Sage Eugenie: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Sage Eugenie: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 12 September 2012. Volume:683;Page:5150. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
EUGENIE SAGE (Green) 
: 
Tena koe. It is Conservation Week this week and it is particularly significant this year because of the historic announcement that NgaiTuhoe are prepared to accept the Crown’s offer to settle their claims and grievances under the Treaty of Waitangi. A major part of that settlement relates to Te Urewera National Park. The Government plans to introduce special legislation that would give the park its own separate legal identity rather than being a national park managed under the National Parks Act 1980. That will be landmark legislation because of the way in which it must combine both biodiversity protection and adequate recognition of Tuhoe’s cultural spiritual and historical connection with Te Urewera and we look forward to it. 
But the Minister of Conservation has marked Conservation Week by announcing an increase in penalties for the smuggling of our native wildlife. That is very welcome but getting tougher on wildlife smugglers cannot disguise this Government’s neglect of the spectacular landscapes and of our native indigenous wildlife and plant communities. The previous speaker Michael Woodhouse was a case in point. He was talking about Bathurst Resources quietly getting on with the job. He was totally failing to appreciate the significance of the Denniston Plateau where that open-cast coalmine by this Aussie coalminer is proposed to take place. The Denniston Plateau is one of the key areas of conservation land that this Government should be protecting and preserving. It is one of our special places. It is no place for an open-cast coalmine. 
This Government repeatedly talks about balance. If it was serious about balance then it would recognise that the Stockton Plateau has been much mined over recent decades and much of the remainder of the Stockton Plateau which is adjacent to the Denniston Plateau is proposed for mining and it would keep the Denniston Plateau and the unique coal measure ecosystems which that plateau is home to as conservation land that is protected because of its distinctive character. These coal measure ecosystems their plants and animals are adapted to live in these very harsh growing conditions in the infertile acidic soils. We have got over 20 different species of earthworm on the plateau alone. That is more than exist on the rest of the West Coast. We have got giant carnivorous  
Powelliphanta 
 land snails which go right back to Gondwana. We have got a giant weta species. We have got species that were previously undiscovered like a moth species until the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society’s bioblitz. 
The Denniston Plateau is no place for this Government’s crazy economic development trash-the-environment plans. It is a place that should be protected as conservation land. It has got small pygmy plants. The Government fails to recognise that these species have value. It is miserly when it comes to investing in conservation. It has cut $54 million from the conservation budget yet it is spendthrift when it comes to propping up polluters like Fonterra shareholders and like coalminers by subsidising them through the very flawed emissions trading scheme. Yet it slashes money from conservation and it fails to recognise that our public protected lands are the essential infrastructure of our economy and that a healthy environment is the basis for a healthy economy. 
The Government needs to invest much more in conservation not the piddling expenditure that we have seen on Conservation Week this week. It is a reflection I guess of the overall miserliness with the conservation budget that this year the department has spent $3000 on Conservation Week. It used to spend $30000 each year on Conservation Week enabling it to educate a lot of children provide literature handbooks posters bookmarks and to have a lot more activity around New Zealand in reaching out and showing a lot of schoolchildren how special a lot of our conservation lands are and why we have to protect our forests our wetlands and our estuaries. That has been cut back as part of an overall cutback in conservation funding which is seeing failure to do adequate pest control failure to acquire new unprotected areas to add to the conservation estate and failure to do proper advocacy—the department being absent from a number of critical resource management hearings. Yet instead the Government is propping up polluters through the failed and flawed emissions trading scheme. 
A healthy environment is the basis of a healthy economy. Protecting places like the Denniston Plateau not opening them up to mining is protecting those areas for present and future generations for their values and their value for tourism.