Dean Jacqui: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dean Jacqui: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 01 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:1820. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki) 
: 
 Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the work of the Department of Conservation. There are some pretty notable successes down in the Otago region. My colleague Nicky Wagner has just talked about the royal albatross colony and the ongoing work of the Department of Conservation both in species management and protection but also in allowing the public of New Zealand to have access to what is pretty special and precious to us in New Zealand. As Nicky Wagner said with regard to the royal albatross colony it went from one egg back in the 1930s I believe it was and people used to throw stones at the albatross because you know people were people back then. But these days it is a colony that is well protected and enhanced and you can all go and see it. It is managed by the Department of Conservation and the Otago Peninsula Trust and what it means is that New Zealanders and visitors to our country alike can go and visit the royal albatross without disturbing them. Of course this has become a major tourist attraction for Dunedin.  
So too has the little blue penguin colony in Oamaru which were 15 years ago almost known as a pest. The little blue penguins used to cross the road and get run over by the milk truck and the bread truck and nobody particularly cared and then one woman Lorraine Adams saw that they were indeed special. She was the one who initiated along with the Department of Conservation the little blue penguin colony in Oamaru. Here we are 15 years later and the town rather than just being a place to stop and fill up with gas and buy an ice cream maybe on your way to somewhere else has become a destination. A lot of that has to go down to the work not only of people like Lorraine Adams and the various trusts that started looking after these animals but also of the Department of Conservation because on the ground it takes a great deal of care and a lot of interest in the development of both the species management and the protection. It can identify what needs to be done but also enthusiastically enables those colonies to be made available to and accessible for the general public.  
There are three yellow-eyed penguin colonies along the Otago coast. Again they are maintained and that species is protected and enhanced by the work of the Department of Conservation. Again this is done with a weather eye to how we can make what is precious to us in New Zealand available to other New Zealanders and also to visitors around the world.  
I want to move on to something slightly different because this is another role that the department has been very successful in and continues to be so. It is not so much about species management but its involvement with the Otago Central Rail Trail. The success story of the Otago Central Rail Trail cannot be underestimated. The benefit goes to the national economy because it is now an international tourism destination. But also many of us in this House have either cycled a stage or a leg of the rail trail—or indeed done the whole thing if they are lucky enough—and would have made a wonderful contribution to the economy of Middlemarch or of Clyde and I thank them for that. In the last figures I read and they may well have increased by now around $7 million goes into the local Central Otago community because of the Department of Conservation’s involvement in the Otago Central Rail Trail. It is people like Robin Thomas who is the area manager for the Department of Conservation who have that commitment and that foresight to get involved in that kind of initiative which not only has spin-offs for the local species in the area in terms of their protection and development but also has that economic spin-off. It is incredibly important to this Government to recognise that our natural heritage and those things that are precious to us can go hand in hand with economic development. I think the rail trail is a spectacular example of how those two things can should and do go hand in hand. Thank you. 
Report noted.