Barry MaggieHon MAGGIE BARRY (Minister of Conservation): I would like to talk about the appropriations as they relate to conservation. This is the first anniversary of the release of the very ambitious notion that New Zealand could become predator-free by 2050 and today I revisited the scene where we made the announcement Zealandia with the British Foreign Secretary who was very complimentary indeed about our campaign of slaughter".There are a number of issues that confront our native and threatened species and when I released the threatened species document a couple of months ago I was very encouraged to hear of the interest that people had in defining the species that need assistance and having for the first time in the Department of Conservation's (DOC's) 30-year history a template. There has been some money that has come through for the sea lions on this and there are a number of other initiatives that we will be announcing in due course.I think you need to have a plan and you need to be able to measure what you are doing and the main issue facing our species that are under threat is of course the rats the stoats and the possums. We identified those and called them out and put them on notice really about a year ago and we put $28 million in as a starter to get some leverage around businesses philanthropy and other organisations that want to help us including local and regional authorities. Their contribution should not be minimised because we expect them to step up and help and to a large extent they have done that.We formed the Predator Free 2050 Ltd board. It has now done the challenges that it needed to do. It has set up a chief executive. It is about to announce expressions of interest and start to talk about the scale—the landscape-scale—protection that needs to be put around the various environments with agreements from iwi and all the community groups so that we can have vast amounts of land. More than a million hectares is our aim in the next few years so that our taonga species can breed and do what nature intended as opposed to just being fodder for so many introduced vermin.There are a number of Budget initiatives that we have put through around this and we have explained this on many occasions. Interestingly when you go into an appropriations hearing at a select committee level—it was very ably chaired of course by Andrew Bayly at the Local Government and Environment Committee—you generally expect to be asked about the Budget particularly as the Greens have been spreading ridiculous misinformation and "Green arithmetic" around this for a long period of time. Remarkably on this occasion they stayed silent. They had the opportunity with the chief financial officer there—just saying. They had every opportunity to ask a lot of questions but they did not. If I was a machiavellian individual I might suspect that they did not actually want to know the facts and have them spoken about openly because then they would have to change the rhythm of their nonsense. Whether they choose to do that or not we do not know. I do not know—they are probably a bit of a lost cause.Let us go through the facts for those who are engaged and interested in them. DOC has a $107 million increase in this year's Budget and that is an outstanding amount of money. There is $76 million for tourism infrastructure and $21 million for the largest predator control operation—Clayton Mitchell: You've already said that. Is that a real or nominal figure?Hon MAGGIE BARRY: —ever in New Zealand's history. That is Battle for our Birds and that is the use of 1080. It is a shame New Zealand First members cannot come up to speed with the facts around this because they are completely incapable of seeing the science that many others have seen. I have tried to send Richard Prosser the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment's report on this. Whether he has been able to open it and read the text—not very many pictures in it—I would not be sure but he certainly does not appear to have taken on board any solid information.Battle for our Birds is very much a part of what we need to do to keep our taonga species safe. The $76 million will be spent for example on a new booking system and that new booking system will enable us to introduce a very very good and I think long-overdue differential charging system.New Zealanders through paying our rates and paying our taxes already have an investment in public conservation land—in our Great Walks staying at our huts and those kinds of things—but for international visitors who come here and use our facilities they really do need to pay what it is worth. At the moment we are going through the figures. We will be making an announcement on those in the next few weeks but to me that is a far more sensible approach than trying to charge everybody who comes to New Zealand. Many of them want to come and look at our landscapes and our wonderful environments but not all of them do. So user-pays is the approach that we would take on this one. It is too blunt an instrument to charge people a large amount of money coming through the border and that could well be a disincentive for tourism which let us face it is a particularly lucrative thing for New Zealand now—more so than even our primary industry.The money that we are putting across with regard to differential charging will of course be used to ensure that we do not see an adverse impact on the environment from these large visitor numbers. So the tracks the infrastructure and the facilities that we need to ensure a top-rate visitor experience will be part of what that money is invested in but any profits that are made—and we expect them to be substantial—will be put back into biodiversity and species protection. That is at the heart of what DOC does and it does it incredibly well.We have as well as that a range of volunteer and community organisations and let me take a moment to commend them. They do a terrific job and they are motivated by the best-possible intention and that is to preserve our environment and our species and to help DOC in the wonderful work that it does. They do it in the way of weeding they do the laying out of traps and so forth.In the next few weeks we will be announcing through our DOC predator control rangers—they will be setting up trap libraries. They will be having traps that are readily and freely available to communities such as Picton. One in every four houses in Picton has a rat trap and a stoat trap as well if they want it. These trap libraries around New Zealand with an initial investment of about $300000 will make traps readily available to those who want to use them.Also our DOC Community Fund—it is about $4.5 million a year—is very much focused on the Battle for our Birds but more on the environment and the ecosystems that our birds need to dwell in. So it is very important that the weeds are cleared away because if you have weeds they will smother the forest and if the smothered forest cannot cope then there are no habitats for birds lizards and other threatened species. So the DOC Community Fund is very popular. We have made it a little bit easier now with the paperwork so that the volunteers and community groups can actually get out there and do what they want to do which is save their threatened species rather than fill out forms.So there are a number of different approaches that DOC is taking. When it comes to wilding pines which are always the No. 1 weed in New Zealand they will be there for some long period of time. Last week with the Hon Mark Mitchell a wonderful new app was launched from Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) that will really enable communities and all the groups that are fighting wildings to see their progress and to know where the threats and the challenges lie. It will also I think help city people and those who do not really necessarily appreciate the terrible devastation that these wilding conifers have on the whole wrought to our native landscape environments. They have changed them beyond all measure. They are using up a great deal of groundwater. They need to be kept under control. But perhaps through these apps people who do not have immediate day-to-day encounters with wildings will be able to assess the progress made in knocking them back and the damage that they are doing.I announced at the same time additional funding for five priority projects Mid Dome amongst them. It is doing terrific work in that part of the South Island and we are helping it with the $16 million bid that we had last year in the Budget. We allocated some more of that last week so that we can enable these wonderful groups to get together and do effective weed control and so that DOC and LINZ and Defence and right across the Crown—the Ministry for the Environment and climate control under the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment as well—can be the ones that really help them get to a substantial gain. We are in a hurry. Our Threatened Species Strategy and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment's bird report showed people who have perhaps not paid attention before just how incredibly important it is to save our species and we are running out of time.I saw today at Zealandia once again and was reminded of New Zealand the way it ought to be the way it ought to sound and the way it ought to look. That is what we have firmly fixed in our minds and that is what this Government is delivering every step of the way in conservation environment and climate control as well. We are there. We understand nature. We are funding it to a realistic level and we are making an appreciable difference. Thank you."