Mitchell ClaytonCLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): At one point through Mojo Mathers' speech I thought she had actually taken my notes to speak from because I pretty much have exactly the same thing to say. It is not very often that we actually see eye to eye the Green Party and New Zealand First on a number of matters and I have to say that on this one we are in complete alignment. That was very well articulated by Mojo Mathers in saying that.New Zealand First will be supporting this bill as it goes through the final reading. We see this as a big step forward the first major step of legislative change within the Wildlife Act 1953 in 60 years. It is a step in the right direction and certainly in empowering our Department of Conservation (DOC) rangers to do the job that they have been tasked to do—and it is not an easy job; it is a huge task—we have to give them all the tools in their tool box that they can actually utilise to ensure the safety security and longevity of our natural flora and fauna.On a positive note we are seeing record numbers of tourists coming to New Zealand. It has now topped $13 billion and rising. This is the No. 1 driver of our GDP now and in just 8 years they are predicting that number to increase by 67 percent to blow out to around $40 billion by 2025. You only have to ask yourself a simple question: what is driving tourists to come to the motherland? Why would they want to come to this beautiful country of ours? It is underlined: it is a beautiful country. There are so many wonderful sights to see so many tracks to go down and so much natural beauty that people around the world who do not have access to that want to come here. Yet we are seriously seriously underfunding the Department of Conservation.We have seen massive job cuts and tracks shut and we are getting the volunteer sector to go out there and liberate some of these huts and cabins to make sure that they stay open with volunteer man-hours doing all the repairs and maintenance because the money from the Department of Conservation is just not there. We are on the one hand saying we are going to ensure that our DOC rangers have got all the tools but on the other hand we are expecting them to do more for less. We have gone from 809 DOC workers in 2009 down to 637.Surely this is a contradiction in what we are trying to achieve with the health and safety reforms that we put through last year. Putting fewer of our qualified ready-for-work battle-hardened DOC rangers out there—with more tools to arrest surveil stop and prevent and ensure that our nature is looked after yet getting fewer of them to do the job—is certainly putting their lives and their health and well-being at serious risk. It is a complete and utter contradiction. On the one hand this Government has pushed through legislation that enforces health and safety regulations but on the other hand we are putting people into the barrel if you like of serious potential harm by allowing them to go out there without the support that they require which is obviously plainly and simply more people on the ground.This bill does four basic things—well you could say five but the fifth thing we will talk about loosely. The first one is the power to seize a wide range of evidence particularly when we have got DOC rangers out there who are looking to prosecute these people who are looking to poach plunder and steal our natural wildlife and sell it on the open market internationally—on the black market. They can now seize phones and cameras and laptops and a range of other equipment to actually build a case against these organised crime syndicates.The second thing that this bill enables our rangers to do is to stop a person. Ironically back in 1953 when the Wildlife Act was implemented DOC rangers had the power to stop a vessel a vehicle or a bag in transit but they did not have the power to stop an actual person. You know what it is like to tell somebody to stop and to have no power to stop them. They will just say: Nod off. I'm going on." So this bill enables them to be able to stop a person to actually engage with them and to get further evidence.The third thing this bill does is empower DOC rangers to be able to intervene to prevent an injustice taking place or to prevent a crime from happening if there is cause for reasonable certainty that an offence is about to occur or if an offence is occurring and of course DOC rangers can involve themselves and prevent that from going forward by intervening. Probably the most simple thing—yet it has taken so many years to come through—is the simple power to enable DOC rangers to ask for somebody's date of birth.You cannot prosecute somebody if you do not know that that is the person that you are prosecuting. The way that the police do that is by checking identification to make sure that they say they are who they are and of course by making sure that their date of birth matches up with who they have got in front of them. That is absolutely key. It is vital. It seems so simple and ridiculous that we have not been able to do this until now. But those four basic steps are a huge change in the way that we have been allowing our DOC rangers around the country to operate.There is one more thing that this bill really does essentially. It does give very very limited powers to Fish and Game rangers. Of course all those powers that I have just talked about above are to do with full-time DOC rangers and not people who have been given a warrant or have been honourably given the title to go and do it. It is only for full-time engaged DOC rangers. But Fish and Game rangers who are now full-time employees can also ask for proof of identification and date of birth. So that is another great step forward. However when you read through the bill—and I have to go to that section because it does jump out as just being a little bit ridiculous when we talk about it. The commentary on the bill states: "We understand from the New Zealand Fish and Game Council that its rangers are currently limited in their ability to perform their statutory role of enforcing game hunting because they are unable to require date-of-birth information from suspected offenders. Fish and Game cannot prosecute offenders unless they give this information voluntarily." Of course that is now tidied up. It goes on to say: "it would not be necessary to extend the power to honorary Fish and Game rangers. This is because honorary rangers are"—underline this—"generally accompanied by full-time Fish and Game rangers." but not always and not definitively.We have got a massive loophole when you have got the volunteer Fish and Game rangers out there doing their work which many of them do because many of them are active with their hunting fishing and gathering of sorts. When they see things going down in front of them they have no power to engage and no power to ask for identification and that just seems absolutely an opportunity lost in this bill although it has been pushed hard. Supplementary Order Paper 243 was put through by Labour to try to allow this to happen and it was blocked by the Government which is absolute lunacy according to New Zealand First.The commentary on the bill goes on to say: "We were advised that Fish and Game rangers should not be granted the proposed new powers because the focus of the bill is primarily on protected wildlife not game birds." But the reality is the species from the Department of Conservation that are protected are protected because they have been plundered in the past. If we do not put strong restrictions on the fishing and game industries then we will find ourselves coming back to address this problem because so too will those stocks be plundered if we do not put enforcement into place. We are talking about putting the ambulance at the top of the cliff not at the bottom which this legislation clearly does not fix.We are seriously concerned over the lack of funding of the Department of Conservation and over the past 9 years since this Government has been in power we have seen around about $97 million annually at the high point to the lowest point in reduction to DOC yet when you look at the current spending in the Department of Conservation—and this is where we probably differ largely from the Greens—35 percent of the current budget is spent on the 1080 dropping. They are absolutely hell-bent on bombing and napalming our forests with 1080 pellets but we are asking for that to be reviewed to make sure we are investing in better ways to control our predators in New Zealand. Thank you."