Dowie SarahSARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): Well look as the Opposition spokesperson for conservation it is a pleasure to take a call on these reviews of the 2017/2018 year. In particular I'm going to focus my contribution on two entities: the Department of Conservation (DOC) which is of course charged with the mandate of protecting conserving the kaitiaki of our natural and historic heritage in New Zealand; and Predator Free New Zealand which is an independent and separate entity that was put in place to look after the initiative that was of course the New Zealand National Party's initiative of Predator Free 2050—to eradicate rats possums and stoats from New Zealand. Hon Member: That's transformational. SARAH DOWIE: Absolutely transformational. In this the year of delivery" all I can say is that these Government departments—notwithstanding I agree with the chair Dr Deborah Russell's statement that the rangers at DOC work very very hard—unfortunately have had a mixed bag under this Government. There are a couple of things that I want to focus on. The first is definitely what we've seen come out under the guise of direction of this Minister to the Department of Conservation is a return to the bad old days of the 1980s where "Minister knows best" and consultation simply does not occur. Now in the past the Department of Conservation have been very good at engagement with stakeholders. They've been very good in the education space working with people at the coalface to get them involved in conservation to get them to buy into initiatives and help out on the ground. But unfortunately as was raised in the reviews even the Director-General of Conservation had to admit that in recent times consultation has been less than adequate. I'm referring specifically to first of all the tahr cull. The tahr cull that was launched into—spearheaded by the Minister ignoring the wishes and will and thoughts of recreational hunters to simply go in and cull to extreme levels without engaging with that sector group. We saw a huge mobilisation and simply what that suggests is that the Minister has no respect for recreationists no respect for their contribution to the conservation estate and had no faith in them as to what they could achieve with and in partnership with the Department of Conservation. Subsequent to that we had the rushed introduction of the Conservation (Indigenous Freshwater Fish) Amendment Bill which again was introduced to this House with a lack of consultation. Practically no stakeholders were engaged and again it mobilised recreational fishers to such an extreme that we saw a backlash as to that bill which was introduced under the guise of technical but it was anything but technical—again a tried implementation of a bill which ran roughshod over recreationists' viewpoints their activity and again their contribution to tourism and investment in the conservationist state. So one of the things that I'll be looking for into the future from the Department of Conservation is for them to pull their socks up and to again engage with the community because if we do not have buy-in from the community then we simply lose with respect to environmental initiatives moving forward. With respect to Predator Free—and my colleague Mr Scott Simpson touched on this—again an independent entity charged with eradicating predator species. But the Minister has come in over the top—she knows best—and made a direction that there should be no investment or looking into biotechnologies. It's Predator Free themselves that have come out and said that without biotechnologies there can be no achievement of Predator Free 2050. It's certainly not a silver bullet but without looking at it without having that conversation simply the goal will not be achieved. This is unfortunate. The National Party still believes in that vision and we believe that an honest and transparent conversation needs to happen with the public about this initiative."