Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's sometimes said that in these days of social media we're into an age of post-truth politics" where people ignore facts try to go direct to the public via social media and think that they'll believe the tripe that's served up to them. Self-praise doesn't make things true. I read the National Party minority view on this and the same phrases were trotted out that we heard from the last speaker Sarah Dowie and I'm going to quote from it: "The National Party is the champion of recreation and sports fishing". When the National Party was in power they threatened the Fish & Game Council and said they couldn't have the increase to their fees that they wanted for habitat protection because they were advocating for environmental protection. That was the Hon Kate Wilkinson; it was exposed by the Fish & Game Council at the time. This is the National Party that is the "champion of recreation and sports fishing". Then they claimed credit for the change in the bill that went to the Environment Committee which was the deletion of clause 5(3) which was a provision in the bill as it went to the select committee that said in the event of a conflict between a plan relating to native fish and a plan relating to sports fish the native fish plan would prevail. Well that was actually something that many parties spoke to in the first reading including me who said that we needed to fix that at select committee; it has been by the Government which includes the Greens New Zealand First and the Labour Party. Of course it's a change that I suspect National does agree with but of course they're not voting for the bill. So to claim credit for that again is ridiculous. The other thing I would say to the National Party that claims to be the "champion of recreation and sports fishing": there's not much recreation to be had when there's no whitebait. That's the point of the bill. We've got to the point in New Zealand where 70 percent of our freshwater species are classified either as "threatened" or "at risk". Now there's 22 species "threatened" and 17 are "at risk". That's a total of 37 out of our 57 species. Some of those species indeed most of them are found nowhere else in the world. What's the answer in the National Party viewpoint of that? Private property rights. They are so absurd in their articulation of private property rights that they think the private property right of a landowner includes the right to make whitebait extinct. That's what they're saying; they are just barking mad when it comes to this view of private property rights. A private property right doesn't include—they've got this view that somehow rural private property rights are different. No one in a city can change their land use from a residence to a 20-storey commercial building or a tannery. We can't do that. Our private property right does not include the right to change land use. But no we just heard from the National Party that if you own a bit of land that's an estuarine piece of land your property right includes the right to stop it being the margin of an estuarine area and turn it into a piece of pasture and kill off all the whitebait. That's effectively what they've said there because they think that it's a property right to change the nature of a piece of land which is currently habitat for threatened fish species and without any intervention be able to say "My land is my castle and I'm going to turn this into something different and kill all the whitebait". That's what Sarah Dowie just said is their position in respect of private property rights. Self-praise does not make it true and for them to say that they're the champion of recreation and sports fisheries—then they say they're "The defender of private property rights". I'm a defender of private property rights too. I believe in the importance of private property rights I just don't think the private property right that attaches to owning a piece of property includes the right to change its land use and to kill off habitat. If that was the case—taking that theory to its extreme—if the last tuatara was on a piece of private land they would say that the private property owner could actually just change that cover over the bit of habitat where the last tuatara was and make it extinct. Private property rights have never been that extensive in New Zealand. They never will be and they never should be unless you get the National Party which is the "champion of recreation and sports fishing" changing the law to say that a private property right extends to the right of doing away with the protection of habitat. Now they say "While it supports protection of indigenous freshwater fish any declarations as to spawning areas on private property need to go through a just process." Well I actually agree with that. But the idea that you have to have some long convoluted process before some sensible person at the Department of Conservation (DOC) can conclude that the water was already up to half waders or gumboots and those little fish that were swimming around most people call them whitebait. And by the way they look like the whitebait that was in someone's bucket that's just put a net over. But that's not good enough for the National Party. They want some process that goes to the Court of Appeal before they can determine that it's not the right of a private property owner to change a habitat which already exists on that property.Hon Member: What a leftie. Hon DAVID PARKER: What's that? Half a sentence from the other side that's typical of that member. He'll be able to double it one day but at that point it still won't be worth listening to. I don't think there's much more to be said. This is a good bill. It is a good bill; it's a necessary bill because we do need to do more to protect our whitebait habitat. I think just about every New Zealander knows that there aren't nearly as many whitebait as there used to be when I was younger. [Interruption] That's true.You know the only place there's really good stocks of whitebait left are really where it's coming out close to the DOC estate. On the West Coast we've got some areas where the catchments are pretty much unmodified and we've got good whitebait in some of those areas but you go to most of the parts of the East Coast where most of the wetlands have already been filled in and you've got problems. You know the last report in New Zealand on environment Aotearoa which came out last year said that 100 years ago New Zealand lost 90 percent of our wetlands and that was when we cleared all of our land for farming—90 percent and that includes national parks. We lost 90 percent of New Zealand's wetlands about 100 years ago. Do you know in the last decade in New Zealand we lost 5 percent of the last 10 percent—we lost one-twentieth of what was left. That's what's happening. We're losing this habitat and that's one of the reasons why we've got to the point where more than half of our indigenous fish species are either threatened or at risk and that's one of the reasons why whitebait fisheries are in decline. So I thank the Minister of Conservation for bringing this forward rather than doing as the prior Government did which was actually to oversee the decline of the whitebait fishery."