Prosser Richard: Crown Pastoral Land (Rent for Pastoral Leases) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Prosser Richard: Crown Pastoral Land (Rent for Pastoral Leases) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:678;Page:1276] 
RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First) 
: 
 I find myself in the curious position of agreeing with almost everything the members on the Government benches are saying about this issue and disagreeing with them on what they propose as the outcome and the solution in the Crown Pastoral Land (Rent for Pastoral Leases) Amendment Bill. The high country is an iconic landscape and it is a fragile landscape as the Greens have noted. There is as some members on the Opposition side have said a perception amongst many in the public that this landscape is off limits and out of the preserve of ordinary people. That is just simply not true.  
I think if we look at what the high country actually is it is the quintessential centre of New Zealand’s image but it does not exist in isolation. If we go back to as Mr Adern said say 1650 as a starting point for assessing the value of that land essentially the value of that land has not changed since 1650. If European colonisation had not occurred in New Zealand that land would probably still look like it did then. But European colonisation did occur. The white man did come here and he did bring animals and he did bring gorse and he brought blackberry and he brought  
Hieracium 
. All of those things would have invaded that high country had it not been for the fact that it was protected guarded and looked after by the farmers.  
Because these are huge tracts of land invaluable tracts—valuable in many senses—there is a perception I think amongst some particularly those on the political left that the people who farm them are very wealthy people and they are not for the most part. There are farmers on essentially welfare in this country. With regard to the land that they are farming the position is very tenuous. That land does not produce a great deal and it would not produce anything if it was not being maintained. It would not produce anything if the pests were not kept under control if the rabbits were not kept under control or the gorse the blackberry etc. etc.  
There is I think a perception that if you took the farmers out of the high country that land would simply stay as it has been for the last 150 years but it has been in that condition for the last 150 years only because it has been maintained that way by farmers and by the operation of farming. 
Shane Ardern 
: Including the tussock. 
RICHARD PROSSER 
: Including the tussock—that is right. The tussock is a fragile thing but it works with sheep. If we take the farmers out of this equation and we do not alternatively put something else back such as extra resourcing for the Department of Conservation that land will suddenly go to rack and ruin. It will happen very quickly and it will stop being an iconic landscape. What we need to do is accept the reality that this landscape has been created by 150 years of farming. Farming is not alien to this landscape; farming is what has maintained it.  
The value of this land to the country is enormous. We cannot put a dollar value on the tourism on the iconic imagery value of that land. What we can say is that in order to keep taking value out of that land we need to keep putting the maintenance into it and the only way effectively that we can do that is by putting resourcing in and the way that resourcing works best is to leave it to the farmers. You can say that farmers may enjoy access to landscapes and so forth that other people do not. That is simply not true. I mean I can say to this House that in more than 30 years of tramping and hunting I have never been denied access to a farmer’s land. All you have to do is go and ask. The same is essentially true on pretty much any conservation land. There are plenty of places in the conservation estate where you cannot go without a permit you cannot go at certain times of the year or it costs you to go in different places so there is really no difference there. I think what we need to do is recognise that the system that we have had for the last 100-ish years is not broken; it does not need to be fixed.  
But I agree with everything that members on the Government side have been saying about the realities of farming: about the isolation and the harsh conditions that people have to put up with. Living in remote places you do not necessarily have access to continuous electricity supplies you do not have broadband and you do not have cellphone coverage. You do not have all these things that people living in sort of splendid isolation in the cities looking at the high country and thinking: “These people have got something that we haven’t.” have. You do not have access to all those things. You quite often have to make your own power. The town is 3 hours away across gravel roads. These are all realities for people living in the high country. So to say that they are getting something for nothing really is not true. What they are getting is something that would be worth nothing if they were not farming it and getting very little in return. They would be getting nothing in return if it were not for the fact that the rents are as low as they are and in many cases according to the reports that have been done they are actually still too high.  
I think the position of New Zealand First can be summed up by the report of the High Country Accord chair Jonathan Wallis back in 2009 when he said that the process “simply reaffirms that the process used to setting rents since 1948”—