Barry MaggieHon MAGGIE BARRY (Minister of Conservation): E Te Tiamana tēnā koe huri noa i Te Whare Paremata me ngā mihi ki ngā mema katoa.[I thank you Mr Chairman and throughout Parliament acknowledgments to all members.]More conservation work is being done in New Zealand today than ever before in our history. At the Estimates and in the subsequent few weeks we have been talking a lot about Department of Conservation (DOC) funding. I was very surprised at the Estimates hearing that the ferocious Greens and other members of the Opposition did not take the opportunity to clarify the figures around DOC's Crown funding which they had misrepresented and got so thoroughly wrong. For the record Crown revenue to DOC has increased from $263 million in 2007-08 to $338 million in 2015-16. That of course includes the $20 million for Battle for our Birds most of which will be carried over. Budget 2016 saw $49 million in new initiatives including that money that was released immediately for Battle for our Birds which we are about to roll out in the next couple of weeks. There was $16 million for wilding pine control $600000 for the Game Animal Council and $11 million for the Pike29 Memorial Track which my colleague Dr Nick Smith is leading. The important thing to know about the conservation environment and climate change portfolios across this Government is that we all work together. We work closely with the Ministry for Primary Industries. Colleagues genuinely engage and discuss the best approach and discuss how we can work closely together to make the hard-earned taxpayers' money go even further. Vote Primary Industries and Food Safety's $69 million for bovine TB eradication and Vote Environment's $100 million for the Freshwater Improvement Fund are two things that we work together on to ensure that nature in this country gets the very best protection that it can with the taxpayers' money. DOC as a department works far more closely with more species than it ever has before—around 320 of them this year instead of the 220 under Labour. We work more around ecosystems. So it is the entire environment. It is not just the single species; it is where that species lives. It is the water around it. Nature is not a series of compartments. We treat it holistically and we are treating it well. There are many good success stories that have come of that. We have wide benefits that have been achieved through some of the measures that we have put in place. My colleague and friend the very able and hard-working chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee Scott Simpson listed out some of the partnerships and the models that we use with community and volunteer groups to very good effect. What he may not know about and what I was asked about at the Estimates hearing was the takahē recovery. Mitre 10 was a sponsor that had been very closely involved for a long period of time and it had withdrawn after more than a decade of support although it will have an ongoing involvement in the programme as an official supplier and will donate materials. What was signed yesterday was the partnership between DOC and Fulton Hogan which is going to help the critically endangered takahē continue their recovery. It is worth $1 million and it has just come at a time when the takahē recovery programme has had its most successful breeding season on record with 38 chicks fledged. Along with the kākāpō the takahē are very difficult creatures to encourage to breed. They are very vulnerable to predation and there have been some very successful outcomes as a result of a cross-Crown unity of purpose. We work closely together and cooperatively and we also work very closely with partnerships and philanthropy. I will not list them because Scott Simpson has already done that. Battle for our Birds will be the largest predator control operation ever launched in New Zealand. It will cover 800000 hectares of land. The idea with the 1080 is that it knocks it down it gets rid of the rodent populations as a result of the beech seeding and then you hold those vermin out with traps. It is a very very good thing to do. The Minister for the Environment was absolutely correct: biodiversity is an important goal. We do have a high number of endangered and threatened species and we have to be very aware of that. I created a new position that of the Threatened Species Ambassador. Nicola Toki has been in that role now for about 8 months. She is doing a tremendous job in formulating a strategy which we will unveil in due course for our most critically endangered species. Again it is an example of working together and making sure that we do what we need to do. Altogether DOC has a million hectares of land under sustained pest management. We own a third of the country. We make sure that we are very prudent guardians of it.