Salesa JennyJENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): I would like to acknowledge the Local Government and Environment Committee as well as the officials who have put a lot of work into ensuring that this legislation comes to the House. Labour supports this bill. This is a bill that will reform the Wildlife Act of 1953 with the objective of giving full-time DOC rangers new enforcement powers when they encounter offences. Some of these new powers would allow DOC rangers the following power: the power to be able to seize a whole lot of evidence. Currently DOC rangers have the power to stop vehicles and to stop vessels as well as bags in transit. However this new legislation will allow them to stop a person and as previously discussed by my colleague Nanaia Mahuta as well as the Minister the Hon Maggie Barry and Scott Simpson this is a power that is not given lightly—the fact that we are giving people the power to be able to stop someone else.At the select committee a lot of submitters were very concerned about the length of time that DOC rangers would be able to stop individuals for whether they would be able to stop people under reasonable circumstances and whether they would have reasonable grounds before they would stop a person. We believe that the amendments that have come through after the select committee process are actually quite sound so that the powers would be given only by the Director-General of Conservation before DOC rangers are able to use this power of arrest and that it would be done by written authority. One of the things that the legislation now clarifies is that instead of the power to be able to warrant—because the power of arrest is actually the power to be able to stop someone without a warrant the term warrant" has now been taken out of the legislation.However we do have some concerns with this particular legislation and I would like to turn to one of those concerns. My colleague the Hon David Parker intends to introduce a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) when we come to the Committee stage and his concerns were expressed during the select committee process. Right now the prosecutorial guidelines applying in New Zealand require all charging documents to include a date of birth. This is in part to avoid confusion between two people of the same name including parents who have the same name as their child living at the same address. This is an SOP to address in particular the Fish and Game rangers being excluded from this legislation. We were advised by the New Zealand Fish and Game Council that its rangers are currently limited in their ability to perform their statutory role of enforcing game hunting because they are unable to require date-of-birth information from suspected offenders and they cannot prosecute unless this information is given voluntarily.We were also advised by officials that although this would be a useful power for full-time Fish and Game rangers it would not be necessary to extend the power to honorary Fish and Game rangers because honorary rangers were said to be generally accompanied by full-time Fish and Game rangers. However we were told by Fish and Game New Zealand that this information was incorrect. So the SOP that my colleague the Hon David Parker intends to introduce would be to address this particular issue.Labour supports any measures that would help our hard-working Conservation staff to do their jobs properly. Our natural environment is a massive asset to all Kiwis not just for recreation but for tourism as well. Tourism as we know is one of the main ways that we earn funding from overseas folks. We also must ensure that the environment is protected for our future generations of New Zealanders to enjoy.However the other concern that Labour has is in terms of funding. DOC already struggles with the funding that it has to do the massive job that it currently does. Last year 1500 of our DOC staff out of frustration at the fact that they were being so overworked took industrial work-to-rule action after being offered very little pay increase. In 2009 there were 803 DOC rangers but currently there are only 637. So in terms of funding in 2009 National's cut to DOC's budget was $46 million in 2013 it was cut by another $8.7 million and this year there was a further cut. We are going to hand over to our DOC staff even more powers even more work for them to do. But as we implement this new legislation in order for this bill to work the Labour Party is saying to the Government that it needs to fund DOC appropriately in order for us to ensure that it can do all of the work that we intend for it to do with this additional work appropriately. Thank you so much."