Franks Stephen: Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Franks Stephen: Resource Management Amendment Bill (No 2) — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:608;Page:5540] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT NZ) 
: 
 I believe that the review I have just been giving this bill is the sort of review that the select committee stage was intended to cover. When the members of the Local Government and Environment Committee have been through the provisions in detail over a really long period they are of course very familiar with them. But someone coming cold or relatively cold to a bill—like a member of Parliament who is now expected to vote—looks at the words that have become familiar to those who spent so long with them and looks at them with the eye that is a little closer to the eye of the person who is going to be subject to it—namely the ordinary citizen. 
What struck my eye in a quick flick through was the amendment to section 31 in clause 10. There it is in paragraph (b)(iii) in subcause (1): “the maintenance of indigenous biological diversity:”. The method that subsection (2)(1) suggests in subclause (2) is to “include the control of subdivision.” 
It struck me that most of New Zealand’s coastal environment at the moment is probably in the position that a friend of mine had his farm in about 14 or 15 years ago. I helped my friend at one stage to collect the seeds of karakas. He knows a lot about trees. He has planted and fenced-off many hectares of land on one of his farms around dams. He has built dams to regenerate wetlands. He is very interested in the state of the natural environment and in what I imagine is meant by indigenous biological diversity—in other words probably patches of bush and patches of native vegetation. We made a special trip around the south coast—Palliser Head—to collect karaka seeds from a variety of karakas and other plants that we found in those groves. He told me to put them in the fridge. They need to go through a winter. They have to be chilled for 6 weeks in order to get a good strike. He was going to strike a whole lot of these karakas to plant on his coastal property. 
About 4 or 5 years later I went to his place and I asked him where the karaka grove was. He had reached the common-sense decision that he would have to have rocks in his head to carry on with his plan. In fact where the karakas were supposed to be there was a plantation of eucalypts. The reason was very simple. He had realised that if he planted what he wanted to plant there he would never be allowed to use his land. He wanted to regenerate native bush he wanted to attract pigeons and he wanted to plant the land so that it recreated what might have been there 150 years ago but if he did that he would be ruining all economic prospects for that land. In fact he would be setting it up to be confiscated by the consent authority. 
So what he did was plant eucalypts. It was the only rational thing to do with that land or to leave it in what it had been planted which was probably a monoculture of rye grass replanted every 5 or 6 years and grazed. He did this because he did want the area to be attractive. He does not regard New Zealand’s landscape without trees as the kind of landscape he wants to spend time in. He planted a variety of different eucalypts. The only reason he chose eucalypts was that they were not indigenous. It was the only way he could see to protect him land from confiscation. 
Fellow members of Parliament when we pass legislation like this knowing that it is a rational response knowing that the only sensible thing for people with any kind of alertness to their own interests is that they will have a bias against natural heritage that they will regard it as stupid to buy land that has regenerating scrub and not knock it off that they will want fires on their property that they will want to graze it heavily so that they do not get anything unusual regenerating and that if they find a rare species they will put a bulldozer through it we deserve all the odium we get.