Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki-King Country): It's a pleasure to take a call tonight in the general debate and it's a pleasure to take it this week because we've just come off the wonderful event of Mystery Creek Fieldays. Being the local member of Parliament for Mystery Creek Fieldays it was a pleasure to welcome many people here from various parties all the way across the House.Being the conservation spokesperson I took the opportunity this year to do some volunteering in the new sustainability hub and it was really fascinating as a volunteer where you had to go around and we had to visit various sites looking at where their rubbish was able to go; where food waste was able to go if there was food waste if it was a site that produced food waste; or if they had coffee machines where the dregs from the coffee machines were going. Other volunteers were looking at who came in what sort of cars and various things were happening—who came by bus where they came from just trying to work out the carbon footprint of Fieldays. So it was a pretty engaging experience and one that I enjoyed. We had the summer Fieldays that rained every day and the winter Fieldays that was pretty fine most days except for Saturday so it was beautiful on the first three days.But I wanted to make a point tonight about conservation because without our industries conservation wouldn't exist and nor would most of the things that we have today. So it really is time in our society to leave some of the idealism behind that we've been facing for the last period of time. Because everything that we have that we own that we look at every room we go in—everything in the room that we either eat wear or outside that we drive roads—is either grazed it's grown or it's extracted from beneath our ground. While climate change is extremely important I wonder how many young climate protestors go along to these protests and have no idea that the bubbles for their drinks actually come from the gas plant in Kapuni in Taranaki. When we lost Marsden Point we lost another source of that carbon dioxide. So I think it's worth knowing when our children are in school and they're studying these days—that's when they are in school and there have been a lot of strikes lately and some of them haven't been there a whole lot—that actually they need to understand where their food is made where their drinks are made how our renewable energy is made. All of the things that we have are made from something that comes from within on top of or below the ground.It's great to be working on things like predator-free but we wouldn't have a lot of what we have in predator-free and we wouldn't have a lot of what we have in our conservation projects if we didn't have these industries who are contributing. I spent a day with some of the mining industry on the West Coast of the South Island last week as well just before I went to Fieldays. It's quite amazing actually how they can actually restore the biodiversity. They can actually lift it up now. They can actually mine underneath it put it back down wet it plant extra trees and it grows again. Of course they're not doing that in national parks or where biodiversity is really affected; they're actually picking pieces of land where they're able to do it without too much disturbance and they put it back better than they found it. The conservation estate is 30 percent of our land so it's a large geography. It's either farming a lot of it is put into energy and a lot of it is mining and whether we're in any of those industries we all wear boots and we all have to drive vehicles to get into those distant and far-flung places but all of us are protecting biodiversity. It needs to be celebrated because often these industries are pointed at and farmers do jobs for nature every day as do our mining industry and as do our infrastructure industry. A lot more offsetting is done out of generosity than many of us would ever ever recognise. So I think there's a point where we need to look at our industries and we need to say thank you because if we drive all of our good industries out of business and we drive our economy of this country down we will never be able to get to predator-free goals and we will never have the conservation that we deserve in this country. So I want to shout out to all of our productive industries in New Zealand who do so much work for conservation for us all. Thank you.