Sage EugenieEUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. The Green Party is pleased to support the Wildlife (Powers) Amendment Bill but I think we risk some of the Government members actually overstating what is in this bill when they talk about the Act being modernised. The bill is quite narrow in its ambit. It deals with improving the enforcement of the Wildlife Act but there is a need for a major overhaul of that Act and this Government lacks the vision to do that and adequately support the Department of Conservation through ensuring that funding is adequate. We can hear lots of speeches from Government members talking about the important work that departmental staff do and the importance of the department's mandate in protecting our indigenous plants and wildlife and our special landscapes but we do not see a commitment in the Budget to actually adequately resourcing that work. We do not see a commitment to ensuring that—Hon Maggie Barry: Predator Free 2050—visionary.EUGENIE SAGE: Well yes the Minister of Conservation may have a vision of Predator Free 2050 but it is the Green Party through our Taonga Levy that has actually come up with a practical proposition to provide the funding to support it rather than the very ad hoc measures that the Minister has proposed—to provide just a bit of additional funding for kiwi and a bit of additional funding tomorrow for wilding control which is a project that we support. But there is a total under-investment in conservation through the continued cuts to conservation funding that we have seen under this Government. The Government is very good at getting the headlines with all of its PR about how well species are doing but it fails to look clearly at what bycatch is happening and at the continued underfunding of conservation. This bill is very narrow in its scope. What we need is an overhaul of the whole Act to protect native fish species. It is under the Wildlife Act that we see most of our native birds protected—Hon Maggie Barry: Out of scope.EUGENIE SAGE: —except the—yes well the Minister is saying it is out of scope. But if the Minister had had some vision she would have embarked on a more comprehensive review of the Wildlife Act. The Minister and this Government do not seem to care about the fact that 72 percent—72 percent—of our native fish species are threatened with extinction yet not one existing native fish is protected by the Wildlife Act. The only fish that is protected is the grayling and that is extinct Minister. So if the Government had some vision we would be looking at a much more comprehensive overhaul of the Act to protect native fish—to protect a taonga like the tuna the longfin eel which is still being fished to extinction. As the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has said it is on a slow pathway to extinction. This bill will be useful in increasing the powers that the warranted officers within the Department of Conservation have available to stop intervene in and prevent offending. It will increase their ability to stop a person if they think that the person is about to commit an offence allow them to stop a person's vehicle but not hold the person for questioning allow them to request identity verification and date of birth and allow them the power to seize a broader range of materials that are connected to offending for example mobile phones and the like. But this is not the first time that we have amended the Wildlife Act. We had a private bill in 2013 that increased the penalties for offending which is all well and good like this bill but it is not actually addressing the critical issues of loss of biodiversity and the fact that our native fish do not have any protection under the Act. The whitebait season has started again and yet most New Zealanders do not realise that of the juveniles of the five native species that make up the whitebait catch—the kōaro the shortjawed kōkopu the giant kokopu—are threatened with extinction. That is the sort of change that we need to be seeing to the Wildlife Act—actually providing protection for these species and the Department of Conservation ensuring that there are adequate freshwater fish reserves to protect them—not just fiddling by improving the offence provisions. The Green Party is supporting the bill. We will consider the amendments that the Labour Party members are proposing to put forward because the advice that we had in the Local Government and Environment Committee was that warranted officers—State servants Department of Conservation staff—should have these powers and so should employed staff of Fish and Game New Zealand but not honorary officers because that was extending the powers too far. There has been a disappointing gap in the Wildlife Act in that there is no protection for our indigenous native fish because they are every bit as important as our native birds our skinks and our lizards which this bill is designed to protect through trying to stop smuggling export and capture of those species. The Government should be amending the law in a much wider way to provide proper statutory protection for all of our native wildlife and not just the native birds the reptiles and a few species of invertebrates that are currently listed in the legislation. But we do support the increase in the provisions to stop offending. Thank you.