Game Animal Council (Herds of Special Interest) Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Game Animal Council (Herds of Special Interest) Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon JAMES MEAGER: I move, That the Game Animal Council (Herds of Special Interest) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

I made a submission to the Standing Orders Committee yesterday about the value of legislative statements, and I said that they were originally intended to allow Ministers the opportunity to put forward the policy intent of the bill and to no longer have to read from their speech. It would be remiss of me not to try and attempt to put my money where my mouth is and, rather than read my second reading speech, point to the thrust of what the committee came out with in their report—some of the highlights, and some of the lowlights, to be fair, in some of the submissions—and talk about why this bill is an important piece of the hunter-led management conservation framework.

First, can I just start by acknowledging all of those submitters who did submit on the bill at select committee and the work of the Environment Committee in managing the bill through. They’ve come back with a report and the commentary, which doesn’t recommend any substantive changes really, but it does provide some relatively good insight as to the views and thoughts of individuals out there, both in the hunting sector and in the wider conservation sector. I say wider conservation sector because, of course, hunters are part of our conservation efforts. Hunters are one of our best conservation tools. They are the ones that are out there day in, day out, repairing the tracks, resetting the traps, and taking care of species—whether that’s deer, whether that’s goats, whether that’s possums. They’re the ones out there on the ground and doing the work, and they’re the ones that should be acknowledged and appreciated for that work.

I want to acknowledge all our hunters that took time out of their busy days, their busy work schedules, to make submissions on this bill to emphasise the value that hunter-led conservation has in our wild animal management framework, and to emphasise how important an approach like herds of special interest is to more effectively and sustainably managing game animals in New Zealand. Our game animals, while they are introduced species, they are valued introduced species. They form a part of our culture and our society, and they have done so for many, many decades now. They are important as a food source to many of our whānau and families on the land who go out there and just want to bring a bit of venison off the back blocks. They are an important economic tool for our international tourism operators and our international guided hunters, who raise, at last count, I think, $280 million from the international community, in terms of economic value, and they are important to our conservationists.

Again, as I repeated at the top of the speech, if you look at what the achievements have been of the Fiordland Wapiti Foundation and the Central North Island Sika Foundation up in the Central Plateau, but also the New Zealand Tahr Foundation in and around my part of the world, central South Island, and also on the West Coast; if you think about what the Rakiura Whitetail Trust has been doing down with the Department of Conservation and with locals down in Stewart Island; and if you think about the proliferation of these community-led organisations around the country, you can only come to the conclusion that by including hunters in our conservation efforts, we will get better conservation outcomes.

At the same time, we will be able to better manage our herds for lower numbers but healthier herd numbers. That’s going to be more venison taken off the land. It’s going to be lower deer numbers. It’s going to mean better conservation outcomes. All I need to do is point those members who are going to get up in about six minutes time and say that these are invasive species that need to be completely eradicated, totally forgetting that many of their own supporters rely on these animals for daily food, they rely on them for their cultural and social values, and they actually rely on them, and the people around these animals, to take care of the environment.

If they actually took the chance to read the departmental report and they go to the part of the departmental report which actually responds to questions about how effective this kind of management has been down in Fiordland, particularly through the Fiordland Wapiti Foundation—I will take them to the particular page so they don’t have to spend too much time trying to chase it because they clearly haven’t read it. It’s page 20 of the departmental report. It actually asks, “What do the results show?” Well, I can tell everyone what the results show. The Fiordland Wapiti Foundation, for decades and decades, have been implementing a community agreement, which is basically a herd of special interest in everything but name. I will take you to the exact point which says, “What are the impacts? Overall, vegetation monitoring results in the Wapiti area indicate a reduction in deer browse impacts in alpine areas and signs of improving regeneration in forested catchments”. I can say that again if the members would like me to. I can point to another point, which is that “In 2024, the proportion of browsed plants in the Wapiti area had significantly declined to 8 percent, meeting a newly established target. In managed areas, outside the Wapiti area, i.e., the area, which is not being managed by hunter-led conservation, browse increased from 10 percent in 2016 to 2018, to 16 percent in 2022.” In the areas outside of hunter-led conservation management, the biodiversity is in a worse state than inside the area which is currently managed. If that is not proof that this is an idea that is worth pursuing and worth enforcing, then I don’t know what else is.

Finally, in the time that I’ve got left, I wanted to address some of the disinformation, misinformation that is being put out there by proxies of the Opposition in the public. They are saying things like, “This bill will set up, in the future, things like sanctuaries for stoats.” Well, if that’s a way to disparage our hunting community, I don’t know what is. The thing that this bill does is it puts in place a management tool and a management regime, which allows our most effective conservation tool, our hunters, to get out there and better manage our wild animal management system. The final one I’ll leave on, and I won’t say which organisation made this comment, but they disparagingly said that “All our hunters do is go around flying in on helicopters and staying in their luxury lodges.” Well, I think that was a mistake that that organisation did because the resulting response from hunters around the country was to send in examples of the luxury lodges. I can tell you, I flatted in Dunedin for about 10 years, and compared to some of the accommodation that our hunters were filming and showing us they were staying in, I think the student accommodation in Dunedin was luxury lodgings compared to some of the hillsides and windswept environments and bivouacs and lean-tos that our hunters put themselves into as they go out day and night to collect food for their families and to do what they love doing, which is to hunt and to be out in the outdoors and to enjoy our natural environment and to do their bit for conservation.

That was my attempt at putting aside the written speech. Let the legislative statement talk for itself. Let the commentary from the select committee speak for itself. I commend this second reading to the House and look forward to its passage as quickly as possible.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for this opportunity to reply to the Minister for Hunting and Fishing on the Game Animal Council (Herds of Special Interest) Amendment Bill. You will see, anybody who’s looked, that the bill itself is very little, one page at the back here—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): Great committee of the whole House coming up, ha, ha!

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —yes—so there’s not very many clauses, so you will not be hearing from me a long speech that reads out bits of the Act or the bill, because it is very short. But it is important to set some context here about how our conservation legislation works and how our Department of Conservation works and also our approach to mammals. We know—well, most people in this House will know—that a third of New Zealand is in some sort of conservation estate. Of course, most of that is in the best island, Madam Speaker, and I will bring you into this debate a little bit because a lot of it is around where you live.

Hon James Meager: I’ve always liked you, Rachel Brooking.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: Well, that’s right. It’s the best part of the world. The Minister and I can agree on that, I’m sure.

Hon Mark Patterson: Aren’t you going to run some defence for Dunedin’s student flats, Rachel? Come on!

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: I’ve been asked—by a Minister, no less—to speak on Dunedin flats, and I will get to that at some point, I can assure the members in the House—

Hon Member: What, the flat you’re in—your flat?

Hon Member: No, we never shared.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —because I know that they are looking forward to that part of my contribution, but for now I’m going to stick—

Hon James Meager: There’s no connection between the two, by the way.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —to the conservation land that does not include the area of North Dunedin that the Ministers are referring to, wonderful though that part of the country is as well.

But we know that we have all of this conservation land, most of it is in the South Island, and a huge amount of that, therefore, is in the takiwā of Ngāi Tahu as well. Within that conservation land, there are different types of land. We hear a lot about stewardship land. This bill is not applying to stewardship land, but it’s important that I mention stewardship land because, of course, all of that conservation land that we have, some of it became conservation land through different changes of Government departments in the 1980s and 1990s as well. Some of that land is not pristine land, and there’s not an intent to preserve all of that land at a most pristine level forever, and that is why it’s called stewardship land. That means that that categorisation, different things can happen on that land compared with other higher-status land.

Now, the most high-status land, of course, is that that is in the national parks. The national parks have their own piece of legislation as well, being the National Parks Act, as well as being relevant to the Conservation Act that talks about the different plans and the different rules that are required on these different types of conservation land. But the national parks are very precious. And, Madam Speaker—again from your part of the world—you’ll know that some of those national parks, there were great campaigns at the turn of the last century to hold pieces, pristine pieces, of New Zealand’s ecosystem intact for future generations. Hence, we have the National Parks Act, and we look after these pieces of land in a very special way.

Now, before I get on to Dunedin students, I do want to talk about my Dunedin-made earrings, which are of pekapeka. It’s important to note that Aotearoa New Zealand does not have any indigenous terrestrial mammals except for a couple of species of bat. Of course, we have wonderful marine mammals and—

Hon Member: Are bats birds? Can bats be Bird of the Year?

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: Bats are manu. Bats can win the Bird of the Year, and it was very good that they did—should have been the manu of the century, but that’s a digression, I admit. I will not go down there.

What I’m talking about is the importance of national parks and that New Zealand does not have mammals, and so much of our biodiversity, our flora and our fauna, has evolved in a different way from the rest of the world because we don’t have these mammals that lots of the world has that eat the undergrowth.

I heard the Minister, in a question and answer earlier this week, talk about the protection of the canopy—that is something that a marsupial causes problems with, the possums. But the mammals, the ungulates, cause the problems with undergrowth, so that is one of the reasons why the National Parks Act says that “introduced plants and animals shall as far as possible be exterminated:”. That, of course, means that the Department of Conservation has not been wanting to protect these introduced mammals, the ungulates, that eat—

Dr Vanessa Weenink: Understorey.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —the undergrowth, the understorey—thank you.

Simon Court: If this is a short speech.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: So what this bill is doing—I made no promise of a short speech. I just said that I wouldn’t be reading from the bill. That is all, Mr Court.

This is a big issue, and this is what the submitters submitted on.

We heard from the Minister. He invited us all to go to the departmental report. I’d like to report to the Minister that whilst we have looked at the departmental report, it is a different situation than earlier this morning where a huge amendment had come through late in the piece and the regulatory impact statement to that had not been available for some time, and there was some argument in the Chamber about this. In this case, there has been a select committee process, and I was very pleased to hear from many submitters, submitters who are hunters, submitters who are conservationists, submitters who are hunters and conservationists—a whole range of people. They all came from, I believe, a very good place and all do truly want the best for our national parks and all that nature within them. We don’t need to be directed to different places in the departmental report, from the Minister, because we did hear the submissions about the negative regenerative growth.

The Minister says—well, the departmental report says it improves by the hunters doing the maintenance rather than leaving it to the Department of Conservation that we all know has had its funding reduced and reduced and reduced. There is another way of coming at this issue and saying, well, could the funding to the Department of Conservation be increased, and could this be a priority—

Ryan Hamilton: Magic money tree.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —work programme for them. And then it’s—oh, then it’s the magic money tree, we hear from the other side. But how long does that argument go on that it’s just the magic money tree and that we should be making concession after concession for actors who are not there just for the conservation of our natural and indigenous biology, to come into our very special conservation land and do the management of it? Where does this stop? I haven’t heard an answer from the Minister about that, and of course we’ll be asking questions in the committee stage. But I invite members opposite to tell me about the sort of funding that they’re going to have for the continued monitoring of any of these groups, the hunting groups, that are doing conservation, to make sure that in fact there is better regenerative growth in the areas that they manage, and what learnings there will therefore be for what other groups can be doing that do not require an introduced mammal to be there eating up the undergrowth.

I think it’s important to also note—before I move on to Dunedin flats—this language around high-valued introduced animals. We’re being told that there’s this real tourism focus, that we need them for tourism. Then, the next moment, we’re told, “Oh no, it’s food for your whānau.” These are two very different arguments, and they haven’t been clearly articulated by the Minister about what is the actual driver for this change.

I want to also acknowledge the New Zealand Conservation Authority submission that is worried that this is another way to get the New Zealand Conservation Authority out of decision making. Of course, Ngāi Tahu, in their settlement legislation, has a role on that conservation authority and others, so that is a highly pertinent point to the great South Island, where most of this conservation land is.

Of course, in the fine electorate of Dunedin that has all the student housing, I’m very pleased that there’s now a healthy homes standard about—hopefully, it will be much better than all of those hunting shacks.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is my pleasure to come to talk about the Game Animal Council (Herds of Special Interest) Amendment Bill because I am a hunter and I’m from the South Island and I’m also a conservationist. I’m not one of these people that is going for growth to have the access to trophy heads in the South Island. In fact, I find that odious. I think we need to get rid of these ungulates in our bush, and that’s part of what I hunt for.

There’s also a value in wild meat, but I’m aware and we heard through the select committee of many hunters who were very, very concerned about the impact of this bill and who opposed this bill. We also heard from hunters who supported this bill, and Roy Sloane from the Fiordland Wapiti Foundation gave a great presentation.

The problem with the hunting support for this bill is that it doesn’t actually reveal the evidence or respect the evidence that we have of hunter management of our ungulates, because we have an escalating pest-damage crisis across the South Island, and that’s because hunters are not good at managing our ungulate problem. They’re clearly not good at managing the ungulate problem. And personally, I know of people who have used their horse trailers to transfer fallow deer from one place to another. There is the transfer of tahr to different parts of the Southern Alps that have happened not quite accidentally. We’re seeing pests in places that can only have got there with human intervention.

While we do have some hunters—many hunters—who are caring about our bush, our communities, and who are conservationists, we also have some irresponsible hunters and people who like to hunt, who are quite happy to feed the populations, to reinject populations. We’ve got wallabies now in Otago.

This is a crisis of pests not just in our national parks but also in our farmland, where we’re seeing pigs coming back. We’re seeing the loss of lambs. It’s a wider thing than simply having what’s claimed to be managed herds in our national parks. But the idea that we can manage herds in our national parks is not only dangerous; it’s a way of taking away from the whole value of our national parks. We are concerned there has been no publicly available inquiries, reviews, or evaluations that have informed or are relevant to the policy that’s being given effect to in this bill, and no further impact analysis has become available for any aspects of the policy to be given effect to by this bill.

We’ve heard from the Minister and we’ve heard from the Government that this bill is about economic growth. What does that mean? The only way you can make money out of this is by inviting, probably American, guided hunters into our national parks to shoot deer that have essentially been raised to be there for them. And you know, as a New Zealander, I find that inappropriate. I find that hope to get some money from people who really are coming here simply to shoot animals is just the wrong way to go about it. I don’t think we should be supporting that type of tourism in this country.

If that’s the type of economic growth that we’re talking about, I’d like to see some numbers, because at least the Government could try and justify it, because we know it is quite unlikely that there’s going to be anything meaningful in that. And what we’ve heard from the Fiordland Wapiti Foundation is that that’ll bring some money back for them to continue to do some work, which is great in that little area. What we have is a conservation estate that has been defunded and defunded and defunded. So the defunding of our conservation estate is one key factor that has given rise to the rising ungulate numbers.

Rather than giving access to our conservation estate and our national parks to hunters, why don’t we invest in our conservation estate to protect our national parks, to remove the ungulates, to support the biodiversity, to support our biodiversity that’s so essential for our climate response, not simply for respecting our unique habitat.

We are concerned. We are concerned that this bill is simply something that this Government wants to do to please a small portion of the New Zealand community, and it is going to do damage even to those hunters, because this bill will not stand in the next Government. Any investment that’s made now, any hope that a small group of hunters have that they’re going to have a free ride, is going to be swept away in the next Government. Rather than working with our hunting community and the different parts of our hunting community, many of whom are doing good things, this is running roughshod over a process. It is not building consensus. It is simply saying, “We want to do it and because we can do it in urgency, we’re going to push it through—push it through.” This is the problem with the Government in general, and it’s probably why we’ve all had enough, and in 2026 we’ll get rid of them.

What we’re really concerned about and what we’ve seen in the Fiordland Wapiti Foundation is that this is also presenting a real challenge for other pest control, because they don’t want 1080 drops. They don’t want 1080 drops because the deer might eat them. Then that might not be a good thing if they’re bringing people in to hunt trophy animals. So that makes it more expensive. DOC’s work to control possums in the national park becomes harder.

Here comes another problem: if we have the Minister for Hunting and Fishing, the Hon James Meager, being able to designate herds of special interest areas in our national parks but the cost of maintaining those national parks falls on the conservation Minister, how do we manage that? Is the Minister going to dedicate some funding to support the conservation estate? Is the Minister going to dedicate the money we need to properly fund the conservation authority? Is the Minister going to properly fund the Department of Conservation?

These are questions that we should be getting a response to, because ultimately this is pushing a problem on to another budget and creating greater expense for people who are working their hardest, who are doing their hardest to reduce the pest numbers—reduce possums, rats, stoats in our conservation estate, as well as reducing the number of ungulates, and reducing the damage that is happening in our bush.

We oppose this bill. We oppose it because it is simply the wrong way to go about managing our conservation estate. And not only that, it is simply a way of rushing a process, which is typical of this Government, to do poor legislation, to push it through under urgency—urgency in a way we’ve never seen from any other Government; as everything starts falling apart, trying to make it work. It’s a sad day when we have such ridiculous, dangerous—dangerous—bills through the House under urgency.

We will oppose this bill, and we will remove it in 2026. It’s going to have a very short life. It’s a very short bill; it’ll have a very short life. Less than a year—

The member’s time has expired. I need to put the question. The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I look forward to agreeing to the motion. This bill is a very short bill, overriding the considerations from section 4(2)(b) in the National Parks Act. It’s doing something that is removing a roadblock. I put an alternate view into this report to make sure that it’s on the record that I think that the threats that we’ve heard from the other side of the House tonight, saying about how this has got a short life, are exactly why we need to make sure that the intent of this bill is carried out.

At the Environment Committee, we heard hyperbole which was ridiculous—introduced animals are going to be thrown all around the country with this bill. It was insane. The Game Animal Council is a fantastic organisation advising, informing, and educating the hunting sector. It should be encouraged to be able to use tools like herds of special interests to get good outcomes for the taxpayer, the hunters, and our bush. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

I rise to support this bill on behalf of New Zealand First. It’s a very sensible bill—a very sensible bill. It does clarify the inherent tension between the Game Animal Council Act and the National Parks Act, and it allows the Minister to designate herds of special interest to be managed within a national park.

Look, hunting is almost a Kiwi birthright. It’s a cultural treasure for so many New Zealanders. It puts meat on our table, and I think that, actually, across the House, people would understand that, or at least they should. It is also the tourists that come in for these trophy heads. I heard Scott Willis over there before, and it seems to have offended his sensibilities, but they would be some of the most high-value tourists that come into this country. This is a very, very high-end tourist.

Scott Willis: Oh, come on, Mark.

Hon MARK PATTERSON: We need to drive some economic growth here, Scott, otherwise, we’re going to have to be making some pretty hard trade-offs. This is but one way that we can attract those very high-value tourists.

There are some challenges with this, and we will have to manage them, and the Minister will have to oversee this carefully. The farming community, particularly, will be looking that these herds are managed. We did hear the example of the Fiordland Wapiti Foundation and how this this model was essentially working in practice now. We think it’s a sensible bill. It’s well worth doing, and New Zealand First support it.

I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Statutes Amendment Bill.