Sage Eugenie: Game Animal Council Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Game Animal Council Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 19 November 2013. Volume:695;Page:14881. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): The concerns we have over Part 2 of the Game Animal Council Bill are around this whole notion of offences. I guess it reflects the whole thrust of the bill which is turning a problem animal into a valued resource and therefore undermining the control that is needed of these animals. So making it an offence to hunt or kill an animal in a herd of special interest as clause 28 does potentially means that if you have a Kiwi hunter who strays into an area that has been designated for a herd of special interest and he or she has not complied with all the provisions and has not got the necessary authorisations that the earlier part of the bill sets up he or she could be charged with an offence. It also means that the Department of Conservation the staff of which are already pressed in terms of managing the one-third of the land area of New Zealand with a budget equivalent to that of Hamilton City Council’s is going to be responsible for some of the enforcement of these provisions. So that is taking those staff away from the much more important duties of managing biodiversity values and potentially having to be responsible for enforcing these penalty provisions.We have seen a similar conflict arise with the Wild Animal Control Act. The best deer the best chamois and the best tahr are dead ones. So anybody who goes out hunting these animals and killing them is doing good for our indigenous species which are found only here in New Zealand. But by this bill making it an offence—Hon Shane Jones: The best one’s in the hangi.EUGENIE SAGE: —means that—well maybe the best one is in a hangi too. It is also dead if it is in a hangi. But making it an offence to kill them is potentially undermining the need to go out and kill them and it is going to set up the tension that several speakers from the Opposition have talked about earlier between the Game Animal Council wanting to protect these herds of special interest as a resource for them to enjoy and exploit and actually needing to reduce their numbers to protect biodiversity. That tension is really apparent in clause 28 where it is an offence to kill any animal in such a herd.So Mr Chair—I was just surprised to see a member of the Opposition in the Chair. That was a refreshing change. This again is an example of how the bill is not needed how it will set up internal conflicts in the management of conservation land and how it twists the Department of Conservation’s primary purpose of managing conservation land to preserve and protect our natural resources and our indigenous species. Now it will be charged instead with potentially protecting those exotic animals those browsers which have a heavy impact on a lot of our threatened plant species and with making it an offence if anyone kills them. So that again is our concern about the bill. It is setting up a very bureaucratic regime because of the need to get a permit issued by the Game Animal Council and the need to pay the fees to kill these species which people can now go out and freely hunt in return for an easy-to-get permit from the Department of Conservation. If you are going to capture convey or possess a game animal that is part of a herd of special interest without having the Minister of Conservation’s permission you are also committing an offence under clause 29.We have already seen some of the parties that were promoting the establishment of the Game Animal Council such as the Game and Forest Foundation. It was issuing press statements in 2010 that were criticising Silver Fern Farms inHokitika on the West Coast for killing chamois recovering those carcasses processing them and thenexporting them. So again these offence provisions will set up a real tension potentially between the wild animal recovery operators and those whom the Game Animal Council protects and whose interests the council is being established to promote. So these offence provisions cut right across the need to reduce these exotic animals to low numbers in order to protect indigenous biodiversity. As Ruth Dyson commented the Local Government and Environment Committee spent a lot of time dealing with how the Game Animal Council would be funded. This part of the bill also deals with the export of game trophies which is intended to be one of the funding mechanisms and sets up offences there.