Sage Eugenie: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sage Eugenie: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 01 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:1817. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
EUGENIE SAGE (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Chair. Last month the Department of Conservation celebrated its 25th anniversary and that is a small miracle given this Government’s penchant for expensive chopping and changing of Government agencies. The department’s establishment in 1987 brought together for the first time all of the “green dots” in the former Wildlife Service Department of Lands and Survey and the New Zealand Forest Service into one organisation with a clear mandate to protect and preserve our wild landscapes our native plants and our wildlife. That was significant internationally. 
Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. 
EUGENIE SAGE 
: I record my and the Green Party’s appreciation of the commitment energy and skill of Department of Conservation staff around the country over the last 25 years who have worked and are working with the community and with the public to protect and preserve our natural areas and historic places. But when we should be celebrating the department’s achievements including the establishment of four new national parks we are seeing instead retrenchment and restructuring in the face of the Government’s funding cuts a failure by the department to focus on the breadth of its statutory purpose and the welcome mat being put out for destructive commercial enterprises such as Bathurst Resources’ major proposed coal mine at Denniston and large-scale tourism developments such as the mad monorail proposal in the southwest world heritage area. 
The Government is miserly when it comes to conservation. It slashed conservation funding by $54 million over 4 years with more cuts to come. The organisational review which the department initiated during the 2010-11 financial year in response to these funding cuts has resulted in at least 96 fulltime-equivalent jobs going with more likely in the current phase of restructuring. Such organisational reviews create morale-sapping uncertainty. They create churn and destabilisation amongst the department’s major asset its staff. They cause a loss of productivity and performance as staff focus on whether they will have a job or not and the redundancies mean a loss of institutional knowledge a loss of expertise and a loss of capacity. It also means that large sums are being spent on organisational reviews and consultants’ reports rather than on real conservation.  
These restructuring costs to date include $1.48 million on the first phase the review of financial services and another $5 million on the review of what departmental managers call “support services”. Support services are in fact the planners the lawyers the technical specialists and the ecologists who are absolutely crucial to the department’s advocacy under the Resource Management Act to protect conservation values outside the conservation estate to protect our rivers against dams and to protect wetlands on private land that are threatened with drainage. It is this advocacy that the department is retreating from—vital work. 
The department is predicting that it will spend another $5 million in the current financial year on the next stage of its restructuring proposals and that will target the kahikatea face of conservation—the field centres and area offices—and further job cuts there are likely. That is $11.5 million over 2 financial years on the costs of restructuring that is not being spent on real conservation work and that is nearly 3.6 percent of the department’s budget. 
There are around 3000 threatened species in New Zealand and many continue to decline because of the impact of introduced predators. The department is on the cutting edge of pest control with its expertise for control on large islands like Campbell and its success in rat eradication there being sought after internationally. Yet with the reduced funding the department is able to actively manage only 10 percent of our threatened species. About 216 species have active threat-management plans in place and the department is only able to sustain possum control over 13 percent of the conservation estate. Information that the Department of Conservation provided to the Local Government and Environment Committee showed that the amount spent on possum control in the 2010-11 year had declined by $1 million compared with 2009-10 and the area under control had declined by 38000 hectares. That is serious because of the impact that possums have both on the health of the forest and on species—a lot of our bird species—by their predation on eggs. So while the planners the lawyers the botanists and the ecologists are being cut through restructuring we have the establishment of a new commercial business unit. And what is its focus? On delivering and extracting value from business and visitors. Thank you.