Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki-King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker. Look congratulations to the member Eugenie Sage for having the member's bill drawn. National will not be supporting this member's bill. Part of the reason is we have just had several cyclones in this country we need in areas to rebuild bridges we need to rebuild roads we are trying to get renewable electricity and we need to build structures for that—and at the moment we are still bringing Indonesian coal into the country to generate our electricity.When we look at the conservation estate we all want to preserve our natural habitat as much as possible; we all want to make sure we get as close to predator-free as we possibly can; we all want to use our land wisely. I want to mention at this point in time our colleague Maureen Pugh who would love to have been here speaking on this bill tonight. She's from the West Coast of the South Island and 81 percent of the West Coast of the South Island holds one-third of the country's total landmass in the conservation estate and 81 percent on the West Coast. So it's huge.But I think the thing that we need to remind people of is that the Department of Conservation holds a lot of this land; the Department of Conservation holds a lot of stewardship land. So when people think about it as national parks it's very important to all of us that we preserve our national parks but the stewardship land is in very varying value.The member before Angela Roberts just mentioned that it's taking a long time to reclassify it. It's taking far too long to reclassify it. We suggest that there could be some that could be quickly classified into something else because we don't see the value of all of it as it's not all national park to be sure. Mining only takes place on 0.04 percent of the conservation estate. Maureen Pugh would describe that as an A4 page on a rugby field. That's probably a much easier way of describing it because it's a very small area for a lot. What I will say is that historically there has been damage done with mining but the mining companies that I talk to—and others in our party talk to these days—are actually building back better. They're actually replacing some of the biodiversity that's been lost as part of the process.As part of rebuilding our country after the cyclones we're going to have an and/and; it's not an either/or. If we went totally down the conservation path and didn't think about what we need in terms of resources to rebuild and run our country we would have no money to do conservation. A lot of the philanthropy and money that goes into rebuilding our conservation estate actually comes from the people who take their resources from the land.I really would love somebody in this room to tell me—I always say: if you can't graze it on the land grow it within the land or extract it from underneath the land what is it? There is nothing that we build nothing in this House nothing that I see anywhere. The only exception to that is probably a fish—and we haven't seen any of those in the House for a little while but it has been known.So look miners have to apply for access to conservation land. There is no open access. It's a rigorous process. There is no mining in national parks but it is a matter of balancing the economic opportunities with our environmental responsibilities.The National Party cares deeply about the environment but would take a different approach towards mining on conservation land. There's land of variable quality and in some cases it makes sense; in some cases we have to mine for these things. I mean there is no way—we've got our energy spokesperson here Stuart Smith—that we are going to build any new renewable electricity in this country without digging something out of the ground to do that. So many mining projects are there; they're already acting in good faith with high-quality restoration occurring afterwards. We do not support this bill.