Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Minister of Conservation): Thank you. It's really interesting: the previous speaker Sarah Dowie was talking about a lack of consultation but seemed to be totally unaware earlier this year in asking me questions in the House about the consultation that the Department of Conservation had done around whitebait. There was a report that was put up in May this year called New Zealanders' views on whitebait management: Summary of findings from a public engagement process. In that process 3000 people engaged and they highlighted 18 major issues for whitebait including habitat loss obstacles to fish passage problems with fisheries compliance and knowledge gap. Of those who responded 90 percent believed that changes were needed to make New Zealand's whitebait fishery more sustainable and that is what this bill is about. It is based on public concern that the management of the fishery needs to improve and some of the management options that people were supporting in that process included protecting and restoring whitebait habitat closing some rivers to whitebait fishing shortening the season reducing catch limits and ending the commercial sale of whitebait. The bill doesn't do anything around that because any changes to the way the fishery is managed happen through regulation and there will be further consultation on that in a document that will come out later this year. But protection of spawning sites is absolutely critical if the species of whitebait are to thrive. The Hon Damien O'Connor was correct that it is because there is a large amount of conservation land where habitat is protected that there is such a good fishery on the West Coast but we have a local member saying that the habitat is at risk not the species. That's why the provisions in the bill around protection of spawning sites are so important. Can I reassure any landowners who are listening that the bill actually clarifies the situation in relation to spawning sites so that any sites that the Director-General of Conservation declares on reasonable grounds—and that already provides a significant threshold which would open the director-general up to judicial review as Duncan Webb noted if the grounds were not reasonable. It makes it certain what those sites are and in fact it loosens the current legislation by ensuring that some activities on those spawning sites can be restricted but not all. So the bill is making it much clearer what happens at those spawning sites and it will also enable some activities like the mowing of grass margins to be potentially restricted to protect the spawning habitat. What the National Opposition seems to fail to understand is the whole life cycle of some of the whitebait species where the adult fish swim downstream in the autumn they lay their eggs on long grass—this is for īnanga—and then those eggs must stay moist. Then they must hatch at the next spring tide go out to sea and grow bigger there and then in the spring they come back upstream. So it is protecting those spawning sites from things like vegetation damage which helps ensure that we get a good catch in subsequent seasons. Now Ms Dowie's Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 390 which is putting in a requirement to always consult landowners is putting a burden on the department that doesn't apply in other areas. Under the Local Government Act 2002 and under the Resource Management Act the councils don't have to consult every single landholder when they are putting provisions in their district plans which may affect those landholders so it would go well beyond what other laws would require. The provisions in the SOP around natural justice and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act—it is normal that those sorts of provisions apply. They don't need to be repeated in the bill as the SOP proposes and the SOP is putting landholders above all others. It may be that the protection of spawning areas might affect gravel extractors for example or it might affect road-controlling authorities. So in that SOP it's just treating one interest above all others and that makes no sense. The National Opposition is asserting that if you own land you therefore have a right to control fish in the water but that is not the case in law. Fish move around. We want to ensure that their habitat is protected so that we get a sustainable fishery. The bill in these provisions around spawning sites is making sure that happens. I'd also like to point out that the SOP that is in my name—SOP 360—does make a small change around the spawning areas to reassure the concerns of Fish & Game because they wanted to ensure that for any areas that were used by spawning trout their ability to protect those areas was also safeguarded by the bill. There was just a minor drafting error there that didn't ensure that those areas could be sustained. The other SOP in Ms Dowie's name—SOP 391—states the obvious which is that scientific information would be considered in drafting regulations. Of course it will be considered but we have a major problem in the whitebait fishery that the Hon Damien O'Connor mentioned which is that it hasn't been properly regulated. There is no requirement for fishers to provide catch returns. That is one of the reasons why there is so little information—because it is not a well-regulated fishery. Unlike any of the quota species catch returns don't have to be provided even though there are large elements of the fishery that are commercial. There is information though on the state of our native fish from a lot of the ecological surveys that the Department of Conservation does. That shows that 70 percent of our native fish and four out of the six whitebait species are threatened with extinction. Yes because of the large area of conservation land on the West Coast the fishery is a lot better there but elsewhere around New Zealand people want to go fishing for whitebait. People want to be able to experience streams where our native fish are abundant. This bill is about making sure that whitebait all over New Zealand are in good health and about providing the tools to ensure that we can have good regulations to better manage the fishery to make it more sustainable and to better protect our spawning sites and manage activities that happen on those sites. To make it more certain for landholders fishers and everyone where those sites are through that declaration process that the director-general can do and to ensure that the whole of the legislation is simpler to administer you haven't got the complexity that this Government inherited. We want to reassure whitebaiters too that the bill ensures that the status quo prevails for the next two years in terms of authorisations to fish on conservation land but given that a lot of the public submissions that came back were saying that some areas need to be closed that is what the provisions in the bill will enable the director-general through a proper process to do. It's about sustaining the fishery. It is not—as the National Party has repeatedly scaremongered—about putting in place a complete ban on whitebaiting. It is closing potential reaches of some rivers and that will be done after public consultation. It is scaremongering by the National Party to claim a ban and it's indicating that the National Party—for all its claims that it cares about conservation—wants our native fish to be second-class species and not to have the ability on conservation land to have the same protection that kiwi kākā whio and all of our native plants and our wildlife have. This bill is improving the tools. The National Party doesn't like that. They did nothing about that in their last term. We want to ensure that we have a healthy fish population that the whitebait fishery is sustainable and that people can go on enjoying whitebait patties for many years to come.