Street Maryan: Game Animal Council Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeStreet Maryan: Game Animal Council Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 19 November 2013. Volume:695;Page:14918. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour): I am just going to take the 5 minutes I have because I understand that this is a split call with the Green Party so I have only 5minutes. I want to recap a couple of points I have made during the course of this debate on the Game Animal Council Bill. First of all I want to respond to Eric Roy’s contribution earlier in the debate in the Committee stage which I thought was a very good contribution. In fact he gave a much more competent set of answers to the questions I had raised earlier than the Hon Peter Dunne was able to give. One of the things that did puzzle me in Eric Roy’s contribution was his talk about expiry dates and dates that made this a bill of necessity to be brought back to this House at this point in urgency. One of the points that he made was to do with commercial contracts that were going to be renewed in January of next year as I understand it. I listened to that very carefully because I do not know how long those commercial contracts last whether they are a season or a year—Eric Roy: Selling safaris.Hon MARYAN STREET: —oh OK thank you—and whether or not the same condition could have applied last January or the January before. Thank you Mr Roy. For the benefit of those who cannot see him he is confirming that that is not in fact the case. So that still remains a good point. However I do want to go back to one of the points I made that was about the need for urgency. I do think that there is more politics than practicality about the urgency of this bill the Game Animal Council Bill. We began the work in 2008. We would not probably—I do not think; who knows—have arrived at the same solution that this Government has. What we have in this Game Animal Council Bill is the maximum impact that can be applied to this situation. In other words it gets a legislative cover of its own. It gets a bill of its own. That is going to cost money. Setting up the council as an independent statutory body is going to cost money. That did not need to happen.Secondly it is going to exacerbate the tensions that exist between hunting groups and also between those groups and the Department of Conservation. Everybody needs to be working together on this issue and this is not going to help. This seems to me like a typical Nick Smith approach. It is the absolute bull-at-a-gate approach that gets the maximum nuclear option on the table. Thank goodness we do not have nuclear power or nuclear arms in this country. Thank goodness the Minister of Conservation the Hon Nick Smith is not in charge of them. This is a kind of excessive response to the things that were needed. It could have been done by amending the Wild Animal Control Act. The Minister could simply have put an advisory committee into that legislation which would have required a legislative change but not a whole bill of its own and not a Game Animal Council of its own with its own statutory authority and all of the complications and all of the expense that that entails.I think this is an unnecessary response and it is for that reason that the Labour Party is not going to support this bill. It could have been done differently. It could have been done more effectively. It could have been done in a way that enhances the relationships in this sector and that does not exacerbate the tensions. That is an opportunity lost. Thank you.