Stanford Erica; Rurawhe AdrianERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Mr Speaker. How that member Duncan Webb kept a straight face for that six or seven minutes that he spoke I will never know. This from a member who not just in the privacy of his own home or to a mate but on television said quite forcefully that he would eat a kiwi and he would eat a whale. And now he's standing up telling us that we so desperately must protect these little slimy fish. It's remarkable that he managed to keep a straight face that whole time.I'm pleased to speak on this bill but just before I do I just need to take a quick step back because I promised that I would do something. I'm just going to take a couple of seconds to congratulate someone in my electorate very quickly: Harry Shine. He's in year 6 and he won the speech competition at Pinehurst School and I said I would mention him. He did a speech on why we should get rid of trees so getting a clever segue into this important piece of environmental legislation was quite difficult. So my segue is that there's no segue.This bill has been described as people have said before me as a bill of minor technical changes. The regulatory impact statement said that most of the amendments are relatively minor and technical and they're not expected to have any unintended consequences at all—famous last words. I'd just like to point out that this bill was allocated to the Environment Committee a year ago in two weeks—a year ago. This is a small technical amendment bill on freshwater fish that has been in the select committee for 11 months. Just contrast that if you would with the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Bill—the biggest challenge facing humanity and we've got a three-month truncated process. What I want to go into today is why we had 11 months in select committee. Why it was that a minor technical amendment bill that should have taken three months to rock through actually ended up taking us 11 months and I want to get into that. Basically what happened was the Minister of Conservation realised that she had an unutilised Environment Committee because despite being the Greenest Government ever" we've had almost no work—certainly no good environmental bills. So she saw an opportunity. She thought "Here's a bill that we can race through. Don't worry about it. Don't need any consultation. We'll just race it through." And her poor officials had that to deal with.I would say at least 80 percent of the submissions that we had mentioned the fact that there was very little or no consultation on this bill. We had Fish & Game the Council of Outdoor Recreation Associations of NZ Inc Tourism Industry Aotearoa the Eel Enhancement Co. Ltd South Island Eel Industry Association and Te Wai Māori. All were very disappointed at the fact that there was no consultation.I want to talk about Te Wai Māori for a little bit. They had a terrible time. They were told that the bill was a minor technical fix-up bill. "Don't worry about it. We're not going to consult with iwi." They pushed back and they wanted to see a copy of the bill which they managed to get. They were of the understanding that they would have a chance to provide input on the draft bill but the bill was put to Parliament on the same day that they were due to put their comments.So effectively no consultation and no changes were able to be made from iwi consultation. This just sums up this Minister's disregard for the views of New Zealanders. Had we had proper consultation had we gone out to people like Fish & Game we could've had this bill sewn up in three or four months.I want to talk very quickly about clause 5(3) the clause that is no longer and that is thanks to the National Party. It is a—Hon Clare Curran: Oh rubbish!ERICA STANFORD: The member says "rubbish" but we fought and fought to get this clause out. Stay with me because it is very complicated. Basically there was a clause in the bill that said "Well look if we've got a freshwater fish management plan and we've got a sports management plan and a little bit of either one are in contradiction to each other then there is a hierarchy and the freshwater fish management plan will override the sports management plan." Of course that raised the ire of every single sports fisher in the country and Fish & Game had to hire a hot-shot lawyer in Sir Geoffrey Palmer spend loads of money—Hon Scott Simpson: A legal luminary.ERICA STANFORD: —a legal luminary as my colleague Scott Simpson so eloquently puts it—at great expense and then after many months the poor officials who are just as confused as the rest of us came back and said "Oh well actually the reason we're doing this is because as the law currently stands if there is a contradiction in two clauses of the bill then actually the sports management plan—the whole thing's null and void." This is brand new information to everyone on the Environment Committee months down the track and then they tell us that actually there's never been a freshwater fish management plan so that's why it's never happened—again brand new information to us months down the track. The Minister has not briefed her officials and we were certainly not briefed. It was all brand new information. We eventually had to send the officials away back to Fish & Game and say "Look sort it out because this is a shemozzle." They came back and said "Oh actually yeah we didn't need that clause anyway because it turns out that Sir Geoffrey Palmer was right in the first place." Months and months and months of this and of us demanding better advice from the officials—and it's not their fault; they were not briefed by the Minister.Freshwater fish management plans are required to help our indigenous fish 75 percent of which are threatened and we need a serious and coordinated approach that looks at the declining state of fish habitat and land-use change. It's easy to point the finger at low-hanging fruit like the whitebaiters but that is not the answer. This bill has a massive overreach into private property rights. The other side of the House will say "Oh no it's not." and Mr Duncan Webb got up today and told us that you know if the Department of Conservation officials come in and they reasonably identify a spawning zone then you know no problem we'll be fine but he wasn't in the select committee. The officials told us in select committee that actually it's really difficult to identify a spawning site and actually in most cases it's a best guess. So you've got these poor landowners who have got officials coming on to their land making a best guess and then telling the landowners that they can't do anything in that particular part of their own land. That's why it's a massive overreach and that's why we will not support this bill.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): This is a split call. I call Kiritapu Allan—five minutes."