Sage EugenieEUGENIE SAGE (Green): E Te Tiamana tēnā koe ki a koutou huri noa i Te Whare tēnā koutou katoa. Ngā mihi o Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori ki a tātou katoa.[Tēnā koe Mr Chairman and greetings to you all throughout the Chamber. Accolades of Māori Language Week to us all.]I am pleased to take a call on the Primary Sector Estimates and I would like to talk about one of the things in Vote Lands that the Minister did not talk about and that is tenure review in the Crown pastoral leases of the South Island. There was $51 million spent on this last year and there is $131 million proposed for spending this year. In the Mackenzie Basin we have a collaborative group that the Government set up that reached an agreement about over 100000 hectares of the Mackenzie Basin needing protection because of its high landscape and biodiversity values. We have seen a major expansion of dairying and irrigation in the basin and a destruction of some of the major areas of the tussock grasslands and shrublands that give the basin its outstanding landscape character and which attracts many of the tourists and provides habit for threatened species like the robust grasshopper and for a lot of braided river birds. Yet through Vote Lands and through tenure review this Government is failing to ensure that we are protecting areas of the Mackenzie Basin particularly on the basin floor despite all the parties having come together and highlighted the need for this. We have seen tenure review on properties like the Wolds where virtually all of the pastoral lease is proposed for privatisation and freeholding and this is despite the provisions in the Crown Pastoral Land Act which provide for land of significant inherent values to be returned to full Crown ownership and management by the Department of Conservation. So once again in terms of the way the Government is allocating funding despite $121 million being provided in this vote for tenure review that is likely to be going to leaseholders to allow only small areas to be protected as conservation land. We have seen under this Government an increasing use of covenants rather than restoration to full Crown ownership and protection as conservation land. It is really disappointing because we have seen tourism grow overtaking dairying in the primary sector in terms of the export returns and yet areas such as Mount Mary on the Wolds which provides an outstanding area to view the Mackenzie Basin and is a major area of ecological significance landscape importance and recreational value in terms of people being able to walk up to the summit being proposed for freeholding. So tenure review is failing to achieve the objectives of the Crown Pastoral Land Act in terms of protecting areas of significant inherent value. I would also like to speak on what Vote Primary Industries and Food Safety is doing in terms of the area of irrigation. We had a previous speaker the chair of the Primary Production Committee talking about how Crown Irrigation Investments the Crown's irrigation company is providing seed funding for some irrigation schemes. But we have a major portion of the vote over $100 million going to the Crown irrigation company as a major way of providing cash handouts to these irrigation schemes. That is public money that has been taken from the sale of our energy company and is now going into subsidising irrigation allowing private sector interests such as the big irrigation companies and landholders to take a public asset—rivers lakes water from our aquifers—and effectively use that to privatise the benefits. They get the benefits of the increase in value when land is irrigated and yet there is no resource rental to provide any return to the community. So the Government is taking over $100 million for its irrigation company instead of investing that money in much-needed research into better understanding the whole basis of our primary production sector—understanding soils understanding how climate change is going to affect our primary sector and understanding the distribution of pests. We need to understand our natural systems which are the fundamental basis of our horticulture primary production fisheries and all of those export sectors. Yet what do we have instead? We have the Government failing to recognise that a healthy environment is the basis of a healthy economy and instead we have this massive spend on irrigation. One of goals of the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) is to increase the number of hectares under irrigation by 220000 hectares and yet in the answers to select committee questions we saw quite clearly that even though the company is called Crown Irrigation Investments this is not about getting a commercial return for the Crown; it is about handouts for irrigation. MPI said: Crown Irrigation Investments Ltd's focus is on investing in schemes that are expected to be commercially viable in the long term but the initial shortfall in irrigator uptake makes it difficult to fully source finance from the capital markets." MPI would not disclose the commercial return that Crown Irrigation Investments Ltd is expected to get. It is said that that was commercially sensitive. So this is all about handouts. We have got the Crown potentially investing in schemes like Ruataniwha which TrustPower and Ngāi Tahu in 2014 decided was too much of a financial risk and that they were not going to get an adequate financial return so they would not invest. So all the funding for these schemes is likely to come from the public purse through the Crown's irrigation company. ACC is reportedly part of a consortium to also invest in the scheme and the Hawke's Bay Regional Council through the Hawke's Bay Regional Investment Company Ltd is also being forced to stump up public money for the scheme which cannot attract adequate private sector investment. It is a nonsense that this public money is being put at risk in such a scheme particularly because it will have a significant impact on water quality affecting the Tukituki catchment the estuary coastal processes and significantly increasing nutrient pollution. One of the other interesting things that came back from MPI in response to select committee questions was that MPI does not take into account greenhouse gas emissions when it assesses applications for irrigation funding. We have seen the Irrigation Acceleration Fund now rolled into Crown Irrigation Investments with no account of the impacts on our climate and this is when agriculture accounts for 47 percent of climate emissions and this is when for a successful agricultural sector we need a stable climate. We know that the risk of fires will increase as the climate warms. We know that pests will increase and their impact will spread. Yet the Government does not seem to be recognising the basis for a healthy sector. We need a healthy climate. So it does not even take greenhouse gas emissions into account. It does not take into account how these subsidies for irrigation are going to create climate pollution. We want a healthy primary sector. We want a stable climate to ensure that. That is why the Government's priorities are all wrong in terms of spending up large on irrigation and agricultural intensification while failing to take account of the impacts on the climate. This Government is letting countries like Ireland get a march on New Zealand through its Origin Green scheme. Ireland has got thorough sustainability initiatives—which are accredited and which are audited—which all of their primary producers sign up to. But instead this Government's goal in the primary space is simply to double exports by 2025 without ensuring that we are protecting our "100% Pure" green brand by ensuring that all of the industry looks at sustainability initiatives and that we invest in that rather than in handouts for more irrigation more climate pollution and more water pollution."