Street Maryan: Game Animal Council Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeStreet Maryan: Game Animal Council Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 19 November 2013. Volume:695;Page:14871. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour): I wanted to rise to speak on Part 1 of the Game Animal Council Bill. I am very pleased that the Minister in the chair at the moment is the Hon Murray McCully. I presume that he elected to do his duty during the course of this bill because of course he will have some interest in and knowledge about elephants. I look forward to him taking a call. Unfortunately elephants are not game animals and they should not be even though they are being slaughtered at a rate of about 100 a day in parts of Africa. However perhaps with that wonderful gain of an elephant in exchange for not upsetting the President of Sri Lanka the Minister might infact get us a bear from Russia in exchange for the human rights of gay and lesbian athletes as they participate in the Winter Olympics in Russia. We look forward to another unhelpful contribution.I have been on the Local Government and Environment Committee for most of the last year. I have never been privy to this debate because it all happened last year. So I have been listening very carefully. This bill has taken a long time to get to the House and here we have it under urgency. It is another one of these measures that the Government uses to appease disgruntled coalition partners. Of course we know that the Hon Peter Dunne has been disgruntled recently with the different treatment that he seems to have received compared with the Hon John Banks. That can be the only reason for this bill appearing under urgency because the work on it started in 2008. There was a regulatory impact statement in 2011. I presume that the Local Government and Environment Committee debated it in 2012 and here we are at the end of 2013 and suddenly it is urgent—suddenly it is urgent. I am afraid that the arguments that the Hon Peter Dunne put up—that certain things might expire before this date—actually do not wash because if you have the work starting in 2008 and coming to fruition only now in 2013 what exactly were the expiry dates? What exactly was going to expire and when that caused this to be brought in under urgency? I would like to know that.I have been listening very carefully to colleagues on both sides of the Committee who have been talking about the deliberations in the select committee. That select committee is chaired well by Nicky Wagner and by all accounts there was a great deal of work and effort that went into finding a suitable solution and a great deal of application by the members to the submitters and their submissions. But it seems to me that with Supplementary Order Paper 395 being introduced which deletes the reference to recreational hunters and simply talks about hunters and hunting rather than recreational hunters and hunting something is happening here that goes across what was discussed in the course of the select committee’s deliberation.Earlier in this debate the Green Party member Eugenie Sage was saying that she thought that recreational hunters were now with the introduction of this Supplementary Order Paper being sold a pup in this bill at which point the Hon Peter Dunne interjected and said “Look at clause 8—look at clause 8.” Well one can read clause 8 as I have and see that none of Eugenie Sage’s concerns is allayed by the content of clause 8. Clause 8 talks about the council membership. The Hon Peter Dunne when he got up a moment ago referred to that. Clause 8 says that the Minister has to appoint members to the council and that they have got to be people whom the Minister considers to “have collectively knowledge of and experience in relation to matters relevant to the functions of the Council.” Well that is a no-brainer. Then it goes on to say: “Knowledge and experience that are relevant include knowledge of and experience relating to (a) in the case of game animals—(i) recreational hunting: (ii) commercial hunting: (iii) deer farming: (iv) safari park operations:” and so on. But it does not say anywhere that those interests must be represented. It says that the knowledge and experience relevant to these areas should be present on the council but it does not say that recreational hunters should have a representative. I dare say that people who are commercial hunters may well have been recreational hunters at one stage in their lives and so they can claim to have knowledge about recreational hunting but there is no guarantee of representation.If the Minister of Conservation Nick Smith is so confident that his Supplementary Order Paper in deleting the word “recreational” actually does not do recreational hunters any harm then why not at the same time put in an amendment to clause 8 that says that these interests should be represented and not just have people who have knowledge of and experience that is relevant to those sectors? Why not havesomething that represents the concerns that were described so fully by Ruth Dyson as part of the fabric of the select committee’s discussion? It seems to me that the recreational hunters are not being provided for at all adequately. Firstly they are having several specific references to recreational hunters and hunting deleted from the bill and they are not having that compensated for by ensuring that representatives of recreational hunters are included amongst the membership of the Game Animal Council.In addition to that I still want to reiterate that this was not the only legislative solution available to the Government. Instead of escalating this into a monster that has its own statute why not simply amend existing legislation like the Wild Animal Control Act and ensure that there would be an advisory committee which would not have the costs and would not have the tensions that will now be entrenched because of this bill but would have ways of ensuring that the voices of hunters could be heard through the Wild Animal Control Act and the protections available there? This expensive option was not the only one available to the Government and it should have looked at others.The regulatory impact statement says that the non-regulatory options for achieving the objectives had not been explored or analysed further because the decision had been taken to proceed with the establishment of the Game Animal Council. The Department of Conservation says in the regulatory impact analysis of 2011—that is how urgent this bill is—that the Game Animal Council could be established either under section 5 of the Wild Animal Control Act or through an amendment to the Wild Animal Control Act. So why take the kind of nuclear option in making this a bill of its own? The Minister has not addressed that issue and I invite him to do so. I do not understand why the most difficult and the most expensive option has been chosen by the Government. Thank you.