Simpson Scott; Parker DavidHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you Madam Chair. I'd like turn to the Government's Jobs for Nature programme and ask two or three questions in that regard.First of all Minister there is a significant underspend in the funding that's been allocated and I'm keen to know what the Government's plans are to address the underspend. The second question relates to the way the metrics are recorded in terms of the outputs for the programme. A fairly blunt metric has been used that just seems to allocate number of people employed and number of jobs created. My question is: why is it not that the metric should be expressed in the number of paid hours worked and the duration of the employment of each person employed? Then finally I'm keen to know whether there is a better measurement or why environmental outcomes other than just statistics such as X number of land under plant pest control in terms of hectares land under animal pest control in terms of hectares area under wilding conifer control under hectares. Why can't there be a more sophisticated analysis of the environmental outcomes that the Government seeks to achieve and the programme has or has not achieved?Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Look I'm aware that the select committee has looked into this a little and I'm also aware that there has been a review of this programme by a Government agency the name of which I forget just as I stand on my feet. This project has actually been going very very well and actually was well reviewed. It had some funding streams that were a combination of existing funding lines for the Department of Conservation and the Ministry for the Environment and the Ministry for Primary Industries and perhaps Land Information New Zealand I think as well. In addition to that during the time when we thought COVID was going to have such a terribly bad economic outcome we also had a vote of additional money from Parliament to augment those amounts to bulk it up. The results have been outstanding in my opinion. There was an article in Stuff just within the last week from a town on the West Coast which had its tourism industry decimated. And they made the point that they are able to make ends meet because of the Jobs for Nature employment opportunities that we created around Fox and Franz Josef. They were mainly on that occasion led by the Department of Conservation. The member is right that there have been a wide range of projects funded. Some of them have been clearing wilding pines—an issue that we haven't got under control in New Zealand but are now making some progress on. There was money put into wallaby control; we've got a problem with wallabies spreading in parts of the South Island. In respect of some of the other work there's been a lot of work done around planting the margins of waterways. Initially some of that was the Department of Conservation; more latterly additional funding has been provided through the Ministry for the Environment. As to the way in which there is a computation of jobs you have to have something that's robust that Opposition parties and others can critique. So there was a metric chosen of the number of hours worked and that was computed into jobs by dividing the hours into a full-time job and you know the outcomes have been very good. There have been millions and millions of plants planted around New Zealand. I was just last week at another one of these projects in respect of the Porirua Estuary. There are many tens of thousands of tonnes of sediment getting into that estuary every year ruining the pipi beds the mussels and clogging the estuary up with sediment—a combination of sources including Transmission Gully actually where there were quite a few breaches of their consents plus problems around some of the subdivisional activity not being done as well as it could be. And the answers to that are quite complex including riparian margin planting plus better management of those events that create risks of sediment loss. That's another good project.In respect of the issue that the member asked as to whether some targets are not being met the fencing target for the first year of the projects was 740 kilometres of fencing—sorry the target was 942 kilometres; the actual fencing was 740 kilometres and the recipients of funding who are contracted to do this work and still have to do it but have been delayed in their work said that there was a shortage in contractors in part because the job outturn as a consequence of COVID was not as bad as was initially feared.