Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Minister of Conservation): E Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe. Tuarua ki ngā mema o tō tātou Whare tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa.[Salutations to you Madam Deputy Speaker. Secondly greetings acknowledgments and accolades to you the members of our House and to us all.]Congratulations Madam Deputy Speaker. I look forward to you and Speaker Mallard's rigorous and astute guidance of this House. Can I also endorse the comments by my colleague the Hon Tracey Martin. The National Opposition has an opportunity to ensure that select committees deliver much better legislation. As a Minister I want to see legislation that comes back to the House from select committees having been thoroughly considered having taken on board the comments and submissions of submitters and having been improved. There's an opportunity now for us to strengthen our democracy by having select committees work in the way that they are intended rather than in the past term when Ministers used them as a rubber stamp and it was Ministers that controlled the legislation rather than select committees. So please use that opportunity and be constructive.It's a very great honour to have been elected back into this Parliament by New Zealanders and it's a very great privilege to serve under our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern whom I have no doubt will be absolutely outstanding as Prime Minister. It's a privilege too to speak as the first Green Minister of Conservation Minister for Land Information and an Associate Minister for the Environment. I'm proud to assure New Zealanders that under this Government we will have a Minister of Conservation and an Associate Minister for the Environment who believes in nature and in safeguarding the values of our species here in Aotearoa.We believe in the right of New Zealanders to have access to clean rivers healthy beaches and wild landscapes where our indigenous plants and wildlife thrive and where there are adequate funds invested in predator control to get them out of the serious trouble that they are currently in. We believe that we have got a responsibility to safeguard these species which came to these islands so many years ago and are the first inhabitants of Aotearoa so that generations unborn can enjoy them and so that they can thrive for their own sake. We haven't seen that under the past National Government because they believed in nature for exploitation not in sustaining it for its own sake and not in recognising its importance as natural capital as a natural asset that provides us with clean water with the air that we breathe with the places where we recreate and that provides the infrastructure for critical industries like tourism and like our primary sector.Nature is at the heart of our success as a country. It's these wild and distinctive landscapes that are so important to Māori and that are at the core of our identity as New Zealanders. Nature is at the backbone of our economy. It's critical to the success of our provinces. It's where tourists go. It's essential for jobs in the provinces and it provides economic opportunities there. So we have got a duty to safeguard nature to ensure that our environment is healthy because a healthy environment is the basis of a healthy economy—not the other way round which is what we've seen over the last nine years. It's our job to safeguard it not to strip-mine it and not to commercialise it as National has sought to do in its previous term. That has been what has happened under National. We've had our rivers our aquifers exploited for intensive agriculture dryland ecosystems in the Mackenzie Basin and Canterbury and elsewhere converted to farm pasture and biodiversity values destroyed and for what? A few dollars. We cannot have a strong economy long term if we destroy the natural capital that that economy depends upon.It was under National that we saw conservation law changed under urgency to allow logging on conservation land something that had never happened in the previous 30 years of the department's existence. That won't happen under this Government. It was under National that we saw an ambitious plan for predator-free New Zealand but no plan to implement it and no adequate funding either. That won't happen under this Government. There are 4000 species—indigenous species—many of them found only here in Aotearoa New Zealand that are threatened with or are at risk of extinction yet under National only 16 percent of the conservation estate had sustained predator control and only 338 of those 4000 species were under active management by the Department of Conservation (DOC). There is wide agreement across the three parties in Government that National has underfunded conservation and has failed to recognise the importance of nature to our economy.That's why there is a strong commitment in both our confidence and supply agreement and the coalition agreement with New Zealand First that we will invest in conservation. We need to do that if we are to safeguard our security long term and the security of species like geckos skinks bats and our native birds like the kea the kiwi and the kōkako. DOC is responsible as kaitiaki for all of these species on our conservation lands and in the marine reserves but those species don't know administrative boundaries. They live on private land as well and under the former Government we had the department failing in its statutory responsibility to be an advocate for nature to ensure that decision makers like councils knew about the value of those species their habitats and the impact that developments like conversion to dairying and like irrigation could have on them. Under this Government we will restore DOC's ability to speak for nature and to ensure that the enormous technical knowledge and expertise of Department of Conservation staff are brought to bear in significant resource consent decisions and plans that are going to impact on our native species on our plants and wildlife and on our wild landscapes.Under National we had funding for advocacy slashed to $600000 annually. We had a reduction of 40 percent in the number of planners who could speak for DOC in those Resource Management Act (RMA) hearings. Under this Government we want an effective RMA. We want those matters of national importance that are set out in section 6 to be taken account of by councils and to be brought to bear in decision making not the exploitation we saw under the former Government.There is a lot to do under this Government. We have a major challenge in getting rid of the despair and the gloom about how nature was treated over the last nine years. We are going to change that. We will be significantly increasing the funding for conservation so that we can improve the prospects for many of these 4000 species that are teetering on the brink.We want to ensure that we plan better for tourism. We've had a major increase in visitors to New Zealand but a failure to actually plan for their impacts on areas like the Mackenzie Basin where we have small councils with a small rating base struggling to cope with thousands of extra visitors and without the infrastructure.We need to ensure that there are more jobs in the regions. We can do that if we develop more facilities for tourism in our provincial cities and towns but not by commercialising our national parks and not by commercialising our conservation lands by allowing big luxurious lodges and other commercial developments there.We will speak for nature because we recognise that it is at the heart of our economy and that we have got a lot to do to rectify the neglect and the underfunding of the past nine years. It's a challenge I look forward to and I want to reassure all New Zealanders that we recognise the importance of these lands for them and we will be investing in our future and the future of these species that call this place home. We can do so much better and we will. Nō reira tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā tātou katoa.Debate interrupted.