Dyson Ruth: Conservation (Natural Heritage Protection) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDyson Ruth: Conservation (Natural Heritage Protection) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 25 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13729. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I am really pleased to be able to take a call or two in the Committee stage of the Conservation (Natural Heritage Protection) Bill. Can I begin by commending the member Jacqui Dean in whose name the bill stands before the House and say that it is a very good bill. I appreciate the way that she engaged with the Local Government and Environment Committee and I particularly appreciate the fact that she acknowledged my colleague Maryan Street for her work. I think that is a very good attitude and a very good basis on which to progress the bill.Labour will certainly be giving its support to the bill. It does things that are sensible. Even though it was a good bill to start with it was substantially improved and it was made even better at the select committee. I think that is also a tribute to all the select committee members.Iain Lees-Galloway: It’s like peace is breaking out.Hon RUTH DYSON: Yes perhaps we could quit now. Peace seems to have broken out as my colleagues say. [Interruption] No I am enjoying it. It is a good bill and the select committee did good work as well. So as I say it is a pleasure to support this bill.I wonder what went through the minds of the members or the leaders of the House—the Hon Gerry Brownlee the Hon Anne Tolley and the Hon Steven Joyce—when this bill was due to come up on this particular night. Well I am sure that they would have seen the title of the bill and thought “Conservation? Actually I think we’ve had enough discussion about conservation in the House in the last little while.” because of course the Minister of Conservation the Hon Nick Smith has been figuring quite highly in the last 2 weeks as a result of his inconsistent representations to the House and to the public. So it is good that this bill—even though it deals with the Minister of Conservation’s legislation—is going to be so well supported and that comments that are made about it are going to be consistent rather than highly questionable.The member Jacqui Dean went through the bill in quite some detail. I think that if you go from the starting point of the fact that this is a member’s bill rather than a Government bill and look at what the member Jacqui Dean sought to do it is a really sensible place to start because the penalties regime was clearly outdated and clearly inconsistent. This bill brings it into a much more realistic state where the penalties that are imposed on people will serve the purpose. The penalties will give those people a wake-up call. They will make them pay the price for any damage that they have done.We can go into the details of what the penalties might do later but for any of the penalties that are incurred they now have a penalty that is considered relevant by this Parliament to the damage that has been done. I think that is a very good thing.At the select committee Maryan Street proposed that a new Part 6 be added to the penalty regime so that the Marine Mammals Protection Act 1978 was also updated in the same way as the other pieces of legislation. As Jacqui Dean has noted that was a move that was innovative. So I think that the Hon Maryan Street should be congratulated on that forethought but also that the select committee should be congratulated on supporting it.There is a frustration that is often shared in this Parliament about the framing of the conservation debate. I think it is one that is worthy of mention at the moment given that this is the topic before us. It is certainly topical in a number of other areas where the current Government has seen conservation and the environment actually as being something that needs to be balanced off against proposals and against things that might give us economic gain. In my view that is not the appropriate way to view the environment conservation and the economy because if you lose some of the value of the conservation estate it is gone for ever. The overall value to the economy of our conservation estate is very high. New Zealand has a lot of things to offer but our biggest attraction is our natural environment. People come to New Zealand because of that. They enjoy it they go back home and tell other people about it and it is something that many other countries envy. We enjoy so much in New Zealand because of the land the environment that we have around us and these are often things that can be enjoyed at no cost which again is something that other countries are very envious of.So we need to do our best to always offer protection. If you start your frame of thinking with “Well we have got some conservation values here but we have got some potential economic gain there and those need to be balanced off.” then I think you are likely to get the wrong answer. In my view you need to say that there are some things that are so precious that it is our responsibility whether in law or just from a moral standpoint to protect those values and those precious parts of our country—whether it is the water whether it is the land or whether it is other landscapes and fauna and flora. That is the frame that I think we need to bring to the conservation debate.This bill actually contributes in many ways because it comes from the starting point of saying that people who break the law people who do damage should actually have a penalty attached to that action that reflects the upset that New Zealand society feels at their action. The previous penalties were wildly out of date and also inconsistent depending on what action was taken and also where it was taken. So that did not give a strong message about the value of the conservation estate in the same way as the National Party’s frame of balancing up conservation versus economic development sends the wrong message to the public of New Zealand. The message that we should be giving is that we are the guardians of our land and of our sea. We are responsible for what future generations will have to enjoy and that is a responsibility that we should take very seriously.I want to conclude by also noting the fantastic work that the officials did on the committee. It is often I think a pretty frustrating task being an official who is dedicated to the work that they are doing. They are in the main and I have seen very few exceptions to this high quality public servants—oh they should be sitting down here in the Chamber. There are some really nice green seats down the front that officials are able to use sometimes but these particular officials are shy and they are getting more embarrassed by the minute as they are clearly in the range. We cannot refer to where they are of course because that is against Standing Orders but they are certainly within earshot of this.On this bill I want to commend the quality of the work from the officials. I know that officials can often get frustrated by what they see as game-playing with important pieces of legislation that they might have worked very hard on. This bill would have come as a surprise to them because it was a member’s bill not a Government bill. I think that the thought they gave to it and the contribution that they made really allowed as I said earlier quite substantial changes to be made during the select committee process which were unanimously agreed and which will now be progressed through the Committee. I know that the Department of Conservation officials particularly have had a really hard time in the last little while. The department’s funding has been cut back over the last 4 years. It has had big restructuring and for the staff who are there these have been pretty stressful and trying times. The most recent incident was where there had been a whistleblower who—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! That is not part of the bill.Hon RUTH DYSON: —raised the issue of the submission from the Department of Conservation on theRuataniwha Dam.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Concentrate on the bill.Hon RUTH DYSON: Of course there will be further uncertainty within the department so for those officials to come to the select committee to look at this bill and to support us in the way they did is not just a commendation for their professionalism but also a recognition of what else is happening in their lives.With those highly relevant comments I want to again commend the member for her vision in introducing this bill and to thank the select committee members for their substantive work on it.