Mathers MojoMOJO MATHERS (Green): I would like to start by saying that the Green Party absolutely recognises and honours the hard-working commitment of DOC rangers and staff. I also just want to acknowledge that they have been facing a totally unacceptable level of abuse as the symptom of particularly DOC's use of 1080. I just want to put on our record that it is not acceptable that they should have to face that kind of treatment of having their photos splattered all over social media their personal home addresses and so on. That is just not OK. We absolutely do support giving them more powers to strengthen their ability to enforce the Wildlife Act but I also want to affirm that it is disappointing that the real problem which is the underfunding and under-resourcing of DOC continues to be ignored. It may be stating the obvious but if you do not have enough people on the ground giving them more powers is not going to make a lot of meaningful difference to protecting and saving our endangered and threatened wildlife. We need the numbers on the ground and the numbers have been going down. Eight years ago there were 833 DOC rangers; now there are 788 despite the fact that we have a biodiversity crisis in this country. So we support the bill and we support it because we have a biodiversity crisis with nearly 4000 of New Zealand's precious and unique species at risk of going extinct. Eight hundred are listed by DOC as being at very high risk of extinction and that number has increased by nearly 200 species in the last 5 years alone. Nearly all amphibians are critically endangered it is similar for many reptiles and birds and just last week a marine environment report found that New Zealand has the highest number of threatened seabird species in the world with 90 percent of our seabirds at risk of extinction as are many of our marine mammals. Not only do we have the dubious honour of having the highest proportion of endangered species of any country on earth the vast majority of these do not have any active recovery plans in place and this is a disgrace. The biggest threats to our native species are predation habitat loss and environmental pollution. So obviously coming down very hard on people who are smuggling or killing rare and endangered species is the right thing to do. But they are only the edge of the problem. The main problems are as I have said habitat loss habitat degradation and predation so it is a small part of the picture. So we support this bill but if we are talking about the biodiversity crisis it is just tinkering at the edge of the margins and this bill will do little to address that. We have to get real about what it is going to take in the way of resourcing and funding DOC to do its work. I want to give as an example very quickly of how this is playing out on the ground. Six months ago I moved to a beautiful area that is right beside a scenic reserve: Peel Forest. This forest is not being adequately managed for pest control so possums are running rampant through the forest—so much so that on the edge of our property there is one small self-resetting trap where we caught 11 possums in a mere 2 weeks. That is how many pests are going absolutely rampant through this highly unique and important remnant forest which is very precious in Canterbury because there is such a small area that is left of the forest type that used to cover a lot of the Canterbury Plains. Now Canterbury is one of the most modified landscapes in the whole of New Zealand so we should be doing everything we can to be protecting these last remnants and that is not happening because the DOC staff are understaffed.