Game Animal Council Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Conservation: I move, That the Game Animal Council Bill be now read a third time. This bill establishes an independent Game Animal Council to improve the management of wild game hunting in New Zealand. Hunting is a traditional free Kiwi pastime. The Government wants the thousands of New Zealanders who hunt continuing to enjoy and benefit from hunting while also contributing to the responsible management of wild animals to protect conservation and other values.

The Game Animal Council Bill establishes an independent statutory body to give greater representation to the interests of recreational hunters. The Game Animal Council aims to better manage recreational and commercial hunting activities for deer, tahr, chamois, and wild pigs. Key functions of the council include advising and making recommendations to the Minister of Conservation on hunting issues, providing information and education to the sector, promoting safety initiatives, conducting game-animal research, and undertaking management functions for designated herds of special interest. An independent whole-of-sector Game Animal Council will get hunters working together to improve cooperation within the sector and help resolve conflicts.

The council’s first task will be developing an industry-led code of practice for controversial aerially assisted trophy hunting methods such as shooting from a helicopter and herding and hazing. Once the code of practice is approved—expected to be by the end of next year—the Minister of Conservation will be able to make it a mandatory condition of aerially assisted trophy hunting concessions from the Department of Conservation by regulation. In the interim the Minister will be considering the inclusion of conditions requiring compliance with the existing voluntary code, which limits shooting from the air and the practices of herding and hazing in relevant concessions.

The establishment of the Game Animal Council and regulations around the practice of aerially assisted trophy hunting are a core part of National’s confidence and supply agreement with United Future. We would like to thank United Future leader Peter Dunne for his passion and determination in getting the Game Animal Council established and ensuring herd-and-chase style heli-hunting becomes a thing of the past. We would also like to thank the Local Government and Environment Committee for its work on this bill. Once this bill is passed the Minister of Conservation intends to move rapidly to establish the Game Animal Council so that it can get on with its important work. We all look forward to seeing its code of practice for aerially assisted trophy hunting. I commend this bill to the House.

Mr Assistant Speaker, thanks for giving me the call in the third reading of the Game Animal Council Bill. Originally when this bill was introduced Labour was very familiar with its history. As part of the confidence and supply agreement with United Future in the previous Government we established an advisory group that travelled the country and did a very good job, actually, on getting the various views on the subject that is now the point of this legislation. Margaret Austin was the leader of that process, and I want to commend her for her passion and integrity throughout that process. I also acknowledge the 4,000 or so submitters who contributed to the early thinking along that path.

There are, of course, extreme views on either side. There are some who would say there should be no hunting at all in New Zealand, and some who would say there should not be a Department of Conservation. Those are not the views that the Local Government and Environment Committee was involved in hearing from and considering. We heard from a very large number of well-respected New Zealanders who had a contribution to make that was worthwhile. I really enjoyed that part of the process. Sometimes at select committees you get very few submitters, or you might get submitters who are just very narrow in their point of view and want to give only their perspective and do not consider anyone else, but that was not the case for all but a few of the submitters whom we heard.

Most of them were people who had a real passion for New Zealand and loved the outdoor life. For many of them it was the first time they had ever made a submission to a parliamentary committee. They were much more comfortable with their tramping boots, their shorts, and their Swanndri, out with a pack on their back than in the confines of a select committee room in front of a bunch of members of Parliament. But they were passionate about what they see as their patch, their part of the world, the public land of New Zealand, and their opportunity to hunt in a recreational capacity.

There was a lot of tension between the recreational hunters and the commercial hunters. I can remember one submitter who came and talked to us and told of how he had endured hours and hours and hours of climbing up very steep terrain—I do not recall exactly where it was; it may have been in Taranaki—to try to get a deer. He had got nearly to the top, nearly to the point where he would be able to shoot this deer, and a helicopter came over and just whooshed in and scared the deer away, and then they went off and shot some deer from the helicopter. He was pretty angry about that. He saw heli-hunting as a really bad practice and very intrusive on what he saw as a core part of his well-being, of his lifestyle as a New Zealander.

So not only do we have the physical benefits of hunting—you know, people get out in the fresh air and they do a lot of hard work to get to the areas where they go hunting—they obviously get food for their family, and, very importantly as well, they reduce the pests that we have got on our land. We have got a lot of work to do in that space. We have far too many pests that destroy the very environment that we all love so much.

So the select committee process itself was a really good one. The committee worked, I think, across all parties in a very constructive way. We had a bit of a shortened process. We wanted a little bit longer to consider the bill, and I think we would have got a lot more agreement had we been given the little extension that we asked for. But, no, the bill was closed down. It got sent back to the House, and here it has sat for months on the Order Paper—months.

💬 Darien Fenton: That’s disgraceful.

It is very odd. It was very frustrating for the committee. We said: “We think we can get this better. We think we can get this right. We think we can get agreement if we have a little bit longer.” No, we were denied that opportunity—“Get that bill back to the House.” Then the bill sat on the Order Paper for months and months and months, and here we are, on a Wednesday morning, under urgency, debating legislation that could have been brought to this House and dealt with in a proper manner. I think the process is offensive to good parliamentary process, and I am surprised that so many of the National Party members now just take it for granted that we will do things in a bad form, in a bad way. Well, what you get when you follow bad process is actually bad legislation. That is something that none of us would want. Even if we do not agree with legislation, we would want it to be robust.

Then, of course, we have had the Minister of Conservation’s Supplementary Order Paper 395. It was not discussed with any political parties before the debate started. It was not signalled during the months that we have had this bill on the Order Paper and not progressing through Parliament. It was just dropped on the Committee at the last minute. It was sort of “I’ve got the numbers. Who cares?”. Well, actually, a lot of people do. A lot of people care about good process and about things being debated and considered properly, because in the end that is how you get high-quality legislation.

I think it is, above all, a wasted opportunity. It was an opportunity to get the various perspectives around this issue together and to work through their differences until you got agreement. I think that was absolutely possible. When we first debated this bill, Labour said we would support its referral to a select committee, but we did express our serious concerns.

We expressed concerns about the actual structure of the Game Animal Council, which is a separate entity rather than a structure such as a ministerial advisory committee or any such comparable structure. That could have been set up under the Wild Animal Control Act. We did not need a separate piece of legislation. We did not need the type of consideration that this bill has gone through. Not only did we think that that was an unnecessary structure but also it was against the specific advice of both Treasury and the Department of Conservation. They said that setting up the Game Animal Council as a separate entity would set up direct and competing interests in the management of wild animals. They thought that it would be the highest cost in terms of regulatory time and in terms of resources.

So here we have got an organisation that creates division, that creates confusion, and that costs heaps of money. I cannot see who is winning out of this so far. It does not sound like this is a win-win situation, when, of course, we could have had a win-win situation. The opportunity was there for us to take, and it was thrown away by the Government.

I want to put on record not just our appreciation of the submitters but also the respect and value that Labour places on recreational hunting in New Zealand. It is a core part of so many people’s lives and it makes a huge contribution in terms of controlling animal numbers and protecting our biodiversity. We heard from many recreational hunters during the select committee process about their frustration with the Department of Conservation and how they were not able to work together. There was always tension; they were always arguing. We heard from others—probably about similar numbers, actually—about the strong, good, and healthy relationship that they had with the Department of Conservation in their areas. We heard the same from iwi. They said that in some parts of the country it worked like magic and in others it just was not working at all.

I wish we had been able to pick up the threads of what works in some areas and then develop a way of transposing that across the country so that every area could operate benefiting from the valuable staff and resources of the Department of Conservation and from recreational hunters, local iwi, community groups—the list goes on and on and on. Why does it work in some parts of the country and not in others? We never really developed the answer to that question, but this bill is not the answer. The establishment of the Game Animal Council is not going to be the answer at all. I think that it will cause further division and tension, and it will not let us pick up the opportunity that we had of learning what works and replicating it.

We did have a lot of discussion about the final determination of a proposal for conservation purposes, such as the dropping of 1080. My colleague Damien O’Connor has already referred to that and put a pretty staunch stake in the ground in terms of his support for the use of 1080. We have had the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment saying that our forests will be silent unless we take a massive step up in terms of pest eradication, and 1080 is currently one of the most effective means of doing that.

The final point I want to mention is in regard to the funding of the council. That has been a very difficult issue, and it is one on which all members of the committee worked hard. The purpose of this legislation will not be achieved by what we have ended up with today, despite the best efforts of the select committee. The bill creates a tension between the Game Animal Council and the Department of Conservation—the very thing it sought to remove. That is in no one’s interest. When this bill is reviewed in 3 years, I hope that we can have an opportunity to improve it and really reshape it to achieve the purpose that was intended.

Well, we have heard a lot of debate about the Game Animal Council Bill in the House today, but I remain convinced of the positive outcomes of this bill—the positive outcomes for the hunting community and the positive outcomes for the conservation estate. In fact, it has confirmed my belief that hunting and conservation can and must go hand in hand. There is plenty of evidence to support the belief that the majority of those attracted to our great outdoors as recreationalists—in this case, hunters—learn to love our special places and become entrenched conservationists.

This bill is a significant achievement for hunters. It gives them much more say in their sport. But it is also designed to improve the outcomes for, and protection of, the conservation estate, because it provides for better management of herds of special significance in specified areas. The Game Animal Council is a framework for collaborative, intelligent management of hunting and game animals. Those animals are tahr, chamois, deer, and wild pigs. This is in really stark contrast to the rather haphazard, divided, and often confrontational management, or lack of management, that is in place currently.

The Local Government and Environment Committee spent many hours investigating and discussing this bill. There has been huge interest in the topic and active discussion since back in 2005. We heard from a significant number of submitters.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m.