SpeechSARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): Thank you Madam Chair. It is a pleasure to lead off this side of the Chamber with respect to the 2019/2020 Estimates for Vote Conservation and a pleasure to follow on from our new chairperson Dr Duncan Webb. I'm pleased that he started with conservation. As the spokesperson for conservation on this side of the Chamber I certainly want to focus my contribution on that vote. I will start off being gracious. I think that the Minister does need to be congratulated for securing an extra $100 million for annual permanent and multi-year funding in this vote. I would say however that it is on the back of the Hon Maggie Barry from this side of the Chamber who secured an extra $76 million in her time as the Minister of Conservation as part of a wider tourism infrastructure fund for the Department of Conservation (DOC). That was part of a wider fund of $178 million. This is despite obviously coming through a global financial crisis and the Christchurch earthquake.So DOC has experienced increases in the vote and I am pleased that this has been an extra increase again to secure projects such as Battle for our Birds. It is needed and it is great to see that DOC is well resourced. However therein lies the problem and Mr Duncan Webb started to touch on it in that the Minister of Conservation is certainly not prepared to start committing to targets. That is a problem with that side of the House. They're prepared to throw money at certain matters or issues but are not prepared to put their money where their mouth is and actually have some tangible targets which need to be achieved as part of that revenue spend. Of course it is New Zealanders' money that is going into these initiatives and it is New Zealanders that the Government needs to be accountable to.So what we have seen is this increase in spending but very little results. Mr Duncan Webb talked about some of the 1080 drops that are planned quite extensive 1080 drops planned for around the country on the conservation estate but yet no tangible targets for increases in native species. That brings us to for example the Kākāpō Recovery Programme where we saw that our kākāpō numbers were actually decreasing because of the risk of fungal disease and yet the Department of Conservation was going out to the public for public funding despite there being quite a kitty in Vote Conservation. Now it's all very well to say that New Zealanders or overseas people would like to get in behind these projects but quite frankly when you have this sort of funding it needs to be prioritised appropriately and perhaps that public funding could go elsewhere. So the Minister really does need to get behind these species recovery programmes put her money where her mouth is and start committing to some tangible targets moving forward.I think the other thing that we've seen is that there's a lot of promise with this Government as to things that are going to happen—or should I say promise from the Green Party and the Minister in the past but yet is now finding it very difficult now that she is part of a minor party in a three-headed monster of a coalition and finding it very hard to get some wins across the line. Some of the things that I talked about and questioned the Minister on was cameras on commercial fishing vessels to start monitoring bycatch and of course there has been some cameras put on commercial fishing vessels but it's less than 5 percent of the fleet—so not an achievement at all and that was certainly criticised by lobby groups such as Greenpeace.The other thing that is concerning about this Government and this Minister is she certainly has a disregard for involving community in conservation and we've seen that in a number of different initiatives that she has led where Minister knows best—I'm going to lock up the land and set it aside and not involve the community in certain initiatives."—such as the tahr culls such as we've seen with the whitebaiting bill go through. So she's not prepared to listen. She runs pseudo-consultation processes but has little regard for what people are saying on the ground.For us we are a very polar opposed party. We support recreation; we support conservation initiatives with community involved."