Prosser Richard: Crown Pastoral Land (Rent for Pastoral Leases) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Prosser Richard: Crown Pastoral Land (Rent for Pastoral Leases) Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 01 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:1848. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First) 
: 
 I despair of the National Government in some regards and of the Minister in particular. He appears to have such a profoundly good grasp of the realities of high country farming as many members on the Government side do and a very good knowledge of how that farming operation is carried on and of the farming community yet they have managed to create such a terribly dreadful piece of legislation to address the rate at which rents are set for high country farms. 
 We have come to the end of the validation process for what is essentially an unnecessary and in some ways an onerous piece of legislation. The Crown Pastoral Land (Rent for Pastoral Leases) Amendment Bill is a bill that sets out to solve a problem that does not exist and it will very likely create more difficulties than its authors have envisaged at this time. The process by which rents for the high country leasehold land are set was not broken. It did not need to be fixed. It certainly did not need to be fixed in the manner in which this Government is attempting to fix it. We are not going forward with the changes this bill brings; we are going backwards. We are returning to the past to a system very much akin to the one that was abandoned in favour of the present system in 1979 because it was not working. This bill is a bit like asset sales. It is very much a case of “Well that didn’t work. Let’s try it again.”  
This bill fails to recognise the inputs made to the high country over the last century and a half by six and seven generations of farming families. It fails to recognise the value of those efforts in terms of preserving the iconic value of our most famous landscapes. It fails to recognise the sheer size and cost of the conservation operation that would be needed in order to maintain the high country in the state in which we have all come to recognise it if it were not for the efforts and inputs of those farmers and their workers. The Department of Conservation would literally need an army of staff in order to carry out the same tasks that the farmers in the high country currently perform at no cost to the taxpayer—quite literally thousands of workers with vehicles dogs horses helicopters tractors sprayers and guns for pest control; thousands of boots on the ground constantly and tirelessly working to maintain this environment for the benefit of the nation. We are not contemplating nor could we afford to contemplate funding the Department of Conservation to carry out this work in their stead.  
The Crown would not miss out on anything by leaving the rents as they currently are nor would the farmers get a free ride. The high country is not off limits to the public under the regime as it stands. As I mentioned in the Committee stage of this bill in 30 years of hunting and tramping I have never been denied access to a farmer’s land. All you have to do is go and ask. You have to know a little bit about when and where to go and ask and there are certain times of the year when you do not go and ask— 
Shane Ardern 
: It doesn’t read good Richard when you spend your whole speech talking in favour and then vote against. It’s not a good read. 
RICHARD PROSSER 
: There are good reasons for that Shane; there are good reasons for that. There would be no disadvantage to the taxpayer in leaving things as they are and no advantage to conservation.  
This bill is an attempt to extract more revenue than is reasonably or realistically possible from the tenuous operation of farming what is very marginal land in a very marginal environment. It is driven by ideology not by any actual need—financial need or economic need—to get more money. It would not cost the Government anything to leave the present rents at or even below the levels that the High Country Accord in 2009 determined were in many cases already too high. But it would cost the Government plenty in order to replicate what the farmers currently do if they were to be removed from the equation. In returning to a regime under which rents are set based on the stock-carrying capacity of the land rather than its unimproved value this bill fails to recognise that in times of downturn farmers will reduce their maintenance of the land and thus reduce the carrying capacity. The upshot of this will be twofold: the value of the land itself will fall both in terms of its monetary value as farmland and in terms of its iconic value to the nation; and as the carrying capacity falls along with this reduced maintenance so the dollar returns to the Crown will also fall and the Government will have shot itself in both feet.  
New Zealand First believes that the Crown should set the rents at a simple low level based on the unimproved value of the land recognising the contribution made to the nation by the activity of farming. This is a complicated system replacing a simple one and history will record it as being one that does not work either. This is a mean and an unnecessary bill and New Zealand First opposes it in its entirety. Thank you.