Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): E te Māngai o te Whare tēnā koe. Thank you. I'm pleased to speak on the Freedom Camping (Infringement Offences and Other Matters) Amendment Bill and congratulate Maureen Pugh for having the bill pulled and also for the thought that has gone into it. It is a serious bill and it does try to fill some gaps in the 2011 Freedom Camping Act.Back in 2011 around the time of the Rugby World Cup the number of freedom campers was estimated to be in the tens of thousands. Now as others have noted it's more likely—before COVID before the lockdown—to be in the vicinity of 250000. That has brought significant problems and I think one of the issues has been the way in which Aotearoa New Zealand has been advertised. These big motorhomes with blue sky the wide expanse of the Mackenzie Basin—this notion that these big motorhomes are free to pull up anywhere and even the term freedom camping" suggests that. So I prefer to use the words "vehicle camping" because that is what it is. It's either with a motorhome or with those sliders the little vans that the Hon Stuart Nash was talking about.So this vehicle camping has really undermined the social licence that tourism had pre-COVID because of the impacts it was having on communities—particularly areas like Queenstown the Mackenzie Lakes the West Coast—which were overrun by motorhomes using locals' favoured sites to pull up for the night. The whole issue with poor toileting and faeces and not having adequate on-board facilities and also the primary economic issue that in a number of regional centres you have motor camps and low-cost motels—those businesses were losing out because people were choosing just to park up anywhere and not pay for services they could get in a motor camp or a small motel.I had the pleasure last term of working with the Hon Kelvin Davis as Minister of Tourism. From very early in the term he recognised the issues around freedom camping calling together a meeting of mayors to find out what councils were experiencing in those key areas and then establishing the Responsible Camping Working Group which came up with a very useful report back in July 2018 and one of the key recommendations in that report was the need for investment in infrastructure. So over the course of two years there was about $27 million that Government invested in working with councils to ensure that there was appropriate infrastructure for vehicle camping. In Queenstown Lakes which is the second-most popular area after the Tasman District for vehicle camping Mayor Boult had regularly had locals ringing him with issues around vehicle camping. But there with the help of Government funding they set up both in Wānaka and in Queenstown a facility where people can have showers do their washing get free Wi-Fi for an hour and a washstand for washing dishes. That meant that the vehicle campers were able to use these facilities and were less likely to be found trying to wash dishes in local toilets. There was much better engagement with Te Papa Atawhai—the Department of Conservation—because if councils ban vehicle camping from local reserves they tend to go off down the road to our public conservation land. So that funding of around $27 million has been really helpful in providing response on the ground in terms of facilities. Minister Nash has carried on that work with the discussion document that was issued and people have responded to but was interested in the Queenstown Lakes District Council (QDLC). It says that the review that Minister Nash conducted was a missed opportunity that the recommendations are too narrow and that they fail to implement a system-wide approach to change and QLDC is hoping that there's a review of the Freedom Camping Act in its whole and of the self-containment of motor caravans regulations and the Camping-Grounds Regulations 1985.So the Green Party won't be supporting Maureen Pugh's bill because we want to see that comprehensive solution that Minister Nash talked about. But we hope that the Labour Government listens to the concerns raised in submissions—particularly by groups like Queenstown Lakes District Council—and makes it more comprehensive. Kia ora."