Mathers MojoMOJO MATHERS (Green): Of course the Green Party is proud to be supporting this bill. We commend the Hon Ruth Dyson for bringing it to the House. We support this bill because we value our greatest heritage sites.Now as that previous speaker Megan Woods has pointed out these sites have been areas that are so outstanding that they have been granted World Heritage status—World Heritage status—and the bar for that is set very high—very high indeed. To be included on the World Heritage list sites must be of outstanding universal value and meet one of 10 very stringent criteria ranging from being a masterpiece of human creative genius through to areas that contain threatened species of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science or conservation. So let us make this quite clear. We are talking about the highest possible value not just in New Zealand but in the world to be included and granted World Heritage site status.And what are we going to do? We are going to open them up to mining? I am not talking about little greenstone harvesting and stuff like that; we can easily sort that in the bill at select committee. We are talking about wanting to stop and protect these areas from things like open-cast coalmining—the most destructive forms of mining. That is what we absolutely do not want to see in a World Heritage site. So for us the choice is really simple. Do we leave the door open for multinational mining corporations to destroy areas of special significance and deny present and future generations their heritage or do we extend the legal protection over our greatest heritage areas? For us this is absolutely a no-brainer because at the moment these areas our places of outstanding beauty of special significance are coming under pressure from all sources for economic exploitation.This bill we regard as an effort to secure proper and appropriate protection for some of the most precious heritage areas so that they are safe from the most destructive forms of land use. We are talking here about mining. It is timely to be having this conversation because as we have seen recently in the news National seems to be hell-bent one way or another on opening up high-value conservation land to coalmining—high-value conservation land that is home to thousands of New Zealand's iconic species. That has just been absolutely confirmed for me by the speeches that National members have given today in the House.When we consider that there are nearly 3000 species that are threatened in New Zealand and a further 3000 are believed to be endangered but cannot be classified as such because not enough is known about them and all that stands between us and witnessing the mass extinction of New Zealand's precious species is time then habitat destruction is not helping. Mining does not help to protect these species. You cannot say on one hand that we are going to protect threatened species like the kiwi and on the other hand open up kiwi habitat to mining and coalmining. They are not compatible no matter how you spin it. We should not be mining any land of high conservation value or high cultural value—not in our national parks not in our schedule 4 lands and certainly not in an area that is a World Heritage site because it is impossible to put back what has been destroyed. We need to love it we need to protect it. We will support this bill.