Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Chairperson of the Environment Committee): E te Māngai o te Whare tēnā koe. Thank you. Speaking to the annual review of the environment sector 2019/20 which is at pages 284 to 317 volume 1 of the reports of select committees. As chair of the Environment Committee in speaking to the annual review of the environment sector including Te Papa Atawhai the Department of Conservation (DOC); Manatū Mō Te Taiao Ministry for the Environment; Predator Free New Zealand I am really conscious that we are missing the energetic presence of the Hon Kiritapu Allan and wish her well in her fourth week of cancer treatment and in her recovery and hope that we see her back in this House very soon.Can I also acknowledge the other members of the hard-working and thoughtful Environment Committee and the range of searching questions that they asked of agencies and I acknowledge the work of staff in those agencies both in fulfilling their statutory functions and in answering some hundreds of questions.So with the Climate Commission the first annual report of the Climate Commission—because it was only established independently separately in December 2019—it has done a lot of work over the last year to establish itself to build up the infrastructure for an organisation that has quite ranging technical capabilities was one of the things we heard. The data that goes to the Climate Commission and that it considers is quite critical. So the select committee spent some time examining the modelling data that the commission used to base its draft report and we are continuing with that work subsequent to the annual review. We heard of the quite extensive community engagement that the Climate Commission has engaged in partly as a result of COVID and moving its consultation with stakeholders online and some 2000 people have attended the webinars that the commission has held on its draft report and there have been thousands of submissions as a result. So I think the committee was very interested in that quite extensive community engagement.Turning to conservation there's been a substantial increase in the Department of Conservation's budget—5 percent in 2019/20 compared to the previous year and also the department has received $502 million as part of the Jobs for Nature package. So that is something that the committee has looked at in depth and will continue to.In terms of highlights through the last year one of them was the partnership with Ngati Porou and Te Whānau a Apanui in doing massive predator control in the forests of the Raukūmara Range. The committee was also interested in the fact that the department's procurement systems and practices aren't fit for purpose and need upgrading and the department in the last financial year started work on implementing a $62 million five-year corporate services work programme. There's been some improvements in terms of digital strategy improvements in the way capital projects are managed but we recognise the need to continually improve there.A couple of the other highlights in the last year that the department brought to our attention was the release of Te Mana o te Taiao the Aotearoa New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy; the achievement in the Tiakina Ngā Manu project; aerial control of predators over nearly a million hectares to improve the chances for our native plants and wildlife; the work of Zero Invasive Predators in the Whataroa and Perth valleys and getting rid of possums and stoats; DOC's five-year climate adaption plan because of course the department is increasingly affected by intense weather events and they saw that during the year with a weather bomb in Southland which affected more than 78 tracks and led to the temporary closure of the route Burnham-Milford. The committee also heard from the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) and it was in terms of its presentation highlighting the increasing pressures that the authority is under as its functions increase—functions like the work under the COVID-19 Recovery (Fast-track Consenting) Act—and the work that it is doing on chemical mapping across Aotearoa being affected by COVID because its chief scientist redirected his work to COVID. One of EPA's highlights is the Mātauranga Framework that it has developed.Then the Ministry for the Environment its work in implementing the recommendations of the Randerson review. The committee asked questions about whether the ministry has capacity to do that because of the wide scale of the Resource Management Act reform and was reassured by the ministry noting that its staffing had increased and it was confident that it could do that over the two-year time frame. Other highlights were the expansion of the waste disposal levy and a long list in the committee's support on climate change.