Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Minister of Conservation): Tēnā koe Madam Assistant Speaker. Last Friday I was really pleased to be at Te Heapara Marae near Ruatōria with the Minister of Employment Willie Jackson to launch a new training programme targeting the Waiapū catchment Ka Hao te Rangitahi. Now that programme is an example of the innovation that is happening with this Government. It's designed to give young people the skills and training that they need to get jobs in their local communities through conservation and erosion management in the Waiapū catchment. It's another example of joined-up thinking by the Government because it's a programme that involves a major grant under the Provincial Growth Fund the Department of Conservation Ngāti Porou and the Eastern Institute of Technology all working together to deliver for young people and for their region. The Waiapū River is one of the most heavily polluted with sediment in New Zealand and so this programme will give those young people those rangatahi the skills in nursery seedling raising in fencing in driving agricultural machinery in pest management and in erosion planting so that at the same time as they are getting skills that will enable them to get jobs in the agricultural sector or in pest management they are also helping restore the health of te taiao. So it's this Government's recognition that a healthy environment is central to the well-being of people and the well-being of our economy and that programme sums that up. Just yesterday I was really pleased to be at Zealandia alongside the Minister for Regional Economic Development the Hon Shane Jones launching there a new grant from the Provincial Growth Fund that will enable Predator Free New Zealand Ltd to widen its landscape-scale predator control work and its regional predator control work. Again this is just the sort of thinking that this Government is about. That will enable Predator Free New Zealand to invest in at least two more regions to do projects similar to those that have already been launched in Taranaki in Hawke's Bay on Waiheke Island and on the Otago Peninsula where we're seeing a joint effort between iwi landholders regional councils the community and the Department of Conservation to get stoat rat and possum numbers down so that we can protect the health of our forests and protect our special native birds. It's interesting that the National Party seems to be in considerable disarray. They don't support using innovative programmes like the Provincial Growth Fund to invest in conservation. They don't support using that programme to invest in innovation—to use the effective tools that we already have like landscape-scale pest control to get on with the job of protecting our special indigenous flora against pests—to ensure that innovators and inventors all around New Zealand can access that funding to take products to market. Yesterday we saw some really innovative new traps to better trap rats because of the huge increase in landholders and community representatives all around Aotearoa who are in this predator-free army who are working to protect what is special about indigenous Aotearoa. Yet on the National Party benches we had the former Minister Maggie Barry really supporting Predator Free New Zealand and really supporting the use of 1080 to get pest numbers down but now the National Party is wanting to go after blue-sky research in GE. It's wanting to divert all of the funding that we use on current tools which we know are effective because of all of the research that's been done to show that they work and instead the National Party wants to leave birds to perish at the teeth of stoats and rats. They want to just divert all that existing funding into new speculative research despite the fact that GE technology is not used anywhere in the world to control predators. We have the tools. We know they can work. We're investing in more innovation to do that work more extensively and I'm proud to be part of a Government that recognises that investing in nature is critical to getting jobs in the regions and to our well-being as a country and a healthy society. Kia ora.