought-out analysis, often of a detailed nature. Here, that is what we need, because there has been a qualitative cost-benefit analysis, which means that they’ve talked to people, but there’s been no genuine Treasury-style cost-benefit analysis, and we need time for that.

Then there’s the big one—the so-called regulatory principle that the people who are affected by a change should be consulted on it. That’s actually a good principle. I agree with that principle, and one of the main tools in this House for implementing that principle is the select committee process. But in a seven-week period, it’s inappropriate, because you’re only going to give—how many weeks are you going to give? You’ve got to get a briefing, you’ve got to call for submissions, you’ve got to analyse the submissions, maybe hear from the submitters—hopefully, we’ll hear from the submitters—and how long are they going to get to get those submissions in? Two weeks, if you’re lucky. That’s not long enough. That’s not long enough.

These are rural communities you’re talking about. These are not beltway Wellingtonian bureaucrats; these are rural communities, and I hope you’ll go out and tell your rural communities to have their say. They deserve a lot more than two weeks to submit on it. They’ve got their cows to milk and their sheep to milk, as well, so that’s an important point.

Look, I really want to say this because in the regulatory impact statement here—it’s on the Table. Grab a copy. I know you won’t read it, but it says that there’s a lack of public consultation, and those are the words it uses: “decisions are not yet known and [there’s a] lack of public consultation, which could have contributed [to] further information.”—which isn’t available—“While it is noted that some consultation is planned, through both targeted engagement and the select committee process”. This regulatory impact statement says there hasn’t been enough consultation and the fix is a select committee process, and it’s the select committee process which you’re now seeking to truncate, and that is, yet again, a bad thing, because people do need to have their say.

This is an important matter, as the ACT Party well knows. You’re now taking away this bill when we want to look at it with a critical eye. There’s an important thing that people need to be consulted on, because if you’ve just gone out and bought yourself a large rolling bit of country that’s category 6 land, thinking, “I’m going to plant a whole lot of carbon trees on that”, that right is being taken away from you. Your property rights are being impaired. I wonder if those people who will submit to the select committee—if they get a decent chance—will say that they deserve compensation, because that’s the ACT Party’s policies. Now, they deserve to have their say because this is a significant change. This is a very significant change in the ability to use land in the way that you choose.

Now, we want to have a good look at it. That’s the other thing—the period of time available to MPs—because this regime is not straightforward. It is a complicated regime, and fast law is not usually good law. We need not only time for submitters to write good, fulsome, and thoughtful submissions but also a period of time to read those submissions—properly read them—and not read them at 10 o’clock one night and turn up at 9 o’clock the next morning, but to read them and reflect on them, to actually reflect on what’s in those submissions, to let the information sort itself out, and come with some genuine reflections.

There is something this Government’s not particularly good at, and that is doing justice to submissions. We know that they didn’t even look at most of the Treaty principles bill’s submissions. I think, here, that this is a bill which deserves every submission to be properly read—and, hopefully, read by MPs from both sides of the House—because it is an important bill.

The thrust of the Minister’s first reading speech here was about protecting rural and remote communities. That’s great. That’s why we are looking to support this bill, to see whether we can contribute to it so that that outcome is actually achieved, but, once again, you need to engage with those rural and remote communities, and that’s not something—

Dana Kirkpatrick: We have.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: No, you haven’t. Read the regulatory impact statement. To the member who says, “We have”, here’s a wee heads-up: the purpose of a regulatory impact statement is to give an independent view of the pre-introduction work that has been done, and it says that there has not been adequate public consultation—a C- is what you get. This regulatory impact statement says the legislation partially meets the quality standard. This place here is the final quality check on legislation, and a seven-week process for what is clearly a complex piece of legislation, touching on both property rights and community values is socially complex, economically complex, and legally complex. Yet here we go. We’re like, “Don’t worry, I’ve talked to my policy advisers.”, and you ram it through, and it’s just bad process once again.

This is a situation where the select committee absolutely needs to have a full—well, not even a full process; I’m going to table an amendment. I accept that you want to get it done, but at least the minimum is the four-month process.

Then, once again, you say the committee has all these special powers to meet on Fridays, to meet when the House is sitting except at question time, to meet outside of Wellington, and all that stuff. It’s foolish to put it in, because it’s unnecessary. Now, if you want to have a truncated process, fine, but you don’t need those special powers. You certainly don’t need to meet whilst the House is sitting. What select committee meets after 7 o’clock at night? What select committee meets at 3 o’clock, other than the Business Committee and what have you. No, subject select committees have never met whilst the House is sitting in normal sitting hours, so those sorts of things are just ridiculous. We simply can’t support this—

The member’s time has expired. Before I call the next speaker, I’m not confident that I got the question out before the point of order, so I’ll just put the question again. The question is that the motion be agreed to.

I am deeply concerned by the very short report-back period that has been proposed for this bill by the Government, by the Minister of Forestry, just now. Originally, when the Minister spoke in his initial speech, I thought he’d said 30 August, and I thought, “Hmm, that’s pretty short. That won’t do justice to this bill. But, OK, that’s close enough to two months, I guess we can do it.” Then it turns out that I had misheard. I asked for clarification, and it turns out to be 13 August, so about a seven-week process for this bill.

I want to explain why that’s really deeply problematic and why we actually ought to have a longer report back. Let me quote some words—actually, I’ll have to paraphrase them because I didn’t write them down at the time, but I do recall the words quite clearly, from a New Zealand First Minister, from Minister Mark Patterson, when he spoke to this bill. What he said was something to the effect of either the most significant—or, I think, maybe he said this was the most consequential piece of legislation in this term of Parliament. I thought, well, that’s a big ask, to say it’s the most consequential piece of legislation in this term of Parliament. Then he qualified it; he said, “for rural communities”. That’s quite significant—the most consequential piece of legislation in this term of Parliament for rural communities. A key member of the Government regards this as an incredibly consequential piece of legislation. A consequential piece of legislation like this deserves full consideration from the Environment Committee.

Now, let me talk about that in a couple of moments. As my colleague Dr Webb has alluded to, we are talking about rural communities who are affected by this, and many of them live in remote areas and so on, so many people who perhaps don’t have as easy access to Parliament as city dwellers will be affected by this bill. I have family members myself who are sheep and beef farmers out around Ōhura, the back blocks of Taranaki, in that dissected hill country—they’re not great townies. For people like them—and this is going to affect them—it’s a huge ask to come and submit on this sort of bill. Even though this is the most consequential piece of legislation in this term of Parliament for rural communities, I find that shortened report-back period does not give sufficient weight to rural communities.

That is not the only problem with this very shortened report-back period and why we actually do really need the extra time. I want to speak here, too, to some of the experts that we would hope would give us some feedback on this particular piece of legislation. By the way, I’m talking about people who are absolutely expert in the workings of the emissions trading scheme. Now, as I noted in my speech on the bill in the first reading, the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t—and I couldn’t find it anywhere in this—have any analysis of the impact on the emissions trading scheme. The emissions trading scheme is horrendously complicated in terms of understanding the economic impacts of what’s going on there. It sounds like a simple scheme until, as I’ve had to do of late, one starts trying to really get to grips with it to understand the complexity of it. The subtleties of it take a great deal of understanding. Frankly, I rely on some of the experts to point out where some of the issues are and so on.

Now, we want experts to come and speak to us about this piece of legislation, to tell us what the impact is. Dr Christina Hood would be a great person to come and talk to us. I’d like to hear from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment on this piece of legislation. Given his enormous report on forestry, that I’ve already referred to, it would be useful to know whether the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment can add anything to the analysis. I would hope that the Climate Change Commission would do so. Here’s the problem: we’ll be asking experts for their well-considered and expert opinion on this piece of legislation, and yet it has come to this House very abruptly and without time for them to even track down the regulatory impact statement. When I was corresponding with Dr Christina Hood earlier today, she said she had been unable to find the regulatory impact statement anywhere, and I took quite an effort to find it. Even on the day that the bill was first being debated, it was hard to find the analysis. We need to give those experts time, actually, to consider the legislation—to work their way through the regulatory impact statement, which is a pretty dense piece of writing there—and to actually come to a considered opinion. That all takes time. We absolutely want that kind of time available to the select committee.

There was that sort of thing. I do want to read exactly something that my colleague Dr Webb said, and it’s on the regulatory impact statement, and I’ll direct members of the Government to pick up a copy from the Table. It’s on page 17, right down the bottom, under “Public consultation”, and it says, “Ministers have chosen to proceed with legislative change without substantive prior public consultation.” Now, I heard members of the Government, in response to my colleague Dr Webb, saying repeatedly that, in fact, there had been consultation, they’d talked about it for years, and they had run on it in an election campaign, and so on. That is, nevertheless, not the formal consultation that a Government is expected to undertake. Consultation has not been undertaken. In particular, if the select committee process is in some way to mitigate that lack of consultation, then we do need to have a much longer period of time available to the select committee.

We hope that the Environment Committee will be able to meet on Thursday and to make a call for submissions, but in the meantime, the chair of that committee is going to need to consult with the leads from other parties as to even the appropriate length of time to open submissions for and how the process is going to be managed. I think this whole process needs more time. To this end, I will absolutely be supporting my colleague Dr Webb’s proposed amendment, where he suggests that instead of this quite frantic seven-week process, at least we go to a four-month process. I just invite the Minister to reflect on the fact that had he opted for an at least plausible four-month process, then we wouldn’t have needed to have been having this debate right now. I urge the House to consider a much longer select committee process, even if it’s not the full six-month process.

Members, the time has come. The House is suspended until 9 a.m. tomorrow.

Sitting suspended from 9.56 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Wednesday)