Sage EugenieEUGENIE SAGE (Green): E Te Tiamana o Te Whare tēnā koe tuarua ki ngā mema o tō tātou Whare tēnā koutou katoa.[Thank you Mr Chairman and secondly acknowledgments to you all members of our House.]The Green Party is pleased to be supporting the Wildlife (Powers) Amendment Bill. We want to see the Department of Conservation staff and Fish and Game officers better able to stop the smuggling of distinctive wildlife such as our native geckos because we know that they are being illegally smuggled out of New Zealand and that there is a very real problem.Department of Conservation staff told the Local Government and Environment Committee that very few green geckos have been legally exported from New Zealand but the supposedly captive-bred population in Europe is actually much larger than the breeding capability of those legally exported geckos so they are obviously being smuggled out of New Zealand without being apprehended. Very low levels of take can significantly impact on species like the green gecko the forest gecko and others because some of these species do not breed until they are 8 years old and then they have got a maximum of only two offspring each year. Those offspring are very vulnerable to predators like cats. Gecko populations are very slow to recover from losses from smuggling.We certainly want to close the loopholes in the Wildlife Act which have made it more difficult for Department of Conservation staff to take action against smugglers and to investigate offences. The 1953 Act is more than 60 years old and those enforcement powers have not been updated during that time. But if Parliament is amending the Wildlife Act—and this is the second time we have considered changes around the offence provisions; the last time of course was with a member's bill by Jacqui Dean which increased the penalties—then it is time to actually look at a much larger modernisation of the 60-year-old Act. I think it reflects the Government's lack of ambition that we have not had that much wider modernisation. There has not been an effort through this bill to actually provide the same protection for our native fish species as we do for our indigenous birds through the Act.It is this Wildlife Act that provides protection for our native birds from being kept in captivity. You cannot kill any native bird except the pūkeko the sooty shearwater or tītī or the paradise shelduck because of provisions in the Wildlife Act yet there is no protection in the Wildlife Act for any of our native freshwater fish species. That is despite the hugely precarious position of a lot of those native fish. Seventy-four percent of our native fish species are facing extinction; that is a much higher proportion than in virtually any other country in the world. Thirty-one of our 66 freshwater fish species are found only in Aotearoa New Zealand so if they go extinct here they go extinct on the whole planet yet the schedules to the Wildlife Act do not include any protection for native fish.We protect lizards we protect our native bats we protect Powelliphanta snail and a few other species of snail—we protect them from being killed from being hunted from being traded and from being held captive without proper authorisation. The freshwater fish regulations provide legal protection for introduced species such as trout and the chinook salmon but they do not provide any protection for native fish species. So Minister Barry we would be very interested as to whether you would take a call on making sure that the Wildlife Act is amended to actually provide protection for some our most vulnerable native species our freshwater fish.There has been a major increase in the risk of extinction for those native fish species. Back in 1990 the Department of Conservation recorded only 10 of our 66 native species—and 10 was too many—as being threatened with extinction. By 2002 that number had increased to 16 and as of 2013 74 percent of our native fish species are threatened or at risk of extinction. That includes four of the five species that New Zealanders eat as whitebait patties.I do not think that a lot of people are aware of the fact that the kōaro the shortjaw kōkopu the giant kōkopu and the īnanga are all at risk of extinction yet it is their young that are fished and killed as whitebait and that end up in whitebait patties. I think we need a serious national conversation about the fate of whitebait and whether we should be having a moratorium on whitebait fishing to give a better chance for species like the kōaro and the giant kōkopu to survive. I have been out at night on the West Coast looking at just a small creek through an area that had been disturbed and there were giant kōkopu there. They were amazing. The fish we saw was as big as my hand and yet it is the young of these species that are being killed as whitebait. We should not have a double standard in the Wildlife Act where our native birds are recognised as taonga—where they are protected from being hunted and killed—and yet our native freshwater fish enjoy no similar protection and can be hunted and killed despite the fact that many of them are staring extinction in the face.I would be very grateful if the Minister in the chair Maggie Barry could comment on whether she and her department in the remaining time available to this Government propose to bring a much more comprehensive change to the Wildlife Act to actually provide protection for native fish species. It is ridiculous that these fish can be caught and then commercially sold without any regulation. You cannot commercially sell trout for very good reason yet you can commercially sell whitebait—why? Why has the Government failed to act to close this glaring loophole when these species are so vulnerable and when they are threatened with extinction? We need to improve their prospects. We can do that by amending the Wildlife Act to actually give them protection by having the Department of Conservation establish some freshwater fish reserves and by looking very closely at more of the irrigation schemes and the intensive agriculture that are actually destroying their habitat as is happening with Ruataniwha.The bill is a good one in providing stronger enforcement powers allowing Department of Conservation staff to actually investigate these offences in a better way. We in the Green Party will be supporting the Hon David Parker's Supplementary Order Paper 243 because fish and game officers—the honorary officers—go through exactly the same training as the warranted officers. Fish and Game has got statutory powers so it is not just a non-government organisation in the same way that Forest and Bird is. It has a lot officers around the country who are doing work to implement the Act and they do need the power to actually ask people for their date of birth in order to ensure that any prosecutions that are taken can actually stick. I encourage the Minister to comment on why the Government is failing to support this sensible amendment to the bill and to comment on whether there is likely to be a much more significant change proposed for the Wildlife Act to actually provide much-needed protection for our native fish species which are staring extinction in the face. Thank you.