Twyford Phil: Game Animal Council Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Game Animal Council Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 19 November 2013. Volume:695;Page:14876. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): Please Mr Chairman may I have a call? Thank you—thank you Mr Chairman. It is good that we are rewriting the Standing Orders on the hoof.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): No no we are not.PHIL TWYFORD: It is good to follow yet another excellent contribution by the member Eugenie Sage and actually I wanted to say also that the member for Southland Eric Roy—Eric Roy: Invercargill.PHIL TWYFORD: Invercargill I beg your pardon. He made a great contribution and it was good to have someone of his firsthand knowledge of hunting and have some real detail to put on the bone. I want to register the ongoing frustration on this side of the Chamber with the lack of any contribution from the Minister in the chair the Hon Murray McCully. I do not know how much hunting is done in East Coast Bays these days but probably more—Hon Trevor Mallard: Probably quite a few Tory members looking for the seat.PHIL TWYFORD: Well I want to come to that but I suspect more hunting is done from the comfort of big-game lodges that has been tacked on to various foreign affairs excursions and international conferences. We live in hope that Mr McCully will make a contribution and answer the many questions that have been posed in the course of this debate.It seems to me looking at the background to this Game Council Bill coming to the Committee stage that it is something of a textbook study on how not to make legislation. It is a pretty unsatisfactory process. If we put aside just for a minute the details of what the bill seeks to do it is an unsatisfactory process and I want to provide some background to why Labour is not supporting the bill at this point.When the bill was first tabled in the House and had its first reading I have to say that there were mixed views within the Labour caucus but considerable sympathy for some of the intent of this bill to provide a place for hunters to stand within the governance of our natural environment and recreational system in New Zealand and a considerable sympathy with their desire to have more of a say to be part of decision making and to protect their access to hunting places around this country. As with all these sorts of things there are always complex trade-offs to be made and I think we have reached a point where we believe this bill actually hinders rather than helps the building of constructive relationships between the hunting community and the conservation estate and that actually the risk now is that this bill will do more harm than good.I want to just touch on some of the arguments why we believe that that is the case. The first is that the council as it is set up in Part 1 of the bill is being set up as a stand-alone separate entity. There was a lot of debate I understand at the Local Government and Environment Committee that in fact it could have been set up as an advisory body. What the bill does is the opposite of creating clean lines of accountability and authority. It basically muddies cuts across and sets up competing interests in the management of the conservation estate and I think that is unfortunate. I would suggest that in time that will make it unsustainable. It sets up direct and competing interests in the management of wild animals. So that is the first thing.The second thing—just as worrying I think—is that in regard to the final determination on a proposal for conservation purposes for example the dropping of 1080 for pest eradication purposes it gives the Game Animal Council that determinative role. That is a serious issue. That is going to create strife. It will build into the system a real tension around what is already a fraught issue in terms of decision making.The third issue is about funding of the council and that is one that the select committee worked really hard on.