Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Minister of Conservation): Tēnā koe Mr Chair thank you. The conservation spokesperson for the Opposition claimed that the former National Government was second to none in terms of conservation management. What a joke when it was under that Government that we saw major cuts to the department's budget the loss of over 220 staff and a series of restructurings. This Government is determined to recognise that nature is at the heart of our success as a country whether it's in primary production or in tourism or in providing the essential services that we need in order to exist like water. So we are investing more in conservation or plan to and I think what was shown in the 2016-17 year was some of the achievements of the department despite the underfunding.It was in 2016 that the Department of Conservation working with the Morgan Foundation the World Wide Fund for Nature New Zealand and Island Conservation set about doing a winter poisoning effort on the Antipodes Island remote from New Zealand to get rid of 200000 mice there. The mice monitoring team came back recently and declared that that operation was successful and there are now no more mice on Antipodes Island. That operation was critical for the threatened plants on the island for a lot of the invertebrates for the birds like the parakeets and the pipits and also for threatened species like the wandering albatross. Elsewhere in the South Georgia area mice have been predating on albatross chicks.Yet in question time today we had the Opposition spokesperson for conservation talking about why the Government isn't going ahead immediately with cameras on boats. National once again was doing something that was facile. It was trying to roll those out without looking at all of the technical difficulties for that. So on the one hand National is complaining that this Government's effort to ensure that cameras on boats actually work is not something to be supported yet National when it was in Government failed to do a review of the Hector's dolphin and Māui's dolphin threat management plan. Minister Nash and I have directed our officials to give urgency to that work in reviewing the threat management plan. If National had been at all concerned about dolphins it would have initiated that work instead of leaving it yet again to this Government to actually clean up after National.We had under National a failure to plan for the huge increase in tourism numbers in New Zealand—the extra million visitors that we're going to be getting a year. The Department of Conservation estimates that tourism is worth about $34 billion to New Zealand but the department has only got in revenue around $20 million. There has been a failure to plan a failure to be strategic about that tourism growth. It has left the department cleaning toilets and spending a lot of staff time and resources providing for visitors but not thinking as a country how those visitors move around and where regional infrastructure needs to be improved to handle them. That is again something that this Government is looking at: how we better plan for tourism so that regions can get the benefits of that and so that those visitors can contribute to the protection of the places they come to enjoy and also contribute more revenue to the Government of New Zealand.There's been a failure too in terms of kauri dieback. That was a major initiative under the last Government. Certainly there was money spent on upgrading tracks and providing cleaning stations but there was a real lack of dealing with the seriousness and the threat to trees like Tāne Māhuta. This Government Minister O'Connor and myself have committed to a national pest management strategy for kauri dieback again to fill the holes left under the last Government.Minister Parker talked about all these slogans in conservation: the War on Weeds" the "Battle for our Birds" "Predator Free 2050". Yes there was a tag line—"predator free by 2050"—but there has been no strategic plan to actually achieve that. One of the first things I've done as Minister of Conservation is ask officials to develop that strategic action plan rather than just having a PR tag line which wasn't supported by a clear process of how it's actually achieved. I've also made it really clear that that plan won't be involving experimentation with genetically modified organisms to try and eradicate mammalian predators. We have the tools to do it; we can. This Government will be investing in conservation and recognising the key role that the department plays."