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 (Teanau Tuiono): 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 first time. I nominate the Environment Committee to consider the bill, and, at the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 30 October 2025.

This is my first piece of legislation in the House, and I had a rather dramatic, flowing 10-minute eloquent speech all ready to go. But given the hour is nearing midnight—it’s 20 past 11, and we all want Reuben Davidson to get a good night’s sleep—I will curtail my first reading contributions to get to the crux of it, and that is that this bill further supports our Government’s view that the hunter-led and community-led conservation effort is the key to improving and protecting our nation’s biodiversity.

The Game Animal Council (Herds of Special Interest) Amendment Bill proposes a small but significant amendment to the Game Animal Council Act 2013. This amendment will provide certainty and will clarify that a herd of special interest designation can be made within national parks, as originally intended by the Act. Herds of special interest are simply herds of game animals on public conservation land that have been formally designated by the Minister to be managed for hunting purposes. The designation enables certain valued introduced species already present in a specific geographic area to be managed for qualities prized by hunters, such as the size and quality of individual animals. However, there is some ambiguity in the current legislative framework.

Specifically, Subpart 3 of the Game Animal Council Act allows the Minister to establish a herd of special interest within national parks. Now, managing a herd for hunting purposes includes maintaining a sustainable population of healthy game animals by targeting cull stags and hinds and does, and allowing strong, healthy older stags and bulls to propagate. This creates a smaller but healthier herd as having less browsing pressure and better genetics results in better, healthier animals, bigger trophies, and larger sources of protein. However, section 4 of the National Parks Act 1980 requires that introduced animals “shall as far as possible be exterminated”. It is, therefore, arguable that you cannot manage a herd of game animals for hunting purposes by completely exterminating them.

The legislation for herds of special interest needs to be clear and unambiguous in order to provide certainty around their designation, particularly those in national parks. It is our view that in passing the Game Animal Council Act back in 2013, this House was clear in its intention to be able to designate herds of special interest in national parks, and so what we are doing today is giving effect to that intention.

To address this inconsistency and to clarify that the final decision to designate a herd of special interest rests with the Minister, this bill will make a single amendment to the Act so that the National Parks Act requirement to exterminate introduced species does not apply to herds of special interest. These herds will, therefore, be able to be sustainably managed, alongside improving our conservation outcomes. The legislation will retain all the requirements for herds of special interest to be consistent with New Zealand’s wider conservation framework. This means that a herd of special interest must be consistent with, amongst other things, the preservation of indigenous species, habitats, ecosystems, and natural features, and, in fact, the wapiti case study proves this to be so.

The Fiordland Wapiti Foundation has been successfully managing red deer and wapiti populations in Fiordland National Park for decades. Not only do they undertake regular culling of deer and wapiti and manage the increasingly popular wapiti ballot during the bugle; they also maintain our huts and our tracks, and they carry out thousands of hours of trapping to better protect our vulnerable native species like the whio / blue duck on behalf of the Department of Conservation. The sustainable management of wapiti within Fiordland National Park has undoubtedly led to greater conservation outcomes than the alternative, which would be to have no involvement from hunters at all.

I could go on at length about the great benefits that our hunting population adds to our conservation sector, and I could go on at length about how the wapiti herd descends from the generous gift of American President Teddy Roosevelt in 1905, but all I will do is go on to say that this legislation provides clarity to the real champions of conservation in the deep South to continue doing what we all need them to do. I’ve met with the wapiti foundation, I’ve met with hunters across New Zealand, and I can tell you now that they love their local environment. They do what they do to ensure that it will be available for generations to come, and today I’m proud to take one more small step in the right direction to support them on that journey. I commend the bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Kia orana, Mr Speaker. I wonder whether James Meager has been to Fiordland National Park, one of our last wilderness areas—10 percent of New Zealand covered in prehistoric forest—and did you know that it’s a world UNESCO heritage area? Here is what UNESCO has to say about it: “Invasive species are the biggest impact on the property, despite their impacts being restricted to small areas of the property. Population increases of red deer as well as impacts from other browsing mammals such as wapiti, fallow deer, goat, chamois and tahr have caused severe damage in some parts of the property,”.

So here we have the area of New Zealand which we most pride ourselves on as the most pristine part of New Zealand, and what does this Government want to do? It’s, basically, putting New Zealand up for sale again, because, let’s face it, what this is about—it was in the Minister’s own speech, and I don’t think he’s been to Fiordland National Park—is trophy hunting.

I know, because I was speaking to someone recently, that there have been studies into what the economic benefit of trophy hunting is: it’s trivial. We have a treasure, and it is those parts of our beautiful natural environment which remain largely unaffected by introduced species. We have a mandate to say that where that exists, let’s keep them unaffected by introduced species, but this Government says no.

I’ve got no problem with hunting. I’ve got—

Hon Members: Oh!

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: Well, the other side can scoff, but if you want to come hunting with me, just let me know. They speak a big talk, but I suspect that most of them have never picked up a rifle.

Hon Peeni Henare: Exactly.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: Yeah. Scott Willis and I will happily take you hunting any time you like. But for you city folks—for you North Islanders, and for the so-called Minister for the South Island—let’s get out into the wild and see what we really value. Those truly unaffected areas are so rare, and yet here we have a bill which is part of a programme to, essentially, say, “Let’s set up a hunting park in Fiordland so that we can make sure that wapiti are always there, because we like the idea that people can go out and hunt them.”

Well, look, I think that if you look at Fiordland and if you look at its true majesty—the beauty of its primeval state—then we should absolutely preserve that, and the idea that that is tradable with trophy hunting for wapiti defies belief. But we have a Minister for the South Island who is happily selling off some of the most valuable jewels of the South Island in order to say, “No, no, it’s fine. Let’s have a grazing park for wapiti so that hunters can come down and shoot their trophy beasts.”

Now, look, I want to say that I appreciate the work that hunters do in keeping the herds as low as they can be, and I appreciate that many hunters go out there to get kai for their whānau. That’s a good thing, and it’s great that they can do that, but Fiordland is a treasure and we should absolutely keep that in its pristine condition. The idea that we can have a herd of national significance which rampages through our forest and damages our indigenous species is entirely unacceptable, and that shows how much the so-called Minister for the South Island is actually interested in the South Island. The answer is not at all, and the Minister for Hunting and Fishing—without a budget, without a real portfolio—needs to buck up and get a proper idea.

Mr Chair—Mr Speaker, thank you.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): Yeah, it’s 11.30 at night, and I get it.

SCOTT WILLIS: Ha, ha! Well, firstly, I would like to acknowledge the work of the Fiordland Wapiti Foundation. We know that they do work on maintaining huts, tracks, and the pest control. That’s really valuable stuff and is protecting our native species, but it is also providing meat to people who need it from wapiti that have been harvested. I think we can all acknowledge that the Fiordland Wapiti Foundation has been successful in showing that hunting and conservation can coexist and can be complementary, and that’s often the case. Many hunters are conservationists. That’s something we should all acknowledge.

I’m a proud hunter. I love going out into the bush. I also want to hear the bush and I want to hear the birdsong in the bush, and one of the things I have noticed when I’ve hunted on a little block near where Mark Patterson lives, actually—there’s a hunting block that I go to. Part of it has been fenced off. When you go through the gate into that fenced area where all the deer have been removed, you can barely move through the bush. For the rest of it, you can spot the deer everywhere because it’s mud and mature trees. There is no understory because the deer have taken it away.

This bill makes me sad—sad because it openly states that our national parks should become sanctuary for pest populations with special protections when we face a biodiversity crisis, and sad because it undermines the conservation goals of the National Parks Act—and it’s unnecessary. That’s the tragedy of it. Because the work that has been going on has been successful, this bit of legislation will actually create division, and it doesn’t need to be that way.

National parks exist to protect our national heritage of taonga species, and hunting isn’t about simply protecting trophy herds of deer in national parks; it’s about respecting ecosystems.

Grant McCallum: You’d have taken the trophy—if you’d shot the trophy, you’d have taken it.

SCOTT WILLIS: Yeah, it’s true that I’m not a trophy hunter. I hunt for meat and I hunt to take animals out of the bush. This should not be about keeping imbalance in our ecosystems in our national parks. It’s giving priority to invasive species over our nature and over our native biodiversity.

National parks exist to protect that biodiversity; not to preserve trophy herds for international or domestic hunters, and this is where I just can’t understand where we’re going to get economic growth from this. It’s minuscule—it’s minuscule—and what are we losing? What are we losing? We’re losing something really, really special, which is our unique place, and it really does demonstrate that the alliance between hunting and conservation doesn’t count for this Government, because it is turning a blind eye to all the concerns that all of us who care about the environment have for the natural places we go to—the places we find really, really special.

It opens the door not only to wapiti in Fiordland, so why not whitetail in Rakiura, why not tahr in the Southern Alps, and why not sika up here, in the North Island? That’s what it will do—it will ensure that we destroy our biodiversity—and, quite simply, there has been no engagement with iwi, no assessment of biodiversity, and no good public consultation. It would have gone some way to maintaining relations, even if this bill proceeds, but there hasn’t been any.

This is opening a door to greater division and to losing the justification that hunters have for working with conservationists. The Green Party policy is that we should, where possible, remove or eradicate large, non-predator, invasive species in the areas where they threaten important ecological values, and if this bill proceeds, any eradication efforts in national parks would not be authorised.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, given the hour, I will save my soliloquies about how much hunting means to so many people in this country, including my good self and many others in this House. Look, I will just say quickly that in two parts of this country and two islands, we’ve got the Fiordland Wapiti Foundation and the Sika Foundation doing amazing work, showing what can be done when hunters have a chance to actually have a decent say about the way our conservation estate can be managed and can be run, and about the way we can support our ecosystem and allow a whole lot of good things to be happening in our ngahere.

It’s time we stop treating our valued introduced species like pests by default and started treating them with the value that they have, with some wise management for both conservation and for the connection that hunting gives us to our land. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Many of us experience our conservation estate and enjoy that in many different ways. For several decades, there’s been obvious disagreement and debate between conservation groups and hunting groups about the place of introduced animals. This bill is about trying to resolve some of those anomalies between the National Parks Act and the Game Animal Council Act, and I commend this bill to the House.

I rise to support this bill brought to us by our second ever hunting and fishing Minister. I would like to congratulate James Meager for bringing this very practical bill before the House. It backs our hunters and our amazing conservationists, and, therefore, I commend this bill to the House.

What a bizarre situation that we face tonight in Parliament here. The so-called parties championing the rights and the values and the aspirations of our rural community are now supporting the protection of an introduced species that is at the core of both bovine tuberculosis and the destruction of our indigenous flora and fauna, and they’re going to spend a whole lot of money and effort not only in Parliament here tonight but in actually setting up protection for an exotic pest—that’s what it is.

I can’t understand the logic. Look, I have been West Coast - Tasman MP and I appreciate—not only from a regional perspective but from a rural perspective and a national perspective—hunting and its value as a recreational activity. We have a whole lot of people who go out every weekend or every night and they hunt possums or they hunt goats or deer, and they do a great job. But they’re actually failing, because we have big issues with possums, and if it wasn’t for the utilisation of 1080, we’d be overrun with possums.

We are now facing increasing numbers of red deer and other deer across our rural network, and farmers are asking what the Department of Conservation (DOC) and the Government are going to do to knock down these deer numbers, because not only are they eating our grass and impacting on our bush—and many farmers want to protect their local indigenous flora and fauna, right? So they’re asking what is the Government doing, because a lot of these animals come from the DOC estate. In Parliament tonight, let the farmers be clear that that this Government is protecting deer—protecting deer, which not only eat grass on farms around this country but also actually contribute, potentially, to the spread of bovine tuberculosis, and they are not an indigenous or native species.

There are a couple of questions I’d ask of the Minister. In passing this legislation, what’s next? Because there will be a group—and I know there are people who like to go out and hunt possums and they like to go and hunt goats or pigs. So will the Minister bring to this House a piece of legislation that will protect wild pigs? Is he going to do that?

Wild pigs, sika deer, fallow deer—are they going to be protected as well by the Minister’s proposals, and what do the farmers think about that when they are spending millions and millions of dollars to knock down deer numbers and keep on top of bovine tuberculosis? What’s the Minister going to do? He doesn’t know. Well, we’ve had three more farms with outbreaks of bovine tuberculosis in Hawke’s Bay because, arguably, there hasn’t been enough pest control in that area. Is it the possums, or is it the deer?

The Minister is saying, “Oh, this is just about Fiordland and it’s just about a unique species.”—actually, no. The legislation enables this Minister to be able to designate any species, anywhere, as a protected species. Well, let’s push the boundary out. Will it be rats—is he going to protect rats?

Hon Peeni Henare: Stoats.

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: Stoats? [Interruption] Oh, no, no—that’s OK. Well, it’s good to get from the Minister that he won’t protect rats or stoats or weasels. What about possums? There are people who say that, actually, the possum population is quite valuable for fur.

This piece of legislation is completely bizarre when we have a Government that claims to protect and advocate for the rural community in this country. The single biggest threat—not the single—one of the largest threats to the rural community and the rural industries is bovine tuberculosis, and this Government and this Minister is bringing in protection for deer, which spread TB across this country. It is a bizarre piece of legislation at a time when this country doesn’t need it.

This is a blue-green bill which strikes a perfect balance between hunting and conservation, and I commend it to the House.

I never ever thought I’d hear the day that a Northland MP would say he was blue-green. I think it’s absolutely rich of Mr McCallum to say that he is a blue-green man when every Northlander knows the saying of Sir Geoffrey Palmer, which is that “Discretion is the mother of all injustice”. What this bill does is carve out a wee piece to say that “It’s OK to do this, but guess what! At some point in time, we might open the door to other things.”, and that’s the problem here.

The Minister for Hunting and Fishing stood up and he said, “Oh well, in 1905, blah, blah, blah.” The point is this: once upon a time, possums were OK. Once upon a time, these things were OK, and all of a sudden, they’re a pest. All of a sudden, they’re a huge cost for the Department of Conservation, and Mr McCallum knows the cost of having possums on his own farm.

Grant McCallum: We kill them.

Hon PEENI HENARE: Exactly. Now, that’s the point about discretion, and I want to say to the Government that when they look towards carving out little exemptions here and a little exemption there, it can only lead to something that is going to be a tidal wave that they can’t stop.

That’s why we oppose this bill, and I want to say to the Minister—he said it was his first bill, and I congratulate the Minister for having the gumption and the opportunity to present a first bill before midnight during urgency, but we’ll talk about that later. Ultimately, what we know about this particular bill is that once you start doing this, you cannot put a finger in the dyke in the hope that it will stop flooding the land.

Grant McCallum: Oh, yes, we can—all the deer in Northland are going.

Hon PEENI HENARE: Well, Mr McCallum might say that, but what he can’t say is that the possums are going.

Grant McCallum: Well, enough of them are going—we’re working on it.

Hon PEENI HENARE: No, no—that’s the point of my kōrero here.

Grant McCallum: Shall we go hunting?

Hon PEENI HENARE: The minute you open the door—and, yes, I’m happy to go hunting, because I can guarantee that having grown up on a farm in Northland, I’ve held a gun more times than a number of members on that side.

Grant McCallum: Oh, not me, mate.

Hon PEENI HENARE: Oh, Mr McCallum, definitely not you because you’re twice my age—but that’s the point.

So I just want to say here that this particular bill, we won’t be supporting, and we hope that in the Minister’s new role, he will he will engage with more communities than just this one. I take the point of my colleague Dr Duncan Webb that this particular part of New Zealand is one of the most beautiful parts of the world, and, in fact, when we look towards how we can grow tourism numbers, I suspect that this isn’t going to quite land it.

I can tell this House that eight months ago, I did a dive and hunt in this exact region. You go out on the boat, you dive for pāua and crayfish, you spearfish—everything; it’s amazing—and then two days later, you find yourself in the hills hunting, and, over five days, you can come home with a bounty that is the envy of everybody at home. But that will not be protected if we continue to let exemptions come into this consideration for the protection of our wildlife and the protection of our beautiful places such as Fiordland and other places in the country.

In the final minute and a half, I want to say this: where is the Minister of Conservation? Where is Mr Tama Potaka, who stands proudly on marae and places right across the country and says that “The Department of Conservation is going to do this and it’s going to look after this and it’s going to do that.”, while, ultimately, they’ve sent in a junior Minister—Minister Meager here—to present a bill just before midnight and try to present to this country that this is a good thing for this country. I say to the country, please go into it with eyes wide open, like we are.

We oppose this bill, and we implore the Minister to come back here with something far more substantial. Stop doing carve-outs. Let’s do something that actually makes a difference in this country and that (1) allows those who enjoy hunting to have a good hunt, and (2) allows the protection of our land, which is more important than anything else, because it is the number one thing that international visitors and international tourists look to when they come to New Zealand. So I say to Mr Meager that the next time he wants to stand in this House and present a bill like this, he should just table it and be done with it.

Yes, I look forward to members bringing that bounty to the House and sharing it around.

First of all, I’d like to congratulate my colleague Minister James Meager for putting his first ever bill into the House, because we can see that he is going to work very hard to keep improving New Zealand. But more good news—

Glen Bennett: Point of order, Mr Speaker. I just wanted to point out that the timer hasn’t been started, and I want to give the member the full five minutes to, obviously, contribute. So I just wanted to make sure that that’s correct.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): All right, the timer is going.

Dr CARLOS CHEUNG: Yes, because there’s more good news for everyone here. First of all, I’d like to congratulate everyone at the Auckland City Football Club for the remarkable result at the FIFA Club World Cup today against Boca Juniors. They never give up, and their fighting spirit shows exactly what this cup stands for. Thank you for making us proud and for representing our communities. This result will go down in history. It is a great day for Mt Roskill, and a great day for New Zealand football. I commend this bill to the House.

Point of order, Mr Speaker. Thank you, Mr Speaker. Given the success in the issue that the member has raised, I seek leave to put a motion before the House congratulating the Auckland City Football Club on its success, and maybe we could have a debate on it right now.

There was already a question before the House, so we can’t do it now. But you might want to suggest it at another time.

Point of order, Mr Speaker. Given the point and the issue that was raised in the House in a timely way, I guess that this is the first opportunity to congratulate the Auckland City Football Club on what is a remarkable achievement, and I seek leave for us to have some speeches in the House congratulating the club on its achievement, acknowledging the great work that they have put forward on behalf of New Zealand.

I can put leave for that motion after we’ve finished the business that we have at the moment.

The question is, That the Game Animal Council (Herds of Special Interest) Amendment Bill be considered by the Environment Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Environment Committee.

Instruction to Environment Committee