Mackey Moana: Game Animal Council Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMackey Moana: Game Animal Council Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 19 November 2013. Volume:695;Page:14862. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOANA MACKEY (Labour): I had been hoping that the Minister with responsibility for the Game Animal Council Bill might be in the chair. Hopefully the Minister of Foreign Affairs Murray McCully is able to answer some questions we have about Supplementary Order Paper 395. I am not sure that that face really inspires confidence that we are going to get an answer to all our questions but we will give it a go—we will give it a go. The Minister of Conservation Nick Smith has introduced Supplementary Order Paper 395 and I really hope that the Minister is going to take a call on it because it does actually appear to quite seriously change everything that we did at the Local Government and Environment Committee.I want to refer specifically to the proposed changes to clause 16 in Part 1 of this bill where we are removing the word “recreational”. So we are going to replace “managed for recreational hunting purposes” with “managed for hunting purposes”. Given that the entire purpose of this bill was meant to be around recreational hunting I am really worried about what that change means and whether that completely undermines everything we did in the select committee.When this bill went through the select committee we were very cognisant of the job that was before us to manage the tensions between the recreational hunting community and the Department of Conservation. That really was our focus. We were recognising the value of the recreational hunting community recognising that there were actually a number of common goals between the Department of Conservation and the recreational hunting community and that there were existing relationships that were already very good. There were some existing relationships that were very very bad but there was enough common ground for us to work on to bring together the recreational hunting community and those purposes where they aligned with the Department of Conservation’s vision and aspirations around pest control and the management of the Department of Conservation estate. So when I see in the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper 395 on Part 1 of this bill that we are removing the word “recreational” from the legislation it is deeply concerning.I hope that the Minister in the chair even if this is an issue that he has to come up to speed with very quickly is able to get some advice from officials. It is not looking good is it? It is not looking good. Given that this could potentially completely change the entire purpose of the bill—and the member Peter Dunne mentioned heli-hunting in his contribution or whatever new name we have given it to make it sound not so awful—I would like to know what this means in terms of the discussions we had at the select committee around the hunting of trophy animals from helicopters. If we are now saying that this is no longer about recreational hunting interests and it is just about all hunting interests that is a completely different kettle of fish and different from every conversation we had at select committee. It might be that this is some minor technicalamendment that does not actually change a lot or that is designed for a specific purpose but I think the very first thing we need in this debate is some clarification from the Minister in the chair around what that means.Why did we have a select committee process that spent all its time focusing on how the interests of recreational hunters worked in with the interests of the Department of Conservation and the general public on behalf of whom the Minister of Conservation is a steward of that land? Why did we go through all that if suddenly this bill is going to be about all hunting interests? I wonder whether it is because maybe we went down the path in terms of setting out how we were going to pay for this Game Animal Council of basing its fees on the number of trophy hunters. And maybe the Government just wants a whole lot more of those but I wondered whether it might be something that the Hon Peter Dunne might be able to refer to. For us this is very concerning.Just so that I can let the member know what our concerns are about we have been focused on recreational hunters. This amendment now takes the word “recreational” out and to me that is a major change. It is not something that was ever flagged at the select committee. If there was an issue with keeping the word “recreational” in there at the select committee I do not know why it was not raised with us then albeit it was decades ago that we had this bill at the select committee. Maybe the Hon Peter Dunne would be able to take a call on this Supplementary Order Paper 395 from Nick Smith and explain why in clause 16 we are changing “managed for recreational hunting purposes” to “managed for hunting purposes”. That does seem like a big change to us and in light of the comments he made about heli-hunting as well it would be good to get some clarification around exactly what that is trying to achieve and to allay concerns on this side of the Chamber that it is not actually going to make worse a bill that we are already concerned about and take the focus off recreational hunting which was what we understood to be the entire purpose of this legislation. So I look forward to getting some clarification on that.In terms of the rest of Part 1 of the bill when you look at the purposes of this bill in clause 3 they are: “(a) to establish the Game Animal Council and provide for its functions; and (b) to create powers for the Minister to manage herds of special interest; and (c) to allow the Minister to delegate his or her powers to the Council; and (d) to provide for fees and levies to fund the Council and its functions.” Our question would be again whether this is an appropriate way to achieve the purposes the policy intentions of this particular piece of legislation especially given that the official advice from Treasury and the Department of Conservation has been that this is not the way to go. Their advice was that this path has the most regulatory burden and has the highest costs and in fact there were other options available to the Government that would have been far easier that would have built on existing relationships that would have built on existing functions that would have identified where those relationships did not exist and that would have done so with far less regulatory burden and at a much lower cost. When you consider that the funding for this bill—$100000 in the first year and then $50000 per year after that—is going to have to come from money that is reprioritised within the Department of Conservation then it becomes even clearer that this pathway and the pathway set out in clause 3 “Purposes” in the bill is not the appropriate legislative pathway to be taking.This legislation has been a long time in the making. This is work that started under the previous Labour Government. The advisory panel provided advice none of which is really represented in this piece of legislation and when you look at what we have come up with there were far simpler ways to do it that could have actually been done a lot quicker—a lot quicker. They could have been done under existing legislation either within ministerial powers that already existed which would not have requiredlegislation at all or through an amendment to existing legislation which would have been far simpler than what we see in Part 1 of this piece of legislation.I know that part of the concern around simply using existing legislative or regulatory tools such as the ability of the Minister of Conservation to set up a special committee to look into this was about the power of the Minister in that role. These are always tensions that we have to manage in legislation regarding the Department of Conservation. It used to be the case that the Minister of Conservation had sole responsibility for all activities on the conservation estate as the guardian of that conservation estate on behalf of all New Zealanders. What we continue to see is an undermining of that role and I think that in Part 1 of the bill we see this again. We have had successive pieces of legislation that have taken away the ability of the Minister of Conservation to carry out that very very crucial role and again here in Part 1 of the bill we see that further undermining but for no gain. It is not saying that you cannot have some of the devolution that we see here from the Minister and from the department to other groups where there are shared goals where there are shared common interests and where those tensions can be managed.In that respect a lot of what we see in Part 1 and what we will see in the debate on it represents a lost opportunity. I do not think there is any question that there were enormous gains to be made here that would have benefited all parties who were in the process and that was very clear at the select committee when we heard from submitters. When we expected to see a much more polarised debate what we actually saw was a lot of people coming together wanting to talk about what they wanted to achieve in common. They wanted to highlight where those tensions did lie but they said: “These are not tensions that cannot be managed and these are not tensions that we cannot find a way through and if we cannot we will just agree to disagree.” There was a lot of goodwill from all sides of the debate and that is why I feel that this really is a lost opportunity.I am going to end my contribution there but I do come back to the amendment to clause 16 on the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper on the bill. It would be really good to have some clarification around that because that does seem like quite a wholesale shift away from what we were trying to achieve at the select committee and what the policy intentions were stated to be.