The Forest Owners Association believes the government appears to have got the balance right in creating a separate Forestry New Zealand, but keeping it as part of the Ministry for Primary Industries. Forest Owners Association President Peter Clark says the need to have a large response capacity to counter a pest or disease incursion, is by itself a good justification for keeping forestry under the government’s wider primary industry umbrella. “In just the past couple of years there’s been two types of eucalypt beetle, as well as myrtle rust, turning up from Australia. None of them appear at this stage to be a disaster for the plantation forest industry, but one day we’ll get a really bad pest or disease which turns up here that needs the whole resource of government to eliminate or control it. That resource is MPI.”