McKelvie Ian: Conservation (Natural Heritage Protection) Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMcKelvie Ian: Conservation (Natural Heritage Protection) Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 04 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13292. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IANMcKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): This bill the Conservation (Natural Heritage Protection) Bill is brought to the House by that very solid member from Waitaki Jacqui Dean in an effort to put a stop to the exploitation and theft of our living treasures in this country and also the environment they live in. It is designed to do this by imposing more severe penalties.There is a very pertinent piece of I guess Māori folklore that goes as follows:toitū te whenuawhatungarongaro te tangata.[Land remains while people disappear.]It was not very well pronounced but I will tell you what it means seeing as I cannot pronounce it. What it means is that the land is always there and people are merely passing by. I guess that is most pertinent when it comes to this piece of legislation because in fact the land will always be there provided we look after it and we are merely passing by.The bill is designed to stop those passing by from damaging plundering and pillaging that which has always been there. We like all other people around the world have spent generations damaging the environment we live in. We knew not what we did I guess. Now we have such good information scientific evidence visual evidence and history to understand what we need to do to protect what we have left for future generations. This bill contributes to that effort.I want to spend a little bit of time tonight however talking about some of the treasures that exist in theRangitīkei and I will start with the blue duck or whio which is endemic and native to New Zealand with no other duck like it in the world. These ducks are one of only three species of bird in the world that inhabit fast-flowing clean water. They are amazing to watch very pretty and clever. However they have been decimated by predators—stoats possums cats and of course human beings—throughout our history. There are only some 2500 of them left today. They exist throughout the northernRangitīkei and of course a number of other places in New Zealand. They are about evenly spread I think between the North Island and the South Island. They do however exist in some of our most beautiful parts of New Zealand and the least accessible parts of New Zealand. The reason they live there is I guess that they have been chased there.There are many enthusiastic volunteers who spend hours and hours protecting these ducks and their environment. This bill will assist them as smuggling the ducks out of the country will no longer be as easy or as attractive. I touched on the volunteers because I wanted to briefly talk about some of the comments that have come from the other side of the House in particular about the funding and staff cuts that those members perceive have happened to conservation. And not only to conservation I might add; they go on about the same sorts of cuts that have occurred in the Ministry for Primary Industries and the police. Those members entirely fail to take into account efficiency and new technology—that is most pertinent in the police situation—and alternative sources of money. They even fail to account for an improved quality of staff that we now employ in a lot of Government departments. Not only that but also we have a significant lift in volunteer support for many of these initiatives and I talked a minute ago about the volunteers and the work they do around the blue duck and a number of our other environmental features.In the south of theRangitīkei theManawatū River runs to the sea at Foxton through that estuary area which is actually in Nathan Guy’s electorate—but I will claim to behis neighbour—and which we have also plundered historically by diverting the river and all sorts of other acts. This area hosts birds from the Arctic rare and migratory birds: the godwit the red knot the Pacific plover the royal spoonbill and the uniquewrybill. Anyone who has seen a bunch of royal spoonbills will realise that they are quite a sight—massive great white birds with long black beaks.Hon Todd McClay: A flock.IANMcKELVIE: A flock. Thank you.Chris Hipkins: When’s he going to get to the interesting bit?IANMcKELVIE: Other very relevant features of this area include flax. It would be very useful to have a bit of flax in here at the moment. I could use it productively. But none the less—Mr Deputy Speaker you will see what I am talking about—it is one of the pieces of our history that is most important to us. TheRangitīkei like many other parts of New Zealand has those features and bits of our history that are most important to us. It is hugely important that we preserve them and this bill goes a little way towards doing that.I want to also just touch on Eugenie Sage’s comment that the Government is moving the balance away from nature and in favour of development. I want to just put a little case to you in respect of the proposedRuataniwha Dam. We have spent 150 years in that area getting the environment to where we have got it to now. Whether that is good bad or indifferent is a matter of opinion but what the dam has the potential to do which I think is totally underestimated by its opponents is to give us the ability to rectify a whole lot of things that we have damaged through the way we have farmed used our land and used our country over the last 150 years. If you think about it putting a dam in that area gives that area the opportunity to significantly increase production for a start but also to significantly increase the amenity value to make the rivers in that area much more reliable to clean them up and to make them more friendly for fish as it will be able to take the peaks and lows out of play.I think that because of the way we have moved over the last 150 years with our environment we are not going to fix it by letting it go back from whence it came. We have to help it get back to where it came from. I am a great supporter of the changes to the Resource Management Act and changes to all sorts of processes that will allow us to get our environment going in a manner that I think will help New Zealand’s future will put our environment back to where it came from and will create the opportunity for our rarer species to continue to live and to breed significantly. Again referring to the blue duck that is one of our rare birds that has certainly increased in population in the last few years and it is going to continue to increase in population if we continue to manage it in the manner we have.One gets a great appreciation of one’s own importance in life when you consider that a minute gecko is worth $100000 and a 60-year-old male is probably worth only food value. I think that really sums up the need for this bill and the importance that it has got in our future. This is a good piece of legislation and I congratulate Jacqui Dean and Nicky Wagner and her Local Government and Environment Committee on getting the bill as far as they have in such good order. I commend this bill to the House.