Sage Eugenie: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 28 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5367. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe  Mr Chair. Thank you. Tuarua ki ngā mema o tō tātou Whare tēnā koutou katoa.[Secondly greetings to you all the members of our House.]Appointing one threatened species ambassador is not going to solve our biodiversity crisis. The Government has done very little in this Budget to tackle that. The Department of Conservation is not being adequately funded to tackle the conservation challenges that it faces and the dump of Budget documents was very revealing. It showed that Treasury as explained to it obviously by the Minister of Finance does not believe that increasing the funding for the department to assist kiwi is consistent with the Government’s overall priorities. The Cabinet may have overruled that but it is clear that the Government has not got a priority of protecting our biodiversity.Since Aotearoa New Zealand was settled 800 years ago 53 bird species have gone extinct 15 of those since 1850. Currently we rank the worst in the United Nations for the protection of threatened species. We have more species threatened with extinction than any other country. Yet what did we have in this Budget? No increase for the Department of Conservation; in fact there was a reduction of $7 million in the funding that the department puts towards the management of natural heritage. This Government despite the Biodiversity Strategy having a clear objective that all Government agencies agreed to in 2000 of maintaining our biodiversity of halting the decline is failing to invest adequately in the protection of our native plant species and wildlife. So the Department of Conservation has been left to manage a third of New Zealand’s land area and over 40000 square kilometres of marine reserves on a pitiful budget.Last year for example the department was supposed to be managing 159 threatened species actively. What happened? The department was so distracted by the restructuring and the loss of staff with technical expertise that it was able to actively manage only 104 threatened species. What is the target for this financial year? Managing 104 threatened species actively. The department is winding back its goals because the Government and this Minister is not investing adequately in baseline conservation funding. National is completely out of touch with what makes New Zealand special and out of touch with how our wild landscapes and our native plants and wildlife contribute to our identity as New Zealanders and how much Kiwis value them.We had the Department of Conservation recognised recently as the eighth most influential brand in New Zealand up there with Facebook and Google and surpassed only by TradeMe and Air New Zealand as other New Zealand entities. The 1000 respondents in that Ipsos survey were asked to score 100 national and international brands on five factors: leading edge trustworthiness engagement citizenship and presence. The fact that the Department of Conservation scored so highly shows how much Kiwis value conservation yet National has looked the other way when it comes to investing in the public sector in conservation.What it is also failing to do is use the Resource Management Act. A lot of our threatened species are on private land so the decisions that Māori landowners and private landowners make about what happens there have a major impact on whether species like grasshoppers like whio and like a lot of our native fish have got better prospects or not for their future. Yet we have seen this Government proposing to spend Nick Smith nearly $21 million which is allocated in this Budget for improving resource management for providing more advice and more tools. Yet this will not be going to strengthen the Resource Management Act in relation to indigenous biodiversity.Given the National Government’s past plans to gut the Resource Management Act we are likely to see it further weakened and see the powers of private landholders to make whatever decisions they like increased. In fact some of the past plans that the Minister had to change the Resource Management Act have included providing for councils to compensate private landowners if the council includes rules in the plan that affect the ability of private landowners to use their land. That will hinder the prospects of threatened species. It will hinder our biodiversity not support it.Under National private property rights reign supreme. We have had major evidence of that in a recent report that Environment Canterbury has put out. It showed how agricultural intensification is destroying areas of riparian wetland and shrubland habitat along the margins of internationally important braided rivers in Canterbury—rivers like the Waiau River the Rangitata the Hakatere River or the Ashburton River. Alongside those rivers those areas of wetlands and shrublands are some of the only areas on the Canterbury Plains where indigenous species can survive. They are habitat for kowhai for cabbage tree for our native brooms for some of the divaricating mat plants like the Raoulia. They have not been cultivated so they remain as habitat. Yet between 1990 and 2012 over 11000 hectares of those areas were destroyed and converted to pasture. That is an average of 530 hectares each year.The Resource Management Act is supposed to provide some protection for significant indigenous habitats and significant indigenous vegetation. It is supposed to control the environmental effects of land use. Yet this grasp for more pasture to increase the milk supply is leading to the decimation of remaining wild nature and indigenous habitats on the plains. National has done absolutely nothing about that. The Department of Conservation and Land Information New Zealand have failed to enforce the Resource Management Act even though 40 percent of that 11000 hectares was actually Crown land or conservation land or Environment Canterbury reserve. The Resource Management Act needs strengthening to ensure that it protects our biodiversity not further weakening as National is proposing in its reforms.One of the other areas where this Government is failing our biodiversity also under the Resource Management Act is the recently released National Environmental Standard for Plantation Forestry. Although it is desirable to have some consistency in the rules that apply to forestry across the country we are not going to get it under this national environmental standard. That is because it has got very weak provisions to protect indigenous biodiversity. It has got quite clear rules around the shading of plantations on roads to prevent icing yet it allows exotic plantations to be established in indigenous grasslands and in shrublands and it provides the requirement for resource consent only if these areas have been identified as significant in district and regional plans. Most councils have got a very limited list of significant natural areas. They cover only a tiny proportion of the indigenous habitats in the district. So this National Environmental Standard for Plantation Forestry is going to provide a means for private landowners to destroy more areas without getting a resource consent.Again with the biodiversity crisis the Government could have picked up the National Policy Statement on Indigenous Biodiversity and made sure we had some consistency in rules around the country in terms of vegetation clearance control. It has failed to do that. In 2011 it could have progressed it but it dropped it like the proverbial hot potato because who opposed it? Landholders and business interests. So National has failed to implement the national policy statement under the Resource Management Act on indigenous biodiversity. There have been two goes at that yet this Minister and her colleague Nick Smith have totally dropped the ball. That allows a permissive approach to the destruction of habitat on private land to continue.This Government is out of touch. It does not recognise that Kiwis really value our indigenous plants and wildlife and our wild landscapes. It does not recognise that we need to protect these areas as the basis of a healthy economy. It allows private property rights to prevail. It thinks that appointing a threatened species ambassador is going to address the major challenges that we face with the highest number of threatened species in the world. It fails to invest in the Department of Conservation by increasing its funding. Instead it cuts its funding. It is all just about optics as my colleague Russel Norman talked about in an earlier speech—the optics of a threatened species ambassador but not the substance of investing in conservation and ensuring that our law actually protects our wild places and our indigenous habitats on private land.