Dowie Sarah: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDowie Sarah: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 13 April 2016. Volume:713;Page:10526. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): Thank you for this opportunity to rise in support of the annual reviews for the Environment Sector in the 2014-15 year. I would like to take this opportunity to talk about the new wave of processes that are coming through both in conservation and in respect of the management of our environment—that is of course in respect of bringing the community along with us and in respect of collaborative processes and partnership models.If you look at what the Local Government and Environment Committee heard in respect of the Ministry for the Environment and the reforms that are due with regard to the Resource Management Act there is a call from the public to streamline processes and to make them less divisive in the community. What the Ministry for the Environment has endorsed is collaborative processes that engage the community and engage different stakeholders with often competing interests and bring them together to look at common wins for managing resources.One of those examples is the Land and Water Forum where over 90 stakeholders have come together to look at ways to manage the water resource and water quality moving forward. What we have found throughout that process is that at the other end when it comes to providing recommendations and providing management plans and moving forward to manage that water resource we have common elements flowing through—no pun intended—those stakeholder groups. They can come to agreement on and then put in practice those proposals through to a competent management plan.The same goes in respect of the Department of Conservation. In the past conservation has often been looked upon as the poor cousin. Funding for it often comes behind portfolios such as health and policing but conservation to New Zealanders is a very important portfolio and I really encourage the Department of Conservation in its move towards endorsing partnerships and taking the community with it in its conservation efforts. So as I said before often communities have competing interests but if the Department of Conservation can bring communities together and bring stakeholders together then it can find common elements and often with that community spirit get wins in a conservation effort to bring about a healthy environment for the community.I want to talk about one such effort in my own electorate. It is actually bringing together the Healthy Nature Healthy People initiative of the Department of Conservation which talks about having a healthy ecosystem getting people out into that healthy ecosystem enjoying nature and learning about the benefits of nature and through that creating a healthier lifestyle for themselves. That in conjunction with the Healthy Families Government initiative which is a health initiative has similar messaging in that we talk about preventing disease through getting out into nature being active and doing healthy things.One of the collaborative processes that I ran myself was to bring Healthy Families together with our Department of Conservation staff and run a function that encouraged our families to get out into nature and enjoy what Southland has to offer in our backyard. That was called the MAD Day Out—the Mud Adventure Discovery Day Out. Basically what people did was they came out to the Sandy Point reserve. We had a short and a long obstacle course where people traipsed through nature through some of our tracks up and down different obstacles that were put in the tracks and then through an optional mud run and families absolutely thrived on it. It was an event where mums and dads and guardians could get involved with their children and enjoy nature and understand the benefits of nature.So as you can see it is not just about getting big corporates involved; it is about taking the community with you and it does not often cost a lot of money to bring about these initiatives.