Game Animal Council Bill

We now move to debate on Part 2. This is clauses 27 to 36 and schedules 1 to 3.

It is good to speak on Part 2 of the Game Animal Council Bill, which deals with some of the issues that, even though not as substantive as the ones we have already been debating, caused the most discussion in the Local Government and Environment Committee. One issue in particular that we discussed was that of offences and penalties.

We also spent a huge amount of time in the select committee talking about how the Game Animal Council would be funded. I was really fascinated by how many proposals we had about the different methods of funding. There was always some group within the hunting fraternity that said: “That is an excellent idea—but we should be excluded.” It did not matter what model we considered, or what model we thought would be an appropriate and fair way of funding the Game Animal Council through some sort of levy, there was always a group that explained to us—and I think that they were being perfectly honest, actually—how that would impact unfairly on them. So this part has a bit about that, a bit about the offences provisions, and a bit about the further definition of the “herds of special interest” and what animals may be hunted within those.

I was very interested to hear an earlier contribution about how much money was going to be spent on operating the Game Animal Council. The estimates that the Local Government and Environment Committee got were $100,000 for the first year of set-up, and from then on, after the first 12 months, it would be $50,000 per annum. At the same time we have had the chief executive of the Department of Conservation on the radio this morning, on Rural News, saying that his department was not going anywhere near the advocacy required for the Ruataniwha dam proposal, which opponents say will turn the Tukituki River toxic.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order!

The Department of Conservation said it would cost it $250,000 to prepare and defend a robust case about the nitrate management on the Tukituki River. That is just 3 years of the funding required, as outlined in Part 2 of this bill, for the Game Animal Council, because if it is $100,000 for the first year and $50,000 after it, then in 3 years you have pretty well chewed through the same amount of money that the department was not prepared to use to defend—and perhaps even, at some future date, enhance—the quality of a river, and a river that actually has significant conservation values—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! This is outside the scope.

Just going back to the more specific areas in this part, Eric Roy in his contribution talked about the regimes that are in place in other countries. I will be interested in his contribution on this, because he is right in saying that other countries have a much stricter regime around what can be hunted, what can be taken from the country, and what can be used for what purpose within the country. They usually have a regime where people from overseas are charged a much higher rate to hunt on public land than they would be if they were a resident of that country. Mr Roy used the examples of Canada and a state in America to emphasise his points. We do not go into that level of detail in this legislation.

The select committee did not talk a lot about whether we should have a different regime for overseas nationals. I have not checked the Table recently, but there may well be a Supplementary Order Paper proposing that sort of regime. It is a little more detail than the committee was able to get agreement on, though. In clause 28 we talk about a person “who hunts or kills any game animal that is part of a herd of special interest”. That is a herd that has been designated as a herd of special interest. If they hunt or kill an animal without an authorisation, without a licence or a permit, and without complying with the terms of that authorisation, however it is given, whether through a licence or a permit, they then are liable to be convicted of an offence that is then liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding $2,500.

I would be very interested to hear from some of the hunters in our Parliament as to whether they consider that to be a high enough penalty to deter people from committing such an offence, because that is another area that the committee felt quite weak on, in terms of knowing exactly what level of fine you would need to impose to deter anyone from committing that act. A person might say: “Well, I’m interested in hunting. I can’t be bothered getting a licence or a permit, or if I applied for one, I might not qualify. There would be reasons that I would be excluded from being granted a licence or a permit to hunt.” So what would be the level of fee that would make them say: “Oh, if I got caught I’d be fined that amount of money.”? That is exactly what clause 28 in Part 2 is aiming to do. It is aiming to set a fine at a level that would stop people from hunting or killing animals within a herd of special interest without a licence or a permit.

The next couple of clauses in Part 2 sort of flow on from that. We have got clause 29, “Capturing, conveying, or possessing game animal that that is part of a herd of special interest”. There are obviously a limited number of ways that people could be doing that, but this is different from hunting or killing. Again, we set the fee at what we considered an appropriate level—$5,000. So if a person captures, conveys, or possesses a game animal that is part of a herd of special interest without a permit or a licence, they get a fine of $5,000.

Next in that series of fines relating to animals that are part of a herd of special interest is the provision in clause 30, “Restrictions on liberation of game animal that is part of herd of special interest”. This attracts the biggest fine in Part 2, and that is a fine of $50,000. So Parliament is saying that that offence—the offence of liberating a game animal that is part of a herd of special interest, or allowing any game animal that belongs to a herd of special interest to escape—is considered to be the most offensive of the three offences, much more so than capturing, conveying, or possessing a game animal, and even more so than hunting or killing an animal in a herd of special interest.

I think that sometimes we go over these fines and penalties provisions quite lightly. But if you take a step back and consider why we have them, the whole point is to create an environment where the weight of the penalty is such that it would stop somebody from moving to commit the offence. It is not just an after-the-event consideration—that we should punish somebody because they have committed an offence. There is also the deterrent factor in the penalty regime, and we certainly hope we have got it right.

There are a few other provisions in Part 2, but those are the four main ones that I wanted to concentrate on. I do think it is an important regime for us to debate, and I hope that it carries on for another little while.

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.

—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 in Hokitika on the West Coast for killing chamois, recovering those carcasses, processing them, and then exporting 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.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. Can I just clarify something for a moment? Are we dealing with Part 2 and schedules 1 and 2, or—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Yes, and 3—schedules 1 to 3.

Schedules 1, 2, and 3—thank you very much, indeed. That may make a difference to what I say. In Part 2 of this bill, the Game Animal Council Bill, subpart 1 deals with offences and penalties and subpart 2 deals with other matters. Before I begin on this, let me say that, in due course, I also want to refer to the Minister of Conservation’s Supplementary Order Paper, Supplementary Order Paper 395, which amends clause 33. However, I just want to recognise the contribution from Eric Roy earlier, which I found very helpful, particularly with some of those clauses in Part 1 that had raised questions. So I thank the member for that, but it did leave me with some more questions, which are now exacerbated by Part 2, because this is the bit that deals with, in the first instance, offences and penalties.

It seems to me that if some of the difficulties between hunting organisations and the Department of Conservation and so on had been resolved through a different measure—that is, not by a statute setting up a Game Animal Council on its own—then some of the provisions in Part 2 would not be necessary either. Certainly, offences need to be established, and that could easily have been done, I think, under the Wild Animal Control Act, to which I have referred previously, and it could have been done in a way that was cooperative and came out of an advisory committee established under that legislation, rather than under this legislation.

So although I recognise that offences and penalties are necessary, the thing I am questioning in this part is that this entire process, and this special bureaucracy that is being established to implement it, would not have been necessary in this form if the Minister of Conservation had chosen to take more notice of the submissions that were put in by submitters to the Local Government and Environment Committee or had chosen to take more notice of the regulatory impact statement written by the Department of Conservation.

This really goes back to stage 1 for me, because if these penalties and provisions here and the definitions of a “herd of special interest”, and so on, are all essential, then it might have been better to have it come as recommendations from an advisory council that the Minister could not disestablish under the Wild Animal Control Act.

I want to go to another matter, and it is in schedule 1, which talks about enforcement officers and honorary enforcement officers. We see in clause 1 that enforcement officers are clearly appointed “within the meaning of section 2(1) of the Conservation Act 1987, as an enforcement officer for the purposes of this Act.” So there will be warranted officers appointed under the Conservation Act to carry out the enforcement functions required under this piece of legislation. Schedule 1 then talks about the appointment and removal of honorary enforcement officers. An honorary enforcement officer here, in schedule 1(2), is somebody “who may be appointed for a term not exceeding 3 years, but may be reappointed: (b) may be removed from office by the Director-General, by written notice, if the Director-General considers for any reason that the person is no longer a fit and proper person”—[Bell rung] I just wish to conclude this point fairly quickly.

Schedule 1(3) states: “The Minister may reimburse an honorary enforcement officer for reasonable expenses”. This goes back to a theme that is being pursued by this Government when it comes to the care and protection of our environment. The Minister of Conservation has stripped back the Department of Conservation to such an extent that now it cannot even carry out its legal functions. So it cannot preserve, protect, and advocate for the environment, given the stripping-back of the staff of the Department of Conservation.

The Minister’s answer to that has been partnership. It has been words around partnering with volunteers and charitable organisations in order to ensure that our environment can be adequately protected. This is the same Minister who wants to get housing on the cheap through giving minuscule amounts of money to third-sector organisations in housing provision. He wants to contract out parts of the functions of the Department of Conservation because it can no longer fulfil those functions because of retrenchments and staffing. He wants to contract out those functions to volunteers and voluntary and charitable organisations, and so get environmental protection on the cheap.

This is now environmental—or game animal—enforcement on the cheap, with enforcement officers. So I presume that the Minister has in mind that he will give a cap to the people who volunteer to take up this position. They can then, with their own resources, with this hat on that says “honorary enforcement officer”, stroll around our environment ensuring that the provisions of this bill, and particularly the requirements of Part 2, are being honoured and are being implemented.

I worry that this is the same model that is being used in other areas where the Government wants to withdraw money that it provides for legitimate and legislated functions, and pass that over to charitable organisations, individuals, and the private sector, in some cases, in order to carry out what should be Government functions. The Minister should resource this properly if he wants the functions to be carried out adequately. Thank you.

I want to begin by focusing on schedule 1, which is around the role of enforcement officers and honorary enforcement officers under this new Game Animal Council Bill. Any piece of legislation is only as good as the provisions under which it can be enforced. So the enforcement and penalty provisions that are found in Part 2 of this bill will have meaning or effect only if those people who seek to break the law feel that there is an adequate chance that they will be caught, in breaching the provisions of this bill.

One of the concerns that we had at the Local Government and Environment Committee was the lack of detail around how many of these enforcement officers we would have. We know that every constable in the New Zealand Police will be considered an enforcement officer, but we also know that police have a very large job to do outside of the Game Animal Council Bill. The reality is that I do not believe that our police force is going to be patrolling Department of Conservation land as a priority, to catch people carrying out illegal hunting or illegal hunting of herds of national significance, unless they have been tipped off that there is something very bad going on. Then the question comes down to who is going to do that day-to-day monitoring, which, realistically, is not going to be carried out by the New Zealand Police.

So we have a role in schedule 1 called “enforcement officers”, and then we have what are called “honorary enforcement officers”. At the select committee our concern was very much that this not become the “Dad’s army” of the conservation estate, and that these be very real positions, which bring in people who have the right qualifications, experience, and knowledge, particularly in the areas of health and safety. Hunting is obviously a very dangerous activity and the last thing we would want to do is put people who are inadequately trained in harm’s way by sending them out into a part of the conservation estate where hunting is being carried out. It comes down, really, to schedule 1, clause 2(1), which says: “The Director-General may appoint any fit and proper person who is suitably qualified and trained …”, but nowhere in the legislation do we find out what “suitably qualified and trained” is deemed to be. There are no thresholds set. There are no basic competencies put in place. So I would like to think that the director-general is going to do the right thing, but, as we can see, public servants can be made to do things that they do not particularly want to do and that are against the interests of the Department of Conservation and what we would normally expect from the Department of Conservation.

💬 Phil Twyford: It’s been going on for 5 years.

That is right—it has been going on for 5 years. If we were then to find out that the Government was under some pressure because, in fact—I mean, these are honorary positions. The Minister has the ability to reimburse for realistic costs, but these people are not getting paid, so I question, really, how realistic it is to think that we are going to get a big enough force of these people to be able to monitor these activities, given that the people who are paid to do it—the paid enforcement officers—are the police force, and this is not going to be a priority for them. There is a risk that that definition of “suitably qualified and trained” might be too watered down and be without adequate belt and braces in the schedule and in this part of the bill to say what the core competencies are. If the Government feels under pressure that it does not have enough people out there, it might start to actually water down that definition of “suitably qualified and trained”. Then we may end up with people who are lesser qualified and trained carrying out this very important role.

I want to just briefly go through some of the powers that these honorary enforcement officers will have. They, basically, will have all the powers that a police officer would have in the Department of Conservation: the power to intervene, the power to prevent or stop offending, the power to require personal details or the production of lawful authority, and the power to search. The honorary enforcement officers “may, without a warrant, search any building, vehicle, vessel, aircraft, animal, or other thing on public conservation land if—[they believe it] is in the possession or under the control of …” someone who they think is committing an offence under this legislation. That is the power to stop and the powers of seizure. Those are quite significant powers to be handing over to non-professional people, and all we were asking, really, was that we have a little bit more detail in this part of the bill about the basic core competencies and requirements of an honorary enforcement officer, given that they are basically going to have nearly all the powers of a police officer when they are acting on Department of Conservation land.

I move, That the question be now put.

So, coming back to my point after that brief and very good speech from Mr Goldsmith—

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: What a contribution.

💬 Paul Goldsmith: Better than yours.

Yeah, OK. It is about this definition of “suitably qualified and trained”, and it is the Director-General of Conservation who will be appointing these people and making these judgments, but as we know, directors-general in the Department of Conservation can be leaned on to do things that they are not particularly comfortable with. We know that that is the case, particularly in terms of the Ruataniwha Dam scheme, which is currently before a board of inquiry—

💬 Hon Judith Collins: Don’t know that at all.

I am sorry, Mrs Collins, but where there is smoke, there is fire. I do not think there is anyone who is under any illusion that the Department of Conservation was not weighed on very heavily—weighed on very, very heavily—to pull its submission on the Ruataniwha Dam scheme. That is quite clear. The Minister leaned on the Department of Conservation, and this happens from time to time. So that is why we are asking in this piece of legislation that, where we have Ministers in the National Government who are prepared to lean on their directors-general and their public servants to get them to do things that they do not want to do, it is important in legislation like this that when we are giving people the power of a police officer—

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: The staff member resigned.

That is right. A staff member actually did resign over what happened in the Department of Conservation with Ruataniwha, so it does happen. It has happened; it is happening. That is why when we are giving these honorary enforcement officers basically the role of a police officer in the conservation estate and it is the director-general who is determining who is “suitably qualified and trained”, we should have a little bit more in the legislation to make it clear. And when we cannot find enough of these people—because they are not paid positions; they are voluntary positions—and when suddenly there are not the numbers that were promised in the conservation estate, it is important that the Minister does not then lean on the director-general to say: “Well, we just need to water down those kinds of standards you’ve put in place for what these people”—

💬 Hon Shane Jones: Honorary politician.

Well, it would be good to have some basic core competencies around that, as well. So when you look at the extensive powers—I mean, we are very disappointed that we were not able to get that under schedule 1 of this bill.

One of the good things in Part 2 of the bill is clause 35, “Review of operation of Act”, which means that in 3 years’ time, when we are the Government, we will get to see whether or not this legislation has actually met its intentions, where the gaps are, and we will pledge to carry out a proper review of the Act. We believe that this was a lost opportunity and that there were real synergies and common goals that could have been built on between recreational hunters, or all hunters now. This bill was about just recreational hunters; it is now about all hunters, which changes the flavour significantly. We will see how the Act has operated in practice and whether the many, many concerns that officials right across the board from Treasury and the Department of Conservation raised during the development of this policy and the select committee process have been realised and, if they have been realised, we will see what we can then do about it. We do pledge to carry out a very thorough and transparent review of this Act in 3 years’ time.

It would actually be good to have an element of independence, perhaps, in that review. The review of the operation of the Act, as it is currently in the bill, is that the Minister will do that, and, as we know, this is a Government that is not afraid to put out reviews that do not reflect reality but reflect what it wants reality to be. So it is a shame that there is not a little bit more independence in clause 35 in relation to the review of the operation of the Act, just to give the public confidence that this is not the Government finding what it wants to find, or trying to brush away any criticisms or concerns that claims it made about the way that the Act would operate have not actually come to pass. I think in terms of the very significant change that we made in Part 1 of the bill, which was to basically remove the word “recreational” from the entire bill and now make this bill apply to all hunters. We are very concerned about that because we think it actually shuts the recreational guys out. We wanted to make it very clear that even though these are small, voluntary organisations—they are recreational; they are not professional—these are the people whom we really want to be involved in this process. We want them to be part of the engagement the Department of Conservation has, and now there is no requirement to do that, because there is no mention of the word “recreational”. It is very telling that the change the Government made, which we will be reviewing, under clause 35 in Part 2 of this bill, never came to the select committee. At the select committee this was never raised with us as problem. Actually, this is Minister Bridges’ modus operandi, so it is quite fortuitous that he is in the chair at the moment. It never came to the select committee. It was dropped—

I move, That the question be now put.

Motion agreed to.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 395 in the name of the Hon Dr Nick Smith to Part 2 be agreed to.