Luxton Jo; Rurawhe AdrianJO LUXTON (Labour): What a pleasure. What a pleasure to take a call on the Conservation (Indigenous Freshwater Fish) Amendment Bill after that member who has just taken his seat Matt Doocey. He had the audacity to talk about filibustering and I think he spent a whole 1½ minutes doing just that and didn't mention whitebait once as you suggested.Anyway I want to say thank you. I want to acknowledge the chairs of the Environment Committee Dr Deborah Russell who was originally the chair of the select committee and then following on from that Dr Duncan Webb. I think it's important also to acknowledge the select committee too because they do the hard work and the hard yards when it comes to legislation such as this.I have one question though: why are the Opposition opposing? Do they oppose now just for the sake of opposing everything that this Government puts forward? So negative—negative National". But that's OK. You know I kind of feel that if we were talking about tahr there would probably be a lot more passion and they'd be more willing to protect something like tahr which is a pest. But what we have here is a Government that is making moves to protect and improve the productivity of our fisheries and our waterways and here they are up in arms. This is actually a good thing—this is actually a good thing. I wish that you—not you Mr Speaker but the Opposition—would take the time just to recognise that and join forces with this side of the House and get this legislation through the House unopposed. But I guess that's just too much to ask.Angie Warren-Clark: "Negative Nelly".JO LUXTON: That's right: "negative Nellies".You know in New Zealand we protect kiwis we protect our native birds we protect insects and we protect even lichen so I found out this evening. So why not protect our native fish? They are in trouble. Just because we can't see them they don't have pretty feathers and they don't parade around in front of us doesn't actually mean they are not worth protecting. They are native to our country which is an extremely precious and important thing.We know that we've got 57 species of indigenous fish here in New Zealand. Of those 22 are listed as threatened and 17 are at risk. As I said before just because we can't see them doesn't mean they don't need our protection.This piece of legislation I noted too actually created a huge amount of interest with 1406 submissions and overwhelmingly the submitters supported the intent of this bill. About 1406 submissions—that's a lot of submissions and is actually a lot more than what I've experienced in some of my other select committees. So that just goes to show how passionate people are and how much they care about this issue.Unfortunately we have seen a lot of scaremongering from the Opposition saying that this is going to be the end of whitebaiting—nobody is going to have any more whitebait fritters—but that is actually not the case. We know that three-quarters of our native fish are threatened. They are at risk or at risk of extinction. So we have to act. We have to do something now. We cannot sit on our hands and do nothing. So I want to thank Minister Sage for bringing this legislation to the House. She recognises the importance of protecting our native fish and the waterways in which they live in and spawn in.We had a large number of submitters that were concerned about whitebaiting and what this bill might mean for whitebaiting—that it would be the end of commercial fishing for whitebaiting but it's actually not the case. What we know is that on conservation land we have the opportunity to protect our whitebait to give them the opportunity to swim to live and to spawn without the risk of being captured by nets. If we continue the way we have been continuing and don't look to protect anything we can say goodbye to whitebait fritters because we will fish them to extinction and I am sure that New Zealanders do not want to see that happen because that would be a catastrophe. It is one of our I guess iconic things here in New Zealand to go along and have whitebait fritters when they're in season.So I'm not going to continue any further. I just want to acknowledge again the select committee and the Minister and the submitters and I highly commend this bill to the House.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Matt King—five minutes."