Warren-Clark AngieANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour): Oh Mr Speaker thank goodness! It's a pleasure to stand tonight as the last speaker on this bill. OK so first and foremost a couple of things before I actually talk about the bill.Maureen Pugh I appreciate the detail that you have gone to. I appreciate that. Having a strong background as a West Coaster myself having on either side of my family two generations of West Coasters who whitebait and also myself having a whitebait stand I absolutely can endorse the love that we all have for the whitebait. Absolutely—I love the whitebait. But just like the kiwi example it is time now to protect our endangered species: 57 species—not five whitebait species; 57 species—are covered under this bill. And it is not just the West Coast of the South Island that we refer to. We talk about all the rivers in this country. We are not only referring to the fact that some of that most beautiful pristine conservation land in the West Coast has been protected despite the desire to mine and despite the desire to cut down the beautiful beech trees etc.; that is what enables an amazing fishery. Now that fishery is surviving because there's a shorter season there's a whole pile of things that those people do. And yes we hear you and it's absolutely correct that we should be concerned about a way of life that's going. But we look at the long-term future of this country and we look at the difficult problems and the way that actually is sustainable. We cannot—we cannot—continue to have whitebait and our other species being endangered in a way that somehow over there they think it is absolutely absolutely OK. They think it is absolutely OK that we have 57 species that are endangered 70 percent of those species are endangered—and that's what this bill does. After nine years of neglect there is so much to fix but this is a very small part of what we are doing to fix what's happening. One of the difficulties that we know is that our environment has been degraded by those people on that side of the House. In nine long years what did they say to us about the rivers? What did they say? It's OK to be wadeable." The rest of us over here—look at the Kaipara Harbour. That's what we've started doing. What did those Opposition members do? Nothing. They just said that it was completely OK. Now back to the bill. We heard from a lot of submitters who were absolutely concerned about a whole pile of things with this bill and yes it did take quite some time to work through the process of getting it across the line. But absolutely most of the time we worked very closely together as quite a collegial committee. We had a lot of questions—a lot of questions—for our officials and I want to commend them for coming back time and time again and answering our questions. We had lots of issues trying to work out for ourselves where things sat. For example when we looked at who would have the best power around the plans for fisheries it was decided absolutely—absolutely—that we needed to consider that and we rolled it back. Essentially this bill is great. We're fixing the difficulties. We're fixing the long-term issues. This bill is clear and sensible. I commend this bill to the House."