Dyson Ruth: Game Animal Council Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDyson Ruth: Game Animal Council Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 19 November 2013. Volume:695;Page:14888. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): Mr Assistant Speaker thanks for giving me the call in the third reading of the Game Animal Council Bill. Originally when this bill was introduced Labour was very familiar with its history. As part of the confidence and supply agreement with United Future in the previous Government we established an advisory group that travelled the country and did a very good job actually on getting the various views on the subject that is now the point of this legislation. Margaret Austin was the leader of that process and I want to commend her for her passion and integrity throughout that process. I also acknowledge the 4000 or so submitters who contributed to the early thinking along that path.There are of course extreme views on either side. There are some who would say there should be no hunting at all in New Zealand and some who would say there should not be a Department of Conservation. Those are not the views that the Local Government and Environment Committee was involved in hearing from and considering. We heard from a very large number of well-respected New Zealanders who had a contribution to make that was worthwhile. I really enjoyed that part of the process. Sometimes at select committees you get very few submitters or you might get submitters who are just very narrow in their point of view and want to give only their perspective and do not consider anyone else but that was not the case for all but a few of the submitters whom we heard.Most of them were people who had a real passion for New Zealand and loved the outdoor life. For many of them it was the first time they had ever made a submission to a parliamentary committee. They were much more comfortable with their tramping boots their shorts and their Swanndri out with a pack on their back than in the confines of a select committee room in front of a bunch of members of Parliament. But they were passionate about what they see as their patch their part of the world the public land of New Zealand and their opportunity to hunt in a recreational capacity.There was a lot of tension between the recreational hunters and the commercial hunters. I can remember one submitter who came and talked to us and told of how he had endured hours and hours and hours of climbing up very steep terrain—I do not recall exactly where it was; it may have been in Taranaki—to try to get a deer. He had got nearly to the top nearly to the point where he would be able to shoot this deer and a helicopter came over and just whooshed in and scared the deer away and then they went off and shot some deer from the helicopter. He was pretty angry about that. He saw heli-hunting as a really bad practice and very intrusive on what he saw as a core part of his well-being of his lifestyle as a New Zealander.So not only do we have the physical benefits of hunting—you know people get out in the fresh air and they do a lot of hard work to get to the areas where they go hunting—they obviously get food for their family and very importantly as well they reduce the pests that we have got on our land. We have got a lot of work to do in that space. We have far too many pests that destroy the very environment that we all love so much.So the select committee process itself was a really good one. The committee worked I think across all parties in a very constructive way. We had a bit of a shortened process. We wanted a little bit longer to consider the bill and I think we would have got a lot more agreement had we been given the little extension that we asked for. But no the bill was closed down. It got sent back to the House and here it has sat for months on the Order Paper—months.Darien Fenton: That’s disgraceful.Hon RUTH DYSON: It is very odd. It was very frustrating for the committee. We said: “We think we can get this better. We think we can get this right. We think we can get agreement if we have a little bit longer.” No we were denied that opportunity—“Get that bill back to the House.” Then the bill sat on the Order Paper for months and months and months and here we are on a Wednesday morning under urgency debating legislation that could have been brought to this House and dealt with in a proper manner. I think the process is offensive to good parliamentary process and I am surprised that so many of the National Party members now just take it for granted that we will do things in a bad form in a bad way. Well what you get when you follow bad process is actually bad legislation. That is something that none of us would want. Even if we do not agree with legislation we would want it to be robust.Then of course we have had the Minister of Conservation’s Supplementary Order Paper 395. It was not discussed with any political parties before the debate started. It was not signalled during the months that we have had this bill on the Order Paper and not progressing through Parliament. It was just dropped on the Committee at the last minute. It was sort of “I’ve got the numbers. Who cares?”. Well actually a lot of people do. A lot of people care about good process and about things being debated and considered properly because in the end that is how you get high-quality legislation.I think it is above all a wasted opportunity. It was an opportunity to get the various perspectives around this issue together and to work through their differences until you got agreement. I think that was absolutely possible. When we first debated this bill Labour said we would support its referral to a select committee but we did express our serious concerns.We expressed concerns about the actual structure of the Game Animal Council which is a separate entity rather than a structure such as a ministerial advisory committee or any such comparable structure. That could have been set up under the Wild Animal Control Act. We did not need a separate piece of legislation. We did not need the type of consideration that this bill has gone through. Not only did we think that that was an unnecessary structure but also it was against the specific advice of both Treasury and the Department of Conservation. They said that setting up the Game Animal Council as a separate entity would set up direct and competing interests in the management of wild animals. They thought that it would be the highest cost in terms of regulatory time and in terms of resources.So here we have got an organisation that creates division that creates confusion and that costs heaps of money. I cannot see who is winning out of this so far. It does not sound like this is a win-win situation when of course we could have had a win-win situation. The opportunity was there for us to take and it was thrown away by the Government.I want to put on record not just our appreciation of the submitters but also the respect and value that Labour places on recreational hunting in New Zealand. It is a core part of so many people’s lives and it makes a huge contribution in terms of controlling animal numbers and protecting our biodiversity. We heard from many recreational hunters during the select committee process about their frustration with the Department of Conservation and how they were not able to work together. There was always tension;they were always arguing. We heard from others—probably about similar numbers actually—about the strong good and healthy relationship that they had with the Department of Conservation in their areas. We heard the same from iwi. They said that in some parts of the country it worked like magic and in others it just was not working at all.I wish we had been able to pick up the threads of what works in some areas and then develop a way of transposing that across the country so that every area could operate benefiting from the valuable staff and resources of the Department of Conservation and from recreational hunters local iwi community groups—the list goes on and on and on. Why does it work in some parts of the country and not in others? We never really developed the answer to that question but this bill is not the answer. The establishment of the Game Animal Council is not going to be the answer at all. I think that it will cause further division and tension and it will not let us pick up the opportunity that we had of learning what works and replicating it.We did have a lot of discussion about the final determination of a proposal for conservation purposes such as the dropping of 1080. My colleague Damien O’Connor has already referred to that and put a pretty staunch stake in the ground in terms of his support for the use of 1080. We have had the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment saying that our forests will be silent unless we take a massive step up in terms of pest eradication and 1080 is currently one of the most effective means of doing that.The final point I want to mention is in regard to the funding of the council. That has been a very difficult issue and it is one on which all members of the committee worked hard. The purpose of this legislation will not be achieved by what we have ended up with today despite the best efforts of the select committee. The bill creates a tension between the Game Animal Council and the Department of Conservation—the very thing it sought to remove. That is in no one’s interest. When this bill is reviewed in 3 years I hope that we can have an opportunity to improve it and really reshape it to achieve the purpose that was intended.