Sage Eugenie: Wildlife (Powers) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Wildlife (Powers) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 29 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:9994. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): I am pleased to take a call on the Wildlife (Powers) Amendment Bill which the Green Party will be supporting to the select committee. I think the very short speech given by the previous speaker Joanne Hayes shows the very limited vision of the Government in relation to our indigenous wildlife. We all agree in this House about the importance of our indigenous plants and wildlife. I have heard various comments about its importance in terms of our identity as Kiwis but this bill has a very limited ambition. Certainly it gives additional powers to Department of Conservation (DOC) staff to prevent offences to detect and investigate offences under the Wildlife Act to seize materials and to stop people but it just shows a complete lack of vision.If the Government is amending the Wildlife Act—if it is taking parliamentary time to do this—it could have been much more ambitious by amending the Act to protect our indigenous freshwater fish given their very precarious state—74 percent of our freshwater fish species our native species are staring extinction in the face. That is a statistic to be ashamed of given that it is one of the highest proportions of threatened native freshwater fish in the world.It is the Wildlife Act that provides varying levels of protection for our birds our native reptiles our skinks our geckos our native frogs our bats and eight marine fish species. It protects them from poaching from hunting from being collected and from being held in captivity without the proper authorisation. You cannot kill native birds except for the pūkeko the paradise shelduck and the tītī because of the provisions in the Wildlife Act. You cannot keep native birds in captivity without authorisation from the DOC because of the provisions in the Wildlife Act. Yet people can kill and destroy our freshwater fish and their habitat because of the big hole in the Wildlife Act and this bill does absolutely nothing to close it.As my colleague Kevin Hague pointed out this highlights the need for a comprehensive review of the Wildlife Act to provide much better protection not just for endangered species but for their habitat as well. The reason that this is such a crucial gap is that there has been an incredible decline in the health and status of our native freshwater fish over the last 20 years which has coincided with the intensification of agriculture in our lowland areas. In 1990 the DOC recorded 10 freshwater fish species as being threatened with extinction and by 2002 that number had increased to 16. In 2013 a comprehensive review showed that 74 percent of all of our native freshwater taxa were threatened with extinction and that is 76 percent if you just consider the native fish species that do not spend part of their life at sea. Four of the five species that people eat as whitebait patties are threatened with extinction.It is a ridiculous state of affairs that we do not have a single native freshwater fish species protected under the Wildlife Act except grayling and they are extinct. It is also ridiculous that we continue to allow the killing of threatened species. Four of the five whitebait species—the kōaro the short-jawed kōkopu the giant kōkopu and the inanga—are all taken by whitebait fishers and they are all threatened with extinction. We have got regulations under the Freshwater Fisheries Regulations that protect exotic species—brown trout rainbow trout chinook salmon—but we have no legal protection for our native fishes.That is a gap that this bill could remedy by adding all of our native fish species—and a lot of our indigenous invertebrates—to the schedules at the back of the Act and by giving the DOC staff increased powers to monitor the whitebait fishery and protect those species. It is also ridiculous that we have no legal protection for the tuna or long-finned eel. There was a comprehensive report by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment about its decline towards extinction. Again this bill could close that loophole by adding it to the list of protected species. That will be something that we hope to see submissions on. We hope that the Minister will recognise that that is a major gap and look to amend the legislation to close it.