Financial Review Debate — Department of Conservation

Thank you for the opportunity to speak in the financial review debate on the Department of Conservation. Can I say from the outset that we will never have enough money to pay for all the conservation that needs to be done in New Zealand. There was an exercise that was done in relation to biodiversity and they were adding up the figures—

💬 Andrew Little: What about the staff?

—and when they got past the health budget they had to stop. It is interesting when you have the Labour Opposition quite willing to spend $150 million on extending paid parental leave, which is about half the budget of the Department of Conservation, but Labour will be the first ones—or maybe the second ones, after the Greens—to say that we are not spending enough money on conservation.

But what this means is that we have the opportunity to look at conservation and look at the opportunities that conservation provides to New Zealand. I do not think we should be afraid of saying that conservation is everyone’s responsibility. Nor should we be afraid of saying that conservation is good for business, and business is good for conservation.

Can I say at the outset—because I acknowledge that the Green member is wanting to take a call—that the memorandum of understanding that we have with the Green Party, which is to protect our native species and fund research into 1080 alternatives, sets aside $4 million for self-setting traps. When we look at the 1080 debate—and I thank the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment for actually putting some common sense and some science around that debate—and if we look at the trends and the learning over the years, we see that the standard application rate for 1080 used to be 20 kilograms per hectare. Now the standard is down to 2 kilograms per hectare, and they are looking now to go down as low as 200 grams per hectare.

There is a stunning example of biodiversity in a biodiversity partnership up in the Wanganui area, where I was just last week, called the Kia Whārite project, where they are trialling the 200 grams per hectare. But what this project does is demonstrate several things: first, a fantastic partnership between the Department of Conservation, the landowners, and the Horizons Regional Council—I think it is one of the most significant partnerships with a regional council—but also a partnership with iwi.

It is one of the largest biodiversity projects in this country. It is focused on an area of 180,000 hectares, of which something like 157,000 is under active pest control and predator eradication. Up in that area there are probably the largest populations of our North Island brown kiwi and also the endangered blue duck. It is also the second-largest stand of lowland native forest in New Zealand. But I think what is exciting about that is the way that the other partners are working with the Department of Conservation. It is a very successful partnership programme. In fact, one of the farmers markets his own beef, which he markets as “conservation beef”. I think that is just a wonderful reflection on the importance of conservation to New Zealand.

One of the other exciting recent developments is, of course, the announcement of our partnership—it is not a sponsorship programme—with Air New Zealand. For many years Air New Zealand had actually enabled some of our flightless birds to fly. It has taken the kākāpō from one end of the country to the other. It transports the kiwi to translocated areas to assist in their ability to thrive. This partnership, which was announced with the Prime Minister just recently, formalises that it is worth about a million dollars annually, but actually for New Zealand it is worth a lot more than that. It is worth a lot more in branding. It recognises that conservation is one of the largest, if not the largest, tourism providers in New Zealand.

We have the opportunity to really showcase our great walks, and showcase our national parks. We have direct investment in conservation programmes. We have thousands of Air New Zealand staff who are now buzzed up about conservation. The walks alone, which will be promoted through this partnership, bring in about $3 million a year. But it is more important that that; it is more about our brand.

Our Department of Conservation staff are fantastic people. They are passionate about what they do.

Tēnā koe, Mr Chair. Last month the Department of Conservation celebrated its 25th anniversary, and that is a small miracle, given this Government’s penchant for expensive chopping and changing of Government agencies. The department’s establishment in 1987 brought together for the first time all of the “green dots” in the former Wildlife Service, Department of Lands and Survey, and the New Zealand Forest Service into one organisation with a clear mandate to protect and preserve our wild landscapes, our native plants, and our wildlife. That was significant internationally.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

I record my and the Green Party’s appreciation of the commitment, energy, and skill of Department of Conservation staff around the country over the last 25 years who have worked and are working with the community and with the public to protect and preserve our natural areas and historic places. But when we should be celebrating the department’s achievements, including the establishment of four new national parks, we are seeing instead retrenchment and restructuring in the face of the Government’s funding cuts, a failure by the department to focus on the breadth of its statutory purpose, and the welcome mat being put out for destructive commercial enterprises such as Bathurst Resources’ major proposed coal mine at Denniston, and large-scale tourism developments such as the mad monorail proposal in the southwest world heritage area.

The Government is miserly when it comes to conservation. It slashed conservation funding by $54 million over 4 years, with more cuts to come. The organisational review, which the department initiated during the 2010-11 financial year in response to these funding cuts, has resulted in at least 96 fulltime-equivalent jobs going, with more likely in the current phase of restructuring. Such organisational reviews create morale-sapping uncertainty. They create churn and destabilisation amongst the department’s major asset, its staff. They cause a loss of productivity and performance as staff focus on whether they will have a job or not, and the redundancies mean a loss of institutional knowledge, a loss of expertise, and a loss of capacity. It also means that large sums are being spent on organisational reviews and consultants’ reports rather than on real conservation.

These restructuring costs to date include $1.48 million on the first phase, the review of financial services, and another $5 million on the review of what departmental managers call “support services”. Support services are in fact the planners, the lawyers, the technical specialists, and the ecologists, who are absolutely crucial to the department’s advocacy under the Resource Management Act to protect conservation values outside the conservation estate, to protect our rivers against dams, and to protect wetlands on private land that are threatened with drainage. It is this advocacy that the department is retreating from—vital work.

The department is predicting that it will spend another $5 million in the current financial year on the next stage of its restructuring proposals, and that will target the kahikatea face of conservation—the field centres and area offices—and further job cuts there are likely. That is $11.5 million over 2 financial years on the costs of restructuring that is not being spent on real conservation work, and that is nearly 3.6 percent of the department’s budget.

There are around 3,000 threatened species in New Zealand and many continue to decline because of the impact of introduced predators. The department is on the cutting edge of pest control, with its expertise for control on large islands like Campbell and its success in rat eradication there being sought after internationally. Yet with the reduced funding, the department is able to actively manage only 10 percent of our threatened species. About 216 species have active threat-management plans in place, and the department is only able to sustain possum control over 13 percent of the conservation estate. Information that the Department of Conservation provided to the Local Government and Environment Committee showed that the amount spent on possum control in the 2010-11 year had declined by $1 million compared with 2009-10, and the area under control had declined by 38,000 hectares. That is serious because of the impact that possums have both on the health of the forest and on species—a lot of our bird species—by their predation on eggs. So while the planners, the lawyers, the botanists, and the ecologists are being cut through restructuring, we have the establishment of a new commercial business unit. And what is its focus? On delivering and extracting value from business and visitors. Thank you.

The National Government has taken a moderate and balanced approach to Government finances. We all know that the economy is tight, and we are determined to do more for less, to increase productivity, and to get better results from everything that we do. We want to get our finances on an even keel, because we want to avoid the horror austerity measures that we are seeing overseas. We need to be disciplined and we need to have a willingness to prioritise and to make trade-offs. We have got a plan and we are sticking to it. In terms of conservation, this means that we are determined not only to honour our conservation and environmental responsibilities but also to stretch our dollars as far as possible and to develop new ways to support conservation work.

We all know that New Zealand is a magnificently beautiful country, with a unique and hugely diverse fauna and flora. The Department of Conservation is charged with managing and overseeing our natural and heritage assets on land, in the marine environment, and also in the freshwater environment. It directly manages the public protected land and marine reserves, and it facilitates agreements with regard to protection on private land. But it is also responsible for managing protected wildlife and marine mammals and it has a role in fostering recreation in the wonderful public lands that it manages, and I believe that the Department of Conservation is particularly good at its job. It is also particularly good at finding ways to get more conservation work done for less. New Zealanders are keen to protect and conserve our environment. Huge numbers of them work closely with Department of Conservation staff as volunteers, and increasingly businesses are getting involved with more conservation work.

The Department of Conservation is absolutely focused on protecting endangered species. There are many successful breeding programmes right across the country. They include the breeding of the takahē, the kākāpō, and kiwis. As a matter of interest, my husband was down in Stewart Island just a couple of weeks ago on a yacht. He was anchored out in a bay, looked across the bay, and there was a kiwi just sauntering along the beach, eating up the grubs, at 10.30 in the morning. There are not many places in the world where you can see kiwis, and there are not many places where you can see them just as you are going about your ordinary business.

So we are being very successful with some of our breeding programmes. We have done fantastic breeding programmes for kākāriki. We have got breeding programmes in Canterbury at Lady Diana Isaac’s property, which has got tuatara, kākāriki, skinks, and all sorts of things. She is working very closely with the Department of Conservation. There are also good programmes for fairy tern, for whio, and even for kererū in some places of the country.

The department also works with the species that are hard to protect from mankind in terms of smuggling. It was very interesting in the weekend. We were talking to Robin Thomas from the Department of Conservation in Otago about the smuggling that has been going on out of Central Otago, particularly of skinks and lizards. It is pretty frightening when you think that if you sell a jewelled gecko on the international market, you might get $25,000 for it, and even selling an ordinary skink will give you US$2,000. Just recently someone was caught leaving New Zealand with 53 skinks in his underwear. The point is that the department is being very vigilant about that and it is looking at how to increase penalties and at how to protect those creatures.

Just last weekend I was on the Otago Peninsula and I saw the work that the Department of Conservation has been doing, protecting all the fauna and flora out there. There is a magnificent array of wildlife on that peninsula—little blue penguins, Stewart Island shags, seals, and sea lions—but I was particularly interested in the work that the Department of Conservation has been doing with the royal albatross. The colony there has developed to over 260 breeding pairs. That is a pretty amazing exercise when you think that back in the 1930s, one egg was there, and it was stolen by a member of the public.

The work that the Department of Conservation has been doing over probably about 80 years is a really good example of how man and nature can complement each other. The observatory is there and tourists go there, but the birds seem to manage that fine, and without man’s intervention I think it is unlikely that that colony would still exist, because as the temperature is warming, we are finding that some of those eggs on the very exposed nests can actually be cooked. So I commend what the Department of Conservation has been doing.

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 Ōāmaru, 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 Ōāmaru. 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.

Department of Labour

Report noted.

Clauses 1 to 10, and schedules 1 to 7 agreed to.

Bill reported without amendment.