Wagner Nicky: Conservation (Natural Heritage Protection) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWagner Nicky: Conservation (Natural Heritage Protection) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 25 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13731. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]NICKY WAGNER (National—Christchurch Central): I too am very happy to support this Conservation (Natural Heritage Protection) Bill brought to the House by my colleague Jacqui Dean. It is a very timely bill. As the Hon Ruth Dyson said everyone on the Local Government and Environment Committee worked hard to make sure that we got a good outcome and it was fully supported. As has already been stated the purpose of the bill is to update penalties across conservation legislation in order to better protect conservation land and protect native species. The bill increases the penalties for offences across six pieces of legislation administered by the Department of Conservation.It was the smuggling of jewelled geckos from the Waitaki Basin that raised the issue for Jacqui Dean. Smugglers were very active in her electorate and the penalties for stealing these very beautiful and very valuable geckos—they are worth up to $25000 each on the international market—were laughably low. We know that the smugglers were very active in her electorate because we managed to catch some of them at customs. We had one smuggler who had nearly a dozen geckos secreted around his person. We also know that there were many smugglers who were spending time in Jacqui’s electorate and getting away with smuggling. Jewelled geckos have unique markings on their bodies and we knew where some of them were living. One day they would be in the Waitaki Basin; the next day you would see their pictures on the internet. They were being marketed to collectors in Europe. We did catch some of those smugglers but when we caught them the penalties were nothing to write home about. In fact they did not punish and they did not deter.There has been other serious conservation offending in recent years. We have all been disturbed by the killing of marine mammals. We do not like the illegal hunting of protected species and illegal commercially motivated activities including the smuggling of animals and plants the draining of wetlands and the logging of native trees.It is very important to have significant penalties for illegal commercially motivated activities because they can be highly lucrative. These new penalties respond in part to the comment by judges when sentencing those very gecko smugglers that the current penalties were not sufficient to punish or deter offenders. These penalties will not affect legitimate operators such as tourism concessionaires if they play fair. Increased penalties are also proposed for non-commercial offences and for breaches of by-laws and regulations across all six Acts.I too would like to thank the officials. They did a lot of work on this bill. They did it with assiduous care. They worked very hard with us and I think we are all very pleased to see this legislation coming out at the other end. We were unanimous in our support around the table. We all believe that there should be stronger penalties for conservation offending. We want to protect our natural heritage. Thank you Jacqui Dean.