Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill

CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) Link to this

I move, That the Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. Tēnā koe, Mr Deputy Speaker. He mihi nui ki te Whare Pāremata. I am proud to introduce my very first bill, the Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill, and I would like it to be referred, at the appropriate time, to the Local Government and Environment Committee. The bill has a clear purpose, which is to regulate the import of timber and timber products at our border. Only products that are both legal and certified to be sustainable by a robust certification scheme will be accepted. Deforestation of the planet requires countries to do more than invent voluntary codes and labelling schemes. We must stop wasting time and must set up a regulatory framework before we have lost the rainforests and the other old growth trees of the world for ever.

As we stand on the brink of the Copenhagen talks, we have this opportunity to take a specific action to reduce world climate emissions by saving forests. The carbon storage capacity from these forests, which are often described as the lungs of the world, is vital to the whole of humanity. Daily, forests are being logged and that land is then replanted as palm oil plantations. We are the customers for these unsustainable products from countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, West Papua, Papua New Guinea, and Myanmar, as well from the old growth forests from Tasmania and across Africa. Regulation can help us end a war against the natural world, against the forest peoples, and, ultimately, against ourselves. This could sound like an exaggeration, but it is worth thinking about the 137 different species of plants, animals, and insects becoming extinct every day as a result of forest destruction. This collapse in biodiversity includes our remarkable second cousin, the orang-utan of Borneo and Sarawak. It includes the colourful cassowary of West Papua and all those tiny, unique, unknown species that are lost as a direct result of our refusal to see the bloodstains on the barbecue furniture and decking in our very own backyards.

But primarily I am motivated by the statistic that 60 million forest peoples globally depend on the forest for their survival. The forest is their entire world. It may not literally be genocide to cut down their forest, but it is within a hair’s breadth. I came to understand the extent of this loss when I met a West Papuan woman who is now living in exile in Melbourne. Paula Makabory showed me recent pictures of the citizens of West Papua who had tried to resist illegal logging and who were macheted to death for their courage. As their kwila forests are devastated and sold into our retail outlets, the people in the way, who are standing up to the Indonesian military and the corporate forestry companies, are literally risking death. In that country, which is not far away, no foreign journalists are allowed, there is no International Movement of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, and people can be jailed for 15 years for raising the Morning Star, which is the West Papuan flag. Illegal logging is steeped in blood and in phoney certification paper trails, and we need to cut the link that fills the pockets of the people who are controlling the trade.

One other exceptionally good reason for stopping this devastation is to help our own forestry industry, which is undermined to the tune of $270 million per year by the effects of illegal and unsustainable logging. While cheap and nasty timber is widely available and can cross all borders, our own bona fide products are undermined and can be seen as being expensive by comparison. There is a 2008 Cabinet paper based on research undertaken in 2007 to assess the economic impacts of illegal logging on our forestry producers. The total revenue by 2020 to the New Zealand forestry sector could be around US$178 million per year if cheap, illegally logged wood products were removed from international markets.

Not surprisingly, this bill has the strong support of forestry organisations, environmental groups, and the tropical timber importers group. Those groups have a legitimate self-interest in ending this trade and in supporting good wood products. They include the New Zealand Forest Owners Association, the Wood Processors Association of New Zealand, the New Zealand Farm Forestry Association, the New Zealand Pine Manufacturers, the Forestry Industry Contractors Association, the Douglas-fir Association, the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, Greenpeace, the Environment and Conservation Organisations of New Zealand, the World Wide Fund for Nature New Zealand, and the Ecologic Foundation.

But why legislate? Why not just educate the consumer, the importer, and the retailer? At this time it is extremely difficult for all these parties to even identify where timber products have come from. Trees logged in West Papua or Borneo may be processed in Viet Nam and marketed from China. How can we be sure, without any border regulation, where these items have been logged? A great deal of dedicated work has gone into educating retailers and consumers, and I particularly commend groups such as the Indonesia Human Rights Committee, the Green Party members, the Auckland Rainforest Action Coalition, and the leadership of the Ecologic Foundation—Guy Salmon—on these issues. I also commend the totally dedicated Wellington rainforest activists who have worked with me on the bill since it was drawn from the ballot. I have also been inspired by the campaign led by Russel Norman nearly 2 years ago that named and shamed the ANZ for investing in companies whose involvement with rainforest destruction is legendary.

But my special thanks must go to a man who was born on the denuded Hauraki Plains and who has given so much of his life to forest protection in the Pacific. Grant Rosoman is a champion of robust forestry certification. Thanks to Grant and to Greenpeace, forestry certification has stayed on the agenda through years of Government inaction and denial. Grant is the first to say that education is not enough. It has lifted the performance of companies such as the Warehouse and the BBQ Factory. It has led them to recognise that robust certification must meet the standards of the internationally rigorous Forest Stewardship Council certification scheme, known as FSC, but that is not enough.

In the new schedule 11 proposed to be added to the Customs and Excise Act by clause 7 of this bill, that scheme and other robust schemes would be listed, so that customs officers can be sure that any product entering the country meets the schemes’ requirements. These requirements are that a product is ecologically, economically, socially, and culturally sustainable, and not something made up in the offices of dodgy corporate raiders. However, if the timber outlets can start taking steps—and I have visited many of them, and many of them I have congratulated on starting, and they have expressed their confusion—we have to ask why the Parliament of New Zealand cannot help them out and save the rainforests.

I acknowledge the support of the Māori Party and Labour on this matter. It is high time that we took action to protect the climate from change, to protect biodiversity, and to protect indigenous people’s rights, as well as to protect our own forestry industry. As somebody with some vague political influence was once heard to say: “Yes, we can.”

I am asking everyone in this House to do the right thing tonight, and to please support this bill. We need it to go to the select committee. We need it to be improved. We are not saying that this bill is perfect in its form; we are saying that we need to support our industry without the competition of the bloodstained trade. It is an opportunity for this House to do something that the consumer already wants. The Prime Minister already knows about it, because more than 700 people, through Greenpeace and through our e-card, have been writing to him and to the Minister of Forestry about this issue. It is high time that people listened to this issue and stopped using excuses, such as world trade. We already have opportunities under the World Trade Organization for acknowledging environmental issues, so it is high time that something was done about this.

I am horrified to see on the World Wide Web that one can still buy kwila that is not certificated and one can still buy mahogany and teak from Myanmar. We know for sure that most of this product is being logged at the point of a gun. We know for sure that what happens after the logging is the planting of palm plantations. We know for sure that we are colluding with this trade if we do not legislate. We cannot wait; we must take action now. I would not have been so motivated about this bill, which I inherited from the Green Party, if I had not met the people of West Papua, whose lives are on the line while we sit here and decide whether we think it is possible that we might be brave enough to make a decision in favour of the climate and the people. It is high time that we took that stand. I ask members to please support this bill and to remember, as Barack Obama said: “Yes, we can.” Thank you.

SHANE ARDERN (National—Taranaki - King Country) Link to this

I rise on behalf of the National Party in opposition to the Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill. It was interesting to listen to the member who has just resumed her seat, Catherine Delahunty, talk about the tragedy—and I agree entirely with her that it is a tragedy—of the clear-felling of indigenous rainforest on the scale that has taken place internationally. I absolutely agree that it is unsustainable, and that it should not be allowed to continue. But to introduce a layer of compliance on our forestry sector, the one sector that can help New Zealand with its greenhouse gas position, is beyond comprehension.

I say to the member who brought this bill to the House that when she uses terms like “the denuded Hauraki Plains”, and in the same speech uses comments like “this is about the environment and the people”, there is something that she is missing out of the equation in this debate. It is that the triple bottom line is just that; it is social, economic, and environmental considerations. If the Hauraki Plains were put back into native forest, the economic production that comes out of that area would be missing from the equation, and that would make New Zealand less sustainable. The export loss we would have from that area would be amazing.

I have to ask the Green Party to be consistent in what it brings forward. I admire the fact that the Green members are champions of environmental debate, and I think that is worthwhile in this Parliament. To farmers the concept that we should leave our land in better condition than we found it in is absolutely ingrained in us. I find it offensive that those who do not plant trees, do not invest their capital, and do not have an active role to play in environmental enhancement or sustainability, and who have an urban lifestyle and enjoy all the trappings of urbanisation, travel the world to conferences, expending huge amounts of fossil fuels in doing so. Then, when they come back to New Zealand, they say to the foresters of New Zealand that they want them to meet a whole layer of compliance, because they want to save the rainforests on the other side of the world. That is not the approach we should take.

I say to Ms Delahunty and the Green Party that we have international agreements through the World Trade Organization (WTO). We do not use them as excuses; we negotiate each agreement. I was recently at a conference in Africa. If members want to see a place that is denuded and that could benefit enormously from some of the agricultural policies that we employ in New Zealand, they should visit Tanzania. That is what I invite the member to do. I invite her to go and ask the people there what they think of the notion that further compliance should be placed on them to develop things like a forestry industry or an agricultural industry, and then come back to me to tell me how that works. We negotiate within the WTO; that is not an excuse. I invite members to listen to the discussion at those conferences on issues of global climate change and economic change, and on some of the tragedy of experiments that have been carried out there, both by the West and by African Governments themselves. If they then come back and say the WTO process is not the process that we should be signed up to, then I am sorry, but we will have to agree to disagree. We should look at the tariffs that those countries pay to get their exports into wealthy Western nations. New Zealand is by and large successful—well above its weight—in its ability to export into some of those nations, because we have always continued to carry the argument in support of free trade around the world, sometimes at huge cost to ourselves. That is the best thing we can do for small, undeveloped, Third World countries and large continents like the African continent.

We oppose this bill on that basis, and I look forward to further debate as we move through this process.

Hon MITA RIRINUI (Labour) Link to this

Let me start by congratulating the Green member Catherine Delahunty on bringing the Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill and its associated issues of illegal logging and associated trade to the attention of this House. The Labour Opposition will support the first reading of this bill. We are adamant that an issue like this should be discussed widely by a select committee, and to that end we will be supporting it.

I am not surprised at National’s position on this bill, but I am stunned—flabbergasted, actually—at the comments from the member who has just resumed his seat, Shane Ardern. He presented some bizarre examples to the House in terms of Catherine Delahunty’s reference to internal matters. He referred to the Hauraki Plains and said that, had there not been any development in that area, it would have had an economic impact on that area. The bill that Catherine Delahunty introduced will not turn back the clock. If it could, we might as well say that if it had not been for a meteor coming out of space and hitting the Earth, we would still be talking to Jurassic creatures or dinosaurs. It is a bizarre example of what this bill is intended to do.

I understand that the purpose of this bill is to make amendments to the Customs and Excise Act 1996 to prohibit the import into New Zealand of timber and wood products produced illegally and unsustainably. This is consistent with the position taken by the previous Labour-led Government in 2006, 2007, and 2008. That position is still held by the Labour Opposition in 2009.

The key elements of the Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill are outlined in the explanatory note and the clause by clause analysis at the beginning of the bill. In particular, two key clauses set out how the legislation would ensure that all wood products imported into New Zealand are sourced from sustainably managed forests. Clause 5 inserts two new sections into the Act. New section 54A makes it unlawful to import into New Zealand timber and wood products not certified under a new schedule 11. That is a very important matter for this House to consider, and I hope that the select committee considers it very seriously.

New section 54B provides that the Minister may add or omit certification schemes from the list in schedule 11. It also provides for the matters that the Minister must have regard to when making a recommendation by Order in Council for changes to schedule 11.

This bill will be properly scrutinised by this House and carefully considered by the select committee. Should any Minister in the future decide that changes to schedule 11 are necessary, then that particular Minister will have to undertake a thorough process before any changes can happen.

Of course there are potential benefits in this bill to this country. For example, it will confirm New Zealand’s position in terms of reinforcing the message that New Zealand will not support illegal logging, that New Zealand supports producers and suppliers who are legally and sustainably producing wood products, and the list just goes on. There are some practical difficulties and, if I have time, I will touch on those. But to continue with the potential benefits, the bill provides exporters with the opportunity to have legal conformance labelling on exported wood products. It also provides a less resource-intensive type of regulatory approach, because the point of intervention rests with the supplier. The industry has a stake in ensuring that it all works and that a system of regulation may occur.

The bill also offers flexibility in terms of the implementation of the sustainable timber documentation approach, and it allows changes to the regulations to be gazetted relatively easily. It is a very straightforward process. I do not see any reason why National members would have difficulty with these compliance requirements.

In particular, the bill does not discriminate against the country of origin. Often it is the case that the country of origin is not necessarily aware of illegal logging activities—and many countries deny that they are aware—but under this bill a country will not be discriminated against in any way, shape, or form whatsoever.

The bill also reduces the likelihood that suppliers that are already verifying the legality of wood products will be undermined by other suppliers selling cheaper wood products that cannot be verified as being legally sourced. As members will understand, the Labour Opposition is keen to support this bill’s referral to a select committee.

COLIN KING (National—Kaikōura) Link to this

As the previous speaker for the Government, Shane Ardern, mentioned, we will not be supporting the Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill, for a number of reasons. To start with, I draw to the House’s attention that over the last 150 years we, as a nation, have cleared the majority of our land. We have turned it into what is today primarily pastoral land, which contributes massively to our country’s economy. It would also be worthwhile to mention that in about the year 2000 sustainable indigenous logging was stopped on the West Coast. As a consequence of that action, we saw a perverse effect happen. We had to weather a flood of unsustainable forestry from other countries. There is no doubt that the Green member, Catherine Delahunty, has introduced this bill with a view to controlling that effect. So from that point of view this bill does come to the House with a noble sentiment, but we do not believe that it is workable.

In the present context this legislation would create immeasurable problems for those people who presently import forestry products. If it was to become law, we would find that people would be subject to prosecution. On that basis, the bill is lacking a transitional provision, and that would need to be a serious part of any consideration. The main point that I make is that, from the Government’s point of view, it would be impossible presently to enforce this legislation if it became an Act, because of the way that timber is traded as a commodity. It, effectively, goes from one country to another in a manufactured state. When we consider that this bill covers all wood products, I do not find that it is possible to support this bill, because we would not be able to enforce it.

STUART NASH (Labour) Link to this

I applaud Catherine Delahunty for introducing the Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill. I think it is a great bill. I think it is a principled bill. It has a lot of real-world application.

One of the main reasons I support this bill is the fact that the previous Labour Government did a lot of work around the issue. I will let the House know what the Labour caucus and the Labour Cabinet were doing with regard to this issue before Labour met its untimely election defeat. It will be only another 2 years before we are back; I think everyone knows that. The last Labour Cabinet invited the Minister of Forestry and the Minister of Trade to report to the Cabinet economic development committee by February 2008 on actions to address the sale in New Zealand of illegally sourced wood products. Given the linkages between international and domestic measures to address illegal logging and deforestation, this report back was broader in scope to include the proposed international engagement.

Our international engagement on forestry connects three components emerging in international forestry. If they had been acted on together, the Labour Cabinet believed that had the potential to make a significant difference to the global environment and global wood markets. The components were reducing deforestation and forest degradation, addressing the trade in illegal timber and wood products, and capacity building and technology transfer for sustainable forest management in developing countries. Action on deforestation and capability building may prove to be the key in the long term.

In the absence of action to address illegal logging, global efforts to reduce deforestation and promote sustainable forest management are likely to continue to be undermined. When we are debating in this House an emissions trading bill, I would have thought that every party in this House would support any measure that promoted sustainable forest management and reduced deforestation.

The proposed approach to international engagement on illegal logging is part of the wider forestry strategy. That strategy includes engagement on and leadership in the development of international financial mechanisms for reducing deforestation in developing countries; active support and advocacy for regional and multinational solutions to address the trade in illegal wood products; ministerial-level bilateral engagement with key producer and consumer countries and, in particular, Australia; commissioning research to assess what further steps can be taken at a global level or by countries over and above current efforts to effectively address international trade in illegal wood; supporting efforts to have kwila listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora; and participating, where appropriate, in key multilateral fora addressing issues directly related to international logging and engagement with the wider New Zealand forestry sector—this includes the industry, non-governmental organisations, and Māori—to elicit their support and involvement, both domestically and internationally, in progressing this strategy.

As members of this House will ascertain, the Labour Cabinet was a long way down the road to addressing this issue, and that is why I applaud Catherine Delahunty for this bill. It is a very good bill, and it should be supported for a whole raft of reasons. For New Zealand, a single species, kwila, is estimated to represent up to 80 percent of the illegally sourced wood products sold in New Zealand. Officials therefore evaluated a range of options to address the sale of illegally sourced kwila wood imported into this country. The Minister of Forestry sought Cabinet’s guidance on which domestic action or combination of actions it considered New Zealand should initiate to address the sale of illegally sourced kwila products. This action would be a consumer awareness campaign, focusing on illegally logged kwila and the development of a voluntary pan-industry practice to encourage the verification of legally sourced kwila imports; and/or the mandatory labelling of all kwila products sold in New Zealand at point of sale, requiring disclosure of wood species and whether the supplier has verification of the legality of the wood; and/or immediate ministerial-level bilateral engagement with key countries to develop bilateral mechanisms to prevent illegally logged kwila imports from entering New Zealand.

This is a very good bill. It is a principled bill. It is a practical bill. As I said, because of the emissions trading scheme and the global awareness around these sorts of issues, everyone in the House should be supporting this bill. Labour definitely supports it. I support it as a past forester, and I think the National Government should support it. My personal belief is that it would be foolish not to. I congratulate Catherine Delahunty and I thank her for a fine bill. Thank you.

TE URUROA FLAVELL (Māori Party—Waiariki) Link to this

Kia ora tātou katoa. Kia ora koe, Mr Deputy Speaker. The Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill, as other speakers have mentioned, amends the Customs and Excise Act 1996 to prohibit the importation of illegally and unsustainably produced timber and wood products into Aotearoa. The sponsor of this bill, Catherine Delahunty, talked about doing the right thing tonight. When we think about the right thing, the Māori Party knows that what is right is to keep our natural resources and environment healthy, safe, and intact for everyone and for future generations.

Forestry, of course, is extremely important to Māori. Some estimates put total Māori forest interests at more than 1.2 million hectares. We have a unique interest in forestry within the distinct context of collective ownership and management. But we know also that the economic benefits of international trade agreements need to be balanced with the considerations of local, regional, and national progress and environmental enhancement. In thinking of the other values that might be useful in this debate tonight, I think of the concept of our forest and the significance of it to our identity. We have many names in Māoridom that symbolise the importance of the forest to our identity, ngāherehere, nehenehe, ngahengahe, waonui, and waoku. We treasure the forest for the scope of its beauties, its spiritual presence, and its bountiful supply of food, medicines, and weaving and building materials.

We have been alarmed at the issue of illegal logging in the context of the value that we, as Māori, place on forestry. We share the views of indigenous peoples around the world that the tropical forests are critical to the survival and well-being of people all round the world. We appreciate that many people depend on the forest for food, shelter, income, medicine, and clean water, so we are greatly concerned at the laundering of illegal timber from some parts of the world’s most endangered forests. The report Sharing the Blame: Global Consumption and China’s Role in Ancient Forest Destruction documents illegally logged timber, particularly from the “Paradise Forests” of the Asia-Pacific region, being shipped to China. When it gets there, it is made into furniture, floorings, and plywood for domestic consumption and for export to satisfy the rising global demand for inexpensive wood products.

This bill makes it illegal to import into Aotearoa timber and wood products that are not from a verified, legal, and certified sustainable source. We in the Māori Party support the move to establish a new schedule that lists verified, legal, and certified sustainable timber and wood production certification schemes. Finally, we are aware that Greenpeace is urging China and the other 187 signatory nations to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity to protect the world’s last ancient forest by establishing a global network of protected forest areas, to ban the trade in illegal and destructively logged wood products, and to introduce a legally binding mechanism under the convention to combat illegal and destructive logging. We welcome that move and, in light of that, we welcome this bill and we support it to go through to the select committee to allow all of that discussion to proceed. Kia ora tātou.

JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Green) Link to this

I am proud to rise to support the Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill and to congratulate my colleague Catherine Delahunty on the huge amount of work she has done on this issue. It is one that has been important to the Green Party for many years. We have put a lot of work into it. We have tried to get previous Governments to take the action set out in this bill. We did get some engagement from the previous Labour Government, but, although there were some discussions and sympathy, in the end it did not take any action, either. That is why this bill is necessary.

Let us be clear about what we are talking about here. New Zealanders, as consumers, are supporting the destruction of old-growth tropical forests, home to a vast richness of huge trees, luxuriant shrubs, the remaining orang-utan, and other mammals and invertebrates not yet even described by science. We have seen the pictures of the slaughter of 50 orang-utans a week in Indonesia. We cannot pretend, as parliamentarians, that we do not know what it is we are supporting. These forests are the lungs of the world, producing our oxygen, storing carbon, holding soil together, and cleaning the air and water that flows through them. They are the home of millions of forest peoples, who depend on them for their food, shelter, medicines, building materials, and, in fact, for their whole sustenance. Those who are not killed in the deforestation end up living in urban slums, where they are unlikely to survive and probably wish they had not. We are supporting their destruction by buying furniture and decking made from that timber that makes that logging economic.

Often we are doing it without knowing. We are buying kwila, ramin, yellow balau, Asian mahogany, and Burmese teak, which used to be the home of countless people and endangered wildlife. We are supporting the destruction of these forests by providing a market for the palm oil grown in place of these forests. We have just persuaded Cadbury’s to stop using it in chocolate, but there are countless other food-related uses, and there is nothing stopping it coming into the country, being made into bio-diesel, and getting a Government subsidy. The Greens have a bill at a select committee to set some standards around that.

We are supporting these forests’ destruction by providing the main world market for palm kernel expeller, the solids left when the oil is extracted, and we are using that to make our dairy industry more and more unsustainable. My colleague Kevin Hague has demonstrated that there are severe biosecurity risks for New Zealand in that practice.

Let us be clear: those who are speaking and voting against this bill tonight propose that we should go on doing all those things. They are voting for accelerated climate change, because 20 percent of that is now coming from the destruction of old-growth forests. They cannot be put back. Once they are gone, they are gone for ever—for eternity.

Let us look at the rather pathetic arguments that have been raised tonight, such as compliance costs for foresters. This bill places absolutely no compliance costs whatever on foresters. It does not require New Zealand foresters to do anything; it simply prevents these products from coming into New Zealand. Of course the Government is concerned that, under the World Trade Organization this might be an interference in free trade. So are we in favour of free trade in blood? Two-thirds of our forestry industry is already certified sustainable; the rest could get there very easily.

I take offence at the suggestion from Shane Ardern that we in the Greens are urban people who have never planted a tree. I have planted thousands of trees, along with the natives I have watered and released and the timber trees I have thinned and pruned. It is an insult to suggest that we do not have practical experience of what we are talking about.

Those members talked of difficulties for importers. I ask how that compares with the people who are losing their lives and their homes. We have beautiful timbers growing sustainably in this country. We stopped logging our own native forests and we have a range of other species that are fit for beautiful furniture and decking, but those who are voting against this bill want to see those New Zealand businesses undercut by imports of tropical timber, because it is always cheaper to get timber that one did not have to plant and where there are no rules about how to treat the local people, or about what happens to the wildlife, the soil, and the water.

SANDRA GOUDIE (National—Coromandel) Link to this

I am delighted to get up and speak on the Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill. I fully endorse all the comments made by my most learned colleague Shane Ardern. Mind you, perhaps the bit about Jeanette and the Greens planting trees might have been a bit off the mark. But he was absolutely right when he said this bill is about trade. Here we have a bill that is just about timber, but it is about timber that is growing in another country. We cannot isolate out the fact that whatever importers bring into this country is part of our trade between nations. We cannot isolate out an item like timber to the degree that this bill does without having some effect on our trade negotiations with other countries. For that reason, I think it is very sound to take the position not to support this bill.

The bill covers both raw and processed products, so we are talking about a huge range of products. This bill talks about trade with another country, and before we start to go down that track we have to talk to that country first. Once we start to do that with regard to timber, another country might say it will do the same to us with regard to another product, and it would start to escalate—

CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) Link to this

I really was fascinated by the responses to my bill, the Customs and Excise (Sustainable Forestry) Amendment Bill, and also by the strange description of me and Jeanette—who have spent most of our adult lives living in rural areas, working on farms, supporting farming, working with forestry, and planting hundreds of trees—as if we have absolutely no idea of how the rural economy functions, nor of the importance of looking after our land. As Sandra knows, having spent 10 years working in a shearing gang and planting many different trees I have a great passion for forests—forests with justice. This is not a light matter. It is not a matter of debating who in this House understands it best; it is a matter of understanding what is going on in the world, and taking this country’s responsibility on illegal logging seriously.

I thank Mita Ririnui, Te Ururoa Flavell, Stuart Nash, and Jeanette Fitzsimons for their constructive comments on what is a very, very serious matter. In my meetings with the current Minister of Forestry, he conceded that voluntary efforts are not working to control illegal and unsustainable wood products. So doing nothing is not an option unless we want to collude with basic and well-documented vandalism. Even the rules of the World Trade Organization acknowledge that there are environmental reasons for regulation in specific instances, so there is no need for National to panic about having no ability to negotiate this. For example, when dolphins are found in tuna nets, or rainforests lie in the path of bulldozers, it is possible, even under that Draconian institution, to negotiate environmental protection.

It just takes some leadership to identify that this is an opportunity to help our own industry. Far from being something that our forestry industry rejects, the industry has written to the Minister. In my previous speech I listed the names of the foresters and the forestry organisations, alongside the environmental ones, that stood up and said to the Minister that it was time to do something. The importers of tropical timber asked the Minister to support my bill; it is not as if the Green Party is in isolation or asking for something outside the agenda of the forestry industry. The forestry industry wants this bill, because it will benefit New Zealand forestry.

The bill, as defined, is not perfect. In order to improve it I urge members to send it to the select committee, where work can be done to make it more practical and workable. In terms of international best practice, a number of countries are working to regulate illegal and unsustainable tropical timber. These include the United States, where the Lacey Act bans the sale of illegal and unsustainable timber within the United States, and the European Union, where a number of countries are working on bilateral agreements with timber-producing nations.

This effort of the Green Party may not appear significant, and I am aware that the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry thinks it could impose compliance costs on our own timber. But Jeannette Fitzsimons asks members to read the fine print of the bill, where they will find nothing that actually disadvantages our own industry—nor does our own industry think that anything in there does. I believe that the bill could be modified at the select committee to negotiate a way through the compliance issues within Aotearoa New Zealand.

As Jeanette also said, our forestry industry is embracing the opportunity for there to be robust certification. Other speakers have mentioned that it is obviously important to be able to demonstrate certification in the world market, and the countries we trade with that make up, lie about, and distort what is going on in their own timber industries should not be colluded with in the name of trade. We stand for fair trade and we stand for trade without blood on its hands. Ultimately all timber products need to meet a robust standard in order to stabilise the climate, protect biodiversity, support our forestry industry, and—most of all—protect the people who still live as one with the forests. Their human rights are on our conscience, and their relationship with the forest holds a line that we should resolutely uphold for the sake of us all. I have been privileged in the last few months to talk to the forest peoples, and they are watching tonight to see whether members of this Parliament have the courage of their convictions; some of us do. Kia ora.