Sage Eugenie: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: General Debate[Sitting date: 09 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6437. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Kia ora tātou katoa. Well in Minister Tolley’s speech talking about getting the job done I did not hear the environment mentioned once. This Government’s economic policy which focuses on short-term extractivism is not building a long-term sustainable future for New Zealanders or the New Zealand economy.I would like to talk today about our indigenous plants and wildlife because they are some of our most significant and special features. They are a result of our long and isolated evolution and the diversity of our land and seascapes. New Zealand is a global hotspot for biodiversity because we have so many species that are found here and nowhere else in the world. We have got very high levels of endemism. All of our skinks and geckos are found only in New Zealand and more than 90 percent of our insects a quarter of our birds and 80 percent of our higher plants. Half a dozen islands in the Hauraki Gulf have got higher levels of endemism than all of Great Britain. We also have a biodiversity crisis with far too many species threatened with extinction and this Government is doing far too little about it.We have the Minister of Conservation sitting in the front row head down failing to invest adequately in funding the Department of Conservation to protect our special places on conservation land and protect our threatened species. Conservation funding for natural heritage management was cut by $7 million this year. The Government is failing to ensure that the law is enforced properly whether it is the Forests Act or the Resource Management Act. It is a Government that proposes to change the Resource Management Act to weaken nature and strengthen private property rights.The Treaty bills that we addressed in this House this morning sought to redress some of the gross injustices of the colonial era and the harm that the Crown allowed to be done to Māori and to their Treaty rights. But we are still harming the first inhabitants of these lands: ruru kākā mānuka kauri. What we need is stronger law and much greater investment in conservation and a complete change from this Government’s agenda of short-term extractivism.Under the Resource Management Act the recognition and protection of the natural character of wetlands the protection of significant indigenous vegetation and significant habitats of indigenous fauna are identified as matters of national importance. Yet what do we have in Northland? We have the plundering of wetlands for ancient swamp kauri. We have the peat mining operation in Kaimaumau wetland and we have the Government failing to provide guidance to councils on how these legal responsibilities should be applied.There was work done on a National Policy Statement on Indigenous Biodiversity—that stopped under this Government in 2011. After public submissions the Minister at the time stopped it. Why? Because he said there were issues including the impact on private landowners. Once again it was the Government putting the interests of private landowners first. Three years later the Government decided to restart that work. But I am not confident that we will get better protection for our special native plants and wildlife under any national guidance from this Government because of what we are seeing in the National Environmental Standard for Plantation Forestry which has been released recently.Forestry is a major export earner but it occurs in areas where there can be significant environmental impacts. This proposed National Environmental Standard on Plantation Forestry is a missed opportunity to encourage a smart sustainable forest industry in the long term while protecting our natural environment. It promotes afforestation at the expense of our indigenous species. It has got a very permissive regime which allows areas of tussock grasslands and shrub lands to be overplanted with exotics except in areas that councils have specifically identified as significant in their plan.Forest and Bird has called the proposed standard woefully inadequate in the way it deals with the protection of wetlands and high-conservation value areas. It is inadequate too in terms of the way it deals with riparian buffers. They are well recognised as safeguarding waterways yet it is proposing only 5-metre buffers around smaller streams and around wetlands.This Government claims that it is providing national guidance but what it does is provide guidance that strengthens the rights of private landowners and does not adequately recognise our distinctive biodiversity and our important landscapesand protect them so that we ensure that a strong economy is based on strong environmental foundations.