Hague Kevin: Crown Pastoral Land (Rent for Pastoral Leases) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Hague Kevin: Crown Pastoral Land (Rent for Pastoral Leases) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:670;Page:16903] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party will take a short call on this bill. We will support its referral to the select committee but we make no indication beyond that of our intention to support it. It is beyond dispute that the normal process for calculating rents based on the unimproved land values of these leases is not a viable process so something has to be done about that problem. The issue touches on one very small aspect of the very much larger issue of how best to manage these pastoral leases especially in the high country. 
These leases have been historically important for New Zealand agriculture but are now under considerable pressure. For the most part these areas of Crown land are also the sites of very high conservation values and that is the nub of the issue around these leases. Tenure review is a process that is placing some of those conservation values at even greater risk and that happened under Labour Governments and National Governments but particularly under the current National Government there is a determination not to add any land to the public conservation estate and at the same time that is coupled with the disastrous decision by the Government to in fact reduce the funding available for conservation. 
That has created a situation in which the objective of the Crown Pastoral Land Act to manage these areas in an ecologically sustainable manner is now at profound risk. What the Government is instead doing is relying on an extremely weak form of protection—covenanting—to provide any protection whatsoever for the conservation values on these areas of land. 
I am a big fan of the Queen Elizabeth the Second National Trust. I have a trust covenant over my own land on the West Coast. The success or otherwise of that mechanism for actually protecting the conservation values of a place is entirely dependent on the motivation of the landowner because the trust itself is not in a position to actively manage and protect those conservation values. 
Although there are some great and committed landowners who are part of the trust and who entered into that covenanting relationship willingly if instead the covenanting of parcels of their land is a condition of the tenure review process one might suspect that at least in some of those cases the commitment of a landowner to protecting the conservation values in that place is likely to be less. That means that some of the places with the very highest values in New Zealand in terms of conservation are now resting on the whim of the landowner who may be poorly motivated to do so to protect them. That is a situation that creates some profound risk for some very important conservation values for New Zealand. So that objective of the Crown Pastoral Lease Act is currently subject to jeopardy. 
It was kind of interesting that another mechanism was offered by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment in her report from April 2009 
 Change in the high country: Environmental stewardship and tenure review.  
The report indicates that a more creative option around rentals was possible. She suggested in fact that our Parliament should look at a rental policy that actually prioritised the environmental outcomes that we were seeking from these precious places. It is with regret that I note that the Government has chosen not to pursue that path. 
However this is a complex issue and it may well be that there are sound arguments for not pursuing that option that was proffered by the commissioner. If so—and we have not heard them yet—we will be very interested to hear the debate at the select committee. We are prepared to support the first reading of the bill but at this stage our intention is to wait and see what the submissions say. Thank you.