Mathers MojoWILDLIFE (POWERS) AMENDMENT BILLThird ReadingDebate resumed from 6 December 2016.MOJO MATHERS (Green): Good evening. It is a pleasure to be able to resume my call on this bill. It has been a while—nearly 2 months—since I started speaking on this so I think I will just repeat some of the key points that I made back then. As I said then the Green Party members are pleased to be supporting this bill but we are also frustrated. We are frustrated because it ignores the elephant in the room. Of course the enforcement powers for our wildlife officers and for Department of Conservation (DOC) rangers will be helpful in some situations but it is frustrating that National continues to ignore the fact that it is absolutely starving DOC of funds. DOC is underfunded and under-resourced. DOC's budget is down by nearly $55 million a year since National came into power in 2008 and that is a serious amount of money. We have seen massive job cuts right across DOC which the Government claims are part of moving to a partnership model. That is just a fancy way of saying that it is not going to fund DOC properly to do its core work.Basically pest control and maintenance of huts and tracks have suffered as a result. We have already seen that with the Inland Pack Track on the West Coast of the South Island which has been closed since Cyclone Ita and it appears that there are no plans to reopen it because it would take too much work to reopen the track. That is a serious loss to the people of the coast and to the visitors going there. If we do not have enough rangers on the ground making sure that we have got pests under control making sure that our facilities are well maintained then we are going to risk tarnishing the reputation that brings people there.The Government has made a wonderful ambitious goal of eradicating all possums rats and stoats by 2050 which is laudable but the fact remains that it has not developed a plan to properly fund that work. How is DOC supposed to support the goal of pest eradication when it has lost more than 40 of its skilled highly trained rangers in the last 5 years? It cannot. It is increasingly reliant on volunteers and private funding to do this core work which is the wrong way around. The pressure on the remaining DOC staff is enormous. They are constantly being asked to do more with less and that is not OK. Our species and our natural environment are suffering as a result.If you do not have enough rangers on the ground monitoring and checking what is going on then all the enforcement power in the world is not going to be enough. It is not going to be enough because there simply will not be people there on the ground to witness the offences so giving them more power to do anything about it is kind of beside the point. We know that smuggling is happening but it is going to take far more to protect our native wildlife than chucking a handful of extra enforcement powers at DOC.The Green Party is absolutely committed to restoring and increasing funding for DOC as a first step towards ensuring that our native species thrive and survive. Without sufficient rangers and people on the ground the basic work of conservation does not happen. Thank you.