Brooking Rachel; Parker DavidRACHEL BROOKING (Labour): Thank you Mr Chair. And may I take this opportunity to congratulate you for being elevated to that position. I have some small questions on Jobs for Nature; it's something that we hear a lot about in Environment Committee in both annual review and Estimates and the Ministers from the Ministry for the Environment. I was wondering if the Minister could give some examples of where Jobs for Nature is doing what's on the tin where it's working for nature and how this will continue to deliver for New Zealand's environment.Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Thanks for that question. You know when we responded to COVID and things were pretty dire particularly in some of the economies reliant on tourism we decided that part of the stimulus and the support that we would have to keep people in employment would be through Jobs for Nature which was a term we used to cover a range of projects that were divided between the Ministry for the Environment the Department of Conservation (DOC) Land Information New Zealand and the Ministry for Primary Industries. It's been remarkably successful indeed. Recently when Kevin Hague retired from Forest and Bird—a former member of this House—he said that it was the most influential practical on the ground project that he'd seen in his working life essentially. He was very complimentary about it and I do have some stats here as to what's been done.There have been plants planted. There's this sort of riparian planting and the like; there is an estimated 14.7 million that are going to be planted of which 4.3 million have been. Wilding conifer areas controlled—that was a bit easier to get racing earlier because there were already wilding pine control programmes in the country and we just had to ramp them up rather than do something new. There is a projected 2.5 million hectares controlled of which about half have been done—1.25 million. Other pest control across 670000 hectares—330000 has been done. Wallaby control; we've got a problem with wallabies spreading in the South Island particularly—681000 hectares were predicted to be done and we've done 522000 roughly so far. These were as of the end of March; more will have been done since. In other animal pest control—this is primarily DOC work—2.6 million hectares predicted 1.6 million so far done. So far as of the end of March there have been 3.5 million hours worked. There have been 8000 people employed—employment starts" we call it. People currently employed at the end of March was 3315 out of lifetime fulltime-equivalent roles of over 8000 people.The other thing that this has done—it's enabled a lot of communities to come together and agree as communities that they want to continue on with things like catchment management groups which are also being funded. Coordinators are being funded by central government. Groups of farmers and interested locals are getting together and geeing each other along and encouraging each other along so that they can make improvements. So this project is making a big difference but perhaps its greatest influence long term will be bringing communities together to do even better in the future."