Sage Eugenie: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is subject to correctionSage Eugenie: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 29 April 2015. Volume:704;Page:2977. Text is subject to correction.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):I am speaking to the annual review of the Department of Conservation—page 41 of reports of select committees 1.20A. I am pleased to hear the Minister of Conservation suggesting that there may be an increase in funding for the protection of kiwi because of course it was the briefing to the incoming Minister that warned that kiwi could potentially be extinct on the mainland within 50 years. We have got a biodiversity crisis in New Zealand and our national icon the kiwi is one of those threatened species. Forty percent of our native bird species are threatened with extinction as are 74 percent of our native freshwater fish species 85 percent of our native lizards and nearly 40 percent of our indigenous plants.We are supposed to be halting the decline in biodiversity but we are failing to do that and one of the reasons is this Government’s miserly approach to conservation. We have got the Government being quite extravagant when it spends public money on promoting intensive dairying and irrigation and when it spends to promote deep-sea oil exploration but it is miserly when it protects nature. We have got a Department of Conservation that is responsible for a third of New Zealand’s land area yet only $163 million of its $346 million annual budget last year was able to be spent on natural heritage management.The department is able to control pests on only 15 percent of the conservation estate and yes Battle for Our Birds was a brilliant initiative but that was funded because the department did not spend quite as much on redundancies in its disastrous restructuring exercise as it had anticipated. There needs to be an increase—a significant increase—in baseline funding for the Department of Conservation so that it can invest in controlling predators over much more of the conservation estate.Mr Simpson said that the department was in very good shape. He obviously has not been reading any of the reports about what a disaster the restructuring exercise that the department undertook last year was. It was done by the former director-general in response to National’s Budget cuts back in 2009. Last year 126 Department of Conservation staff were made redundant and with that there was a huge loss of technical expertise in the regions—places like the West Coast where there are major challenges on the ground—and that loss of 126 jobs last year was on top of the 197 jobs that have been cut in the department under this National Government.So we have seen 323 jobs go in the Department of Conservation. It shows how serious—or not—the Government is about protecting our conservation estate. This was the largest restructuring in the public sector. The Government talks about having better public services yet the restructuring cost the department $7 million last year. There has been no clear rationale as to why it was needed. It has restructured the department into two silos: operations and services.I get regular comments about the fact that things are going through the gap in the middle. There is no clear integrated line of decision making. Has it led to better public services? No. What did the department do last year? It spent $1 million more on travel. Why? Because a lot of the staff are now in offices where their managers are not present in that office. That $1 million extra being spent on travel could have funded aerial predator control over nearly 60000 hectares an area almost the size of two Paparoa National Parks. Where did it go? On travel.The restructuring has increased the number of people on salaries of more than $100000—another 10 last year. It has meant another 20 staff in the Wellington office of the department when a lot of the work has actually got to be done in the regions. So the restructuring has been an abysmal failure and that is just looking at the financial side. It does not include any accounting of the losses in terms of conservation management when staff have been so stressed concentrating on whether they are going to have a job or not that they have not been able to get on with the operational programmes that they are responsible for.Hon Maggie Barry: Don’t be so pessimistic.EUGENIE SAGE: And not just that $7 million—the Minister says: “Don’t be so pessimistic.” Yes the new director-general is implementing a new pilot but that is costing another half a million dollars to try to fix up the utter shambles that the restructuring has created.Hon Maggie Barry: It’s money well spent.EUGENIE SAGE: It is not money well spent. Under this Government $17 million has been spent on restructuring the Department of Conservation that could have been spent on pest control.Reports noted.