Sage Eugenie: Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Crown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 April 2013. Volume:689;Page:9304. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Thank you. I would like to pay particular tribute to the speech by Damien O’Connor who comes from the West Coast which has had two tragedies: Cave Creek and Pike River coalmine. The latter was due to a failure of regulation which this bill theCrown Minerals (Permitting and Crown Land) Bill goes some way to addressing.In terms of the West Coast the Cave Creek commission of inquiry looked into the circumstances around the platform collapse and highlighted that the department had been starved of resources and did not have the number of staff or the resourcing provided through Vote Conservation that it needed to do its job well. That is what we are seeing with this Government and that is why hundreds of people around New Zealand today have turned up at Department of Conservation offices to post their messages of support for the department and the professional ability of departmental staff and the work they do. That is because New Zealanders love and treasure the places that the department is charged with managing.What we have in Part 2 of the bill is a major change so that a decision to reclassify land as a nature reserve or a scientific reserve will not be a decision just for the Minister of Conservation but will be a Cabinet decision. So the whole philosophy of the Government here is that you cannot trust the Department of Conservation to manage conservation land properly and you have to bring Cabinet in. When you bring Cabinet in—with the Minister in the chair Hon Simon Bridges and his responsibilities under this bill to promote mining—we will see conservation lands our public protected lands opened up to much more development.Where will that hit most? In areas like Coromandel and in areas like the West Coast where there are already some hundreds of alluvial goldmining licences. There is already a large-scale open-cast goldmine OceanaGold in the forests behind Reefton and it makes a huge hole in the Victoria Conservation Park and the wildlife corridor that connects the central Southern Alps with Paparoa.It is those sorts of big developments which destroy forests and pollute streams that this Government wants to encourage on conservation land. That is why it is depriving the department of staff and resources. The cuts last year saw the loss of a lot of the planning and technical staff who would make submissions under the Resource Management Act on applications to mine but who no longer do because that brings them into conflict with the mining companies and the cuts deprive the department of the staff who are responsible for overseeing applications that are granted to mine on conservation land. If you strip out that you are stripping out the ability to supervise mining operations and you are stripping out the field staff who are doing the work of predator control and actively protecting our plants and wildlife.Although the Minister of Conservation said today that he is confident that the department will continue to do its work his comments have been seen as insulting by the families of those who are losing their jobs in the staff cuts. We have had an openletter to the Minister inWilderness magazine which showed that there are front-line staff positions that are being cut. It is not back-room people. It is not the bureaucrats the paper shufflers whom the Minister refers to; it is people who are doing vital conservation work. They are doing work around threatened species. They are also doing work in supervising mining. If you strip out that you strip out the ability for the department to properly manage our public protected lands.This bill highlights how hostile the Government is both to conservation legally and in terms of its budget decisions to the department’s work on the ground because it is taking out the staff who have got the professional capability to do that work. So this bill is about not trusting the department. It is about the resource use Ministers—the Minister of Energy and Resources the Minister for Economic Development and the Minister of Science and Innovation—wanting to get their hands on conservation lands to promote more commercial exploitation focusing very much on the short term not the management of these lands to protect their conservation values now and for the future.So it is very short-term thinking and it is showing a complete lack of understanding of how the department operates of how much work is actually done in the field and that you cannot replace that professional work with volunteers. Nor can your replace it by commercial sponsorships because of the variability in those. This bill shows that the Government does not trust the Department of Conservation.