Wildlife (Authorisations) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Wildlife (Authorisations) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

I had a very favoured group when I was about 11 years old. The name of that group was Crowded House. They had a great song that started like this:

Everywhere you go,

You always take the weather with you.

Across that side of the House, it’s very blustery, dank, and dark. On this side, we’re going for growth.

New Zealand’s wildlife is unique and precious to New Zealanders. This country is literally a “Slice of Heaven”. Projects that provide essential benefits to the lives of New Zealanders should be able to proceed without compromising our indigenous species. The balance is key in the protection and the conservation of wildlife populations and key to protecting the world that our mokopuna deserve.

The Wildlife Act is an important piece of legislation, but it’s old and creaking. It’s asking for the “Nature [to] enter me”. The Act provides for the protection of wildlife throughout Aotearoa New Zealand, including some of New Zealand’s most endangered species. It protects our precious wildlife—those frogs that were mentioned before, bats, reptiles, and other things. It also recognises the need to regulate human interactions with them so that our actions do not negatively affect protected species in the long run. This bill makes specific targeted changes to respond to a High Court decision ruling in March this year that deemed the authorisation of incidental killing of protected wildlife under section 53 of the Act to be unlawful. With these changes, we will restore people’s confidence that they can carry out activities lawfully when they’re granted a permit and are meeting the condition it sets. They will no longer feel like a group of “Pacific lambs to the [judicial] slaughter”, enabling the Department of Conservation (DOC) to regulate incidental harm so that these activities do not cause permanent harm to the viability of protected wildlife species.

This bill does not make fundamental changes to the Wildlife Act; it addresses the issue at hand following the court decision while maintaining the existing foundations of this Act. Essentially, it restores what is understood to be the status quo and enables DOC to get on with a practical, pragmatic approach to how it regulates harm to protected species, consistent with previous practice and the Act’s protective purpose. A number of members have raised concerns that this bill will water down protections for wildlife and make it easier to kill wildlife. It does not lower the bar. This is not the case. The protective purpose of the Act remains.

People have said that it is essential that DOC regulates and manages harm to wildlife to minimise its impacts and ensure our precious species are protected. This is exactly what this bill does. As I said: “How many [bills] flow like this? Not many, if any.” It does not reduce DOC’s ability to protect wildlife. It does not change DOC’s approach. Rather, this bill restores the regulatory approach that was universally understood and that had been taken by the Department of Conservation before the High Court’s recent judgment. It will still be unlawful for developers and infrastructure providers to harm wildlife without getting proper authority from DOC. The overall effect of that authority must be consistent with protecting the affected wildlife population and species. I understand that some members are concerned about this bill proceeding so quickly without public consultation or scrutiny—[The Hon Shane Jones walks past Minister Potaka]—Minister Jones—by a select committee.

As has been previously mentioned, the recent High Court decision on the Mt Messenger case means that DOC can no longer authorise and manage incidental harm to wildlife under section 53, as has been done in the past. We need to be very mindful of that well-known Tim Finn song, where he says:

When you want to see where to sing the song of Parihaka,

You’ve got to get over a road.

That road is Mt Messenger. Existing authority holders are concerned that they could now be prosecuted if their projects kill any protected wildlife, despite having a permit and applying relevant conditions to protect them. This could lead to delay, stop projects and a wide range of activities—subdivision, construction, solar and wind farms, power-line maintenance, pest control. DOC has also pushed pause on deciding applications that involve incidental harm until this matter is resolved. It reminds me of that Opshop song, actually:

Lately I’ve found myself wondering out loud

—wondering what some of the MPs from the Opposition parties were actually saying. We urgently need to enable these applications to be processed so that activities can go ahead with appropriate safeguards to protect wildlife. In this situation, urgency is warranted. The bill, effectively, restores DOC’s interpretation of the status quo before the court’s decision. I’ve got to say, like that famous Herbs song, since early March, it’s always been “On My Mind”.

Some members have suggested that these amendments would not be necessary if the wider review of the Wildlife Act had already been completed. This review began under the previous Government and is still going. Actually, we’re going to put the foot down. It remains a priority for me. I’ve been given the encouragement by the matua, now you’ve got the Tama, and the consensus this afternoon, hopefully, shall be the Wairua Tapu. As I mentioned earlier, the Wildlife Act is over 70 years old. It’s old. It’s creaky. The many amendments over the last 70 years have led it to lose legislative coherence. It’s been described as difficult, convoluted, and confused. This Act needs mahi. The section 53 amendments that we’re focusing on today are part of that larger Act. There are many more issues that need to be addressed as part of the review. We need to take the proper time to complete that review. I welcome the feedback and the engagement of many members of this House when we really get under way to ensure it’s workable and to test these changes with stakeholders and the public. In the meantime, we can’t wait until that review has been completed. We won’t be left just turning pages; we’ve got to make this urgent fix to the problem at hand with these targeted amendments.

Benefits of the bill: it’s going to restore certainty. It’s going to restore confidence. We need to make certain that people can rely on those authorisations that have been granted in the past and that enable important developments and infrastructure activities—pest control and other things—and important conservation work, including the TB programme. I wish Minister Hoggard was here. He’s got a lot of biosecurity questions to answer. This bill will ensure that this is possible. It delivers a pragmatic, practical fix to a problem that might otherwise stymie important mahi to get our economy moving again. It continues to ensure that our precious wildlife is protected.

Hon Rachel Brooking: That’s not on trains or Government roads—it doesn’t help there, does it, Minister?

Hon TAMA POTAKA: Members of the Opposition have been vocal. They’ve expressed concern. In my ears ring the words of the Herbs in that fabulous song that was on my marriage CD:

You say to me let’s rock on.

That night out stirs my mind.

I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. You would think that when a bill is rushed through all stages under urgency and when we’ve had a reasonably fulsome committee of the whole House, we’d have something at the third reading to report back in terms of the detail of the bill. I’m almost more confused about this bill, having gone through the committee stage, than I was at the start. We didn’t get any fulsome responses or any detail, really, clarifying what is quite a convoluted bill, and I don’t blame the officials who drafted it. They would have had to draft it under immense pressure.

That is why, throughout the course of the various stages of this bill in this House, members on this side of the House have asked and called upon the Minister of Conservation to introduce perhaps even a one-week select committee process so that we could have finessed the detail of the bill, because it is confusing. The Minister himself stood in this House at the third reading and said that this isn’t a bill that will dilute the purpose of the Wildlife Act, and yet it’s going to allow all these things to go through. He can’t really argue it both ways—

Hon Rachel Brooking: We think.

Hon PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN: —and he hasn’t—yes, we think; we’re not even sure. It came out at the committee stage that perhaps roads aren’t actually part of the changes and we won’t actually be able to build quicker and better as a result of this bill, and so we’re still none the wiser on this side of the House.

What I am clear about, though, is that this bill didn’t need to be rushed through at the level of urgency that it’s been through yesterday and today. There was no regulatory impact statement and no released Cabinet paper. It absolutely does dilute the purpose of the Wildlife Act, and, ultimately, it is a knee-jerk, ad hoc reaction to a High Court ruling. There was a much better way that this could have been done.

What’s led to this? That High Court ruling, which was just in March this year. Now, we’ve known that, since a Supreme Court ruling in 2019—and the Minister couldn’t even answer this in the committee stage—the approach of the Department of Conservation (DOC) to applications under section 53 changed. At that point, wildlife permits under section 53 were granted by looking at the project as a whole and assessing whether the viability of the population was maintained or improved through the action or some unrelated action through the authorisation. Now, the ruling, basically, said that you cannot kill protected wildlife if the primary purpose of the killing doesn’t have a direct positive benefit—the direct nexus argument—to the purpose of the Act. The nexus requirement is key, and that’s really the crux of why we’re here today. This bill ostensibly responds to that.

What the judge said was that the killing for the purpose of building a road was not directly connected to the protective purpose of the Act, so killing for the purpose of any other economic development project is not directly connected to the purpose of this Act, which is to protect wildlife, and so that’s the main issue. At that point, any Government, regardless of stripe, would have had a choice to make. Either you’d strengthen the legislation and you’d strengthen the Wildlife Act so that the permits for the authorisations are in keeping with the primary purpose of the Act, or you’d dilute it, and you’d just change the law in the sloppy way that we’ve seen yesterday and today to just tweak an already complicated, convoluted, potentially becoming slightly irrelevant Wildlife Act to then revert the processes and then retrospectively make what the Minister now tells us is 500 permits lawful, although they still don’t meet the primary purpose of the Act. That is what we’ve seen take place under urgency, through all stages, today.

As the Environment Law Initiative themselves have said—and I quote—“this was not a question of whether development projects could go ahead or not. It was about making sure all reasonable steps are taken to protect what we have left of our wildlife.” Let me put to bed the accusations from that side of the House that members on this side are anti-development. We’re not. There was never any question that these developments would go ahead. It’s how they go ahead that was in question and whether reasonable steps would be taken to protect the wildlife that we have left. That is an important point as well. Aotearoa New Zealand has the highest species extinction rate in the world. More than 4,000 of our native species are at risk of, or threatened with, extinction.

Now, the Minister has on various occasions waxed lyrical about the fact that one of his key motivations as conservation Minister is to increase tourism to New Zealand. What do most of our tourists come here to see? Our wildlife. Our biodiversity is a huge drawcard, so even if it’s just from that point of view, what this Minister should be focusing on is improving biodiversity, whereas this amendment bill goes against that. It flies in the face of that.

As I’ve said previously—and I’ve said it repeatedly in this House over the last I don’t know how many hours that we’ve been debating this bill in urgency—this is the antithesis of good lawmaking. It is sloppy. There was no need for it to be rushed through all stages in urgency. We have made the case very clearly, on this side of the House, that we could have had one week or two weeks of a select committee process where we could have teased out the wording in the bill, and we do have an issue with the wording of the bill. We believe that, very soon, this Minister will be back in this House to tidy up this piece of legislation, because not even the Minister in charge of the bill could effectively convince any of us on this side of the House that the wording in the bill actually makes sense. I had to read the legislative statement to understand what this Minister was trying to do, because the wording in the bill was so confusing. We have no doubt that we’re going to be back debating this legislation, because something would be wrong.

There was no select committee process. All we had was a couple of press releases from organisations that have invested time and energy over years into looking at the Wildlife Act. I feel that it’s pretty disgraceful that we’ve locked out all of their voices when there was no real need for that to happen. That’s not the way that laws should be made or amended in this Parliament. In fact, as the Environmental Law Initiative has said, quite clearly, it further complicates the Act. The Minister of Conservation has said, “Yes, at some point, perhaps, we’ll look at reviewing the Wildlife Act.”—perhaps. We have heard from Minister Jones that he wants to get rid of the Act, so which is it, Minister?

We have started to review the Wildlife Act. There was a report back from DOC. There’s a whole piece of work that the Environmental Defence Society has done on this. All the Minister needed to do was to pick that up and get that done in the last 1½ years. We wouldn’t be here discussing this sloppy piece of legislation if the Minister had just done that.

Instead, what is this Government’s track record on the environment? It is, as many have said, to wage a war on nature. The proof is in the pudding: the reduction of DOC funding to the tune of $130 million since this Government has taken office, the stopping of work that we had done on having no new mines on conservation land, the plan for the Kermadecs—well, there’s still the Hauraki Gulf / Tīkapa Moana Marine Protection Bill, which we shepherded right through to the point that it’s at now. Of course, at the eleventh hour, that too will be diluted because of Minister Jones, and that is what gives me no confidence that this Minister is actually going to review the Wildlife Act. Minister Jones has been very clear that he doesn’t want that to happen, and we’ve seen what’s happened to the Hauraki Gulf marine protection bill.

In addition, we know—we know—that our biodiversity crisis in this country and climate change are the two biggest threats to the environment in New Zealand, and yet what have we seen this Government do? Repeals and deferrals on regulating to protect fresh water and native species, the proposed repeal of the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration, and the setting of climate targets so low that we are now at risk of violating our commitments under the Paris Agreement, not to mention the 30 by 30 target for marine protection. This Minister says that it is just aspirational and that there’s no legal requirement to do that.

What is his vision for conservation in his Cabinet paper? It is having more visits by tourists than New Zealanders to our iconic landscapes and activating more commercial opportunities. Enhancing biodiversity comes last in that. I would have thought that, as the Minister of Conservation, that would be his top priority.

The only progress this Minister has made in conservation has been to make it easier for protected wildlife to be killed. I hope that he’s proud of that. We’re not, and we don’t commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s quite perplexing in 2025 why it is so hard seemingly for us to just protect wildlife, particularly when it comes to our threatened native species and taonga species. We know that the statistics are really bad, and there are some really clear basic measures that we could take to ensure their protection.

We heard really clearly from the Minister of Conservation some really lovely things about creating a world that our mokopuna deserve, but we also heard “growth, growth, growth, growth, growth” while protecting the environment. What is absolutely crystal clear for this Government is that simply saying “protecting the environment” means that it is protected. There are so many unresolved questions, and so much uncertainty, that this bill brings to this whole landscape of even attempting to protect the environment and that have been unanswered. A particular one, a critical one, that is still a mystery to me is about how possibly this bill can be put through where the Director-General of Conservation needs to be satisfied that through the killing of wildlife, populations of wildlife and individual wildlife will still be protected. It’s nonsensical. It’s adding this absolute cloud and uncertainty to the Wildlife Act, which was our key Act that offered that protection for our wildlife.

This law is a deep betrayal of the Government’s duty of care not only to the environment but to the people of New Zealand who care about the environment and want to see it protected. We are absolutely appalled about this Government’s use of urgency in rewriting this Wildlife Act without a regulatory impact statement, without Cabinet papers being released, and without any expert advice or voice of iwi/hapū or voice of the public in actually resolving this very. This is an issue that needs to be resolved, but not like this. This rushing through of this legislation to enable the authorisation of the killing of wildlife is unnecessary, and it’s going to make things more complicated.

We feel that the fact that the conservation Minister comes out just days ago and says things like nature is “part of our national identity, economy, and way of life” and then insists that this kind of bill is still about wildlife protection continually shows that this Government is bulldozing this kind of thinking through the House. It’s a disgrace. You simply can’t claim to value our biodiversity while forcing through law changes, like this, that make it easier to destroy it. This isn’t about protecting biodiversity. It’s about protecting profit and corporate greed.

The one thing that this Government do not seem to understand is that when nature is only valued for its economic benefit, the outcome is inevitable. We’re seeing it today in our statistics across the entirety of our environmental domains, but particularly with biodiversity. We see destruction, we see exploitation, and we see a decline in our environment and its health and, therefore, a decline in the health of ourselves.

Now, what is particularly concerning about this bill is that it’s part of a trend of unprecedented changes within our environmental legislation, where the whole thrust and purpose of the legislation that has been put in place is to protect the environment. Now, we’re seeing this in the amendment to the Resource Management Act, where the whole purpose of it is to avoid, remedy, or mitigate adverse effects. Instead, the Government are allowing significant adverse effects where there are already severely adversely affected or polluted waterways. We’re seeing it with fast track, where all of the Government’s decisions under fast track relegate what we considered to be environmental protections to simply be considerations that are now decided in the context of economic growth. Now, we have these Wildlife Act changes that change the entire focus of the Wildlife Act to no longer be so clearly about protection. It’s about the director-general now being authorised to allow these killings, and it’s unnecessary.

What is really concerning as well in this bill is that we are still unclear about the actual resources that the Department of Conservation (DOC) will have to put in to enable this process to occur. We know that DOC are under huge strain—particularly when it comes to the budget cuts, particularly the $48 million or even more since this Government have come in—and they are struggling. This bill risks tying up their very limited resources and perversely allowing this killing of wildlife.

Now, I think what is really concerning with this—sorry, I’ve just lost my notes here; thank you—is the point that my colleague made earlier in the debate in the committee of the whole House. It was an analogy for us humans in our own work environment. When we humans work in risky or dangerous workplaces, we don’t actually authorise workplaces in anticipation of deaths. We don’t authorise those deaths. We take every practical step to ensure risk mitigation and to ensure protection of life. That is exactly the approach which we can and should be taking with the Wildlife Act in this instance.

We’ve heard various comments from the Minister that the Wildlife Act, for example, is wavering or creaking with its age, and it is. I do welcome the acceleration of the review of the Wildlife Act, because it is so badly needed, but it’s not the Act that is wavering in this case. What is wavering is this Government’s duty of care to actually protect our endangered and threatened native species, which we know are so dear and so integral to New Zealanders and our way of life—taonga species for iwi and hapū. That’s exactly what we want to remain the focus of the Wildlife Act.

Muddying the waters and transferring this burden of proof and evidence in the actual circumstances of the killing of wildlife from the individuals and companies and entities to the director-general to hold that is completely unnecessary and completely counter to what New Zealanders expect from their Wildlife Act and to what New Zealanders expect from the duty of care of this Government. They are showing, time and time again, that not only do they not understand but that, under the guise of this so-called protection of the environment, they are weakening, removing, or completely abolishing protections that we so desperately need.

These are the concerns that Te Pāti Kākāriki have with this bill. We absolutely do not support it. We think that, at the very least, it could be going to select committees so we could actually get some public voice, actually get some expert voice, and actually get iwi and hapū to help us resolve this actual problem, rather than ramming this through under urgency. It’s an absolute disgrace, and the Green Party do not commend this to the House.

Madam Speaker, thank you. ACT will be supporting this bill. It’s a fantastic technical amendment to what is an outdated wildlife management Act. It’s really, really important that we do this at this time. It is minor. It is technical in nature. It is not a catastrophe, as the Opposition has suggested.

I just want to point out that every professional person involved in delivering infrastructure relies on professional ecologists and environmental scientists to tell them how to best mitigate the risks to New Zealand’s little creatures when they go and build a road, when they go and build a pipeline, and when they go and build a piece of electricity infrastructure. Professional ecologists and environmental scientists don’t turn up to work every day to kill kiwi, skinks, geckos, and bats. They come to work every day to deliver on the commitments that these projects have made to identify and protect these creatures. When we think about what infrastructure designers do, we think about the eco-viaducts that have been built over pristine areas of indigenous vegetation, like the Northern Gateway in Auckland, a fantastic four-lane toll road. We think about the—

Hon Members: It doesn’t apply to that road.

SIMON COURT: Well, clearly these people don’t want it to apply to roads, but I think it should. The Manawatū Tararua Highway is an eco-viaduct across an area of pristine indigenous biodiversity. I want to come back to the Mt Messenger bypass, which is a road and which was the basis for the court case brought by the Environmental Law Initiative, which has led to the need for this amendment. Now, it might be amusing to the members on the other side of the House, but to professional people involved in managing the impacts on wildlife, they want to know there is some certainty. I will give you an example. In the Mt Messenger bypass bat management plan, it recognises that bats are vagrants, because when bats make a nest or roost, they’re only there for a short amount of time. After the bats have left, which we can find out through listening devices and through visual observation, it turns out you can safely clear the vegetation without any harm to the bats. That is one of the ways that we manage risk to indigenous biodiversity under the Wildlife Act.

What’s important about this piece of legislation? It provides certainty to infrastructure development—roads or no roads. It provides certainty for ecology professionals doing their best to identify and protect New Zealand’s threatened species. Then we’ll think about, well, what more could we do. Well, this Government is also looking into biodiversity credits and offsetting regimes. It turns out that, sometimes, when you need to build things, you do need to clear vegetation, and there may be risks to indigenous species, and that’s why it’s important to have lawful outlets where we can actually invest in biodiversity separately rather than saying we can’t do anything anywhere ever simply because we might harm something. That is a practical example of what this Government is doing to address risks to indigenous biodiversity. It’s quite different to what the Opposition is suggesting, which is to do nothing—nowhere, never. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Today is “validation day”. Today is the Crown demonstrating through democracy, when the executive holds a majority in the House, that Parliament is sovereign. This is simply the executive that has a solemn duty to ensure that those mammals in the animal kingdom, otherwise known as human beings, don’t play second fiddle to Freddy—we’re not having that. This is also an opportunity for this side of the House to remind Kiwis that when the High Court makes a random decision, it is not unreasonable for the mining industry, the transport industry, the infrastructure industry, and property developers to ensure that the weaponisation of random skinks, hitherto unknown insects, and various other geckos, and those things that cackle beyond the other side of the House will not trump the need for communities to enjoy access to reliable infrastructure.

The virtue of this piece of legislation is that it is retrospective. It corrects a flight of jurisprudential development, which is a threat to the place in which we develop the country. Let us contemplate how we have arrived at this situation. We are fixing up a problem that Labour left. Labour and the Greens had three unfettered years of power—three unfettered years where they could have used their authority liberally fix up this problem. No. They decided to hold policy seances. They decided to have an endless set of meetings in windowless and sunless rooms—not unlike the character they bring to their politics.

It’s fallen upon my colleague the Hon Tama Potaka to seize this issue and rescue the development of New Zealand’s infrastructure from a narrow, vested, and, I have to say, very shadowy group that has brought this litigation. Their thinking is spawned in murk. Apparently, the funder comes from somewhere in the South Island. I’m encouraging the media to look into the background of the funder of this subversive, guerilla-like organisation called the Environmental Law Initiative. They must be subject to the disinfectant-like qualities of sunlight, because they are wandering around, interfering in the ambitions of communities to grow, finding obscure, pettifogging-orientated references in the law, and they’re weaponising them. I look forward to the Resource Management Act, the reform of the Fisheries Act, and further reform of the Wildlife Act and, indeed, the Conservation Act to ensure there is balance.

It’s actually a pleasure in this third reading speech to remind all the men and women out there today, digging coal, looking for gold, generating wealth in the quarries, looking for new critical minerals that their interests have not been subjugated by a small, unelected cast of intellectuals known as ecologists who keep looking for bats until the number twos of a bat are discovered. I could have quickly directed their attention to number twos in the House; however, that’s another matter.

We do look forward to further work on the Wildlife Act, but in the short term, let’s celebrate the fact that this is a Government who’s going to stand up for investment certainty, jobs, and growth. As I said last night, in the past I talked about getting the nephs off the couch. With investment in jobs, I’ll get the nephs off the meth. Kia ora tātou katoa.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka. Tēnā hoki tātou. E ara ake nei au ki te whakapuaki i ētahi kupu whakakōpani i te kaupapa nei, whakawherawhera hoki i te kaupapa nei hei whakaarotanga mā te Minita, mā Tama Pōtaka.

Nō reira i roto i te iwi Māori e mea ana te kōrero “Toitū te whenua, whatungarongaro te tangata”. Ko te tātai whakapapa he mea nui.

[Thank you, Madam Speaker. Greetings to us all. I rise to express a few words to summarise this topic, to also interrogate this topic for consideration by the Minister, by Tama Pōtaka.

And so, among the Māori people, there is a saying: “The land remains, as people disappear”. Lines of genealogical descent are important.]

This bill will overturn the judgment of the High Court. As I spoke to last night, it seems that this Government is quite fine with overturning rulings of courts, leaving not much confidence, within the public, for the longevity of or even the presence of democracy.

We oppose this bill in the name of mana motuhake, because mana motuhake is the thing that hapū and iwi possess, and in mana motuhake, relationships that include whakapapa include te taiao—the natural environment—and those people. Those two things are inseparable. They are part of the knowledge system, the being system of te iwi Māori. I know Tama understands that, but, miraculously, he seems to have forgotten it in his current state.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Both names please.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: I know Tama Potaka understands it, but he seems to have—“He taonga te wareware”. Tēnā anō tētahi kōrero [“Forgetfulness is omnipresent”. That is another saying].

Where does it leave us, really? Where does it leave us? Well, it leaves us with probably more problems to solve than answers. All of the recommendations of chapter four of the Wai 262 claim, where taonga species are clearly defined and recommendations are clearly set forward—this action by the conservation Minister just drives a bulldozer straight over that. The Wai 262 claim is one of the longest-standing claims that Tama Potaka’s own grandparents would have fought for, as did mine.

Here we are. We have te Minita o Te Papa Atawhai, hamumu nei tōna reo, tōna waha me te kī nei koia rā te kaitiaki o aku taonga; koia te kaiwhakaae ki te oranga, te matenga rānei o aku taonga, ngā taonga o tōku whenua. Kāore mātou e paku whakaae ki tērā whakaaro o tētahi Kāwanatanga ahakoa ko wai. Nō reira, kei te Minita, e kī, e kī. E kī, e kī.

[We have the Minister of the Department of Conservation, his voice ringing out, his mouth saying that he is the custodian of my treasures; he is the one to authorise the life or death of my treasures, the treasures of my land. We do not at all agree with that concept of a Government, regardless of who it is. And so, to the Minister, how dare you. How dare you.]

It’s highly unlikely that the provisions contained in this bill will uphold many of the other commitments that the Crown has already made in conservation in other areas, particularly in iwi settlements, like partnership and shared decision-making between departments and kaitiaki—i.e., the hapū and iwi; partnerships between the Department of Conservation and the iwi; Treaty principles in general; policies in national parks; co-management and customary use; no ownership of protected wildlife; Māori ownership of taonga, taonga species in particular, completely related to the whakapapa kōrero that I just gave. These things all sustain culture. They are part of culture. They are not decompartmentalised, from a Māori point of view, yet here we are, passing a bill under urgency that does that for us. Tēnā koe e te Minita. Āe, āe, me mihi kia ora atu ki ō iwi.

[Thank you, Minister. Yes, yes, you should say thank you to your people.]

Here we are, e te iwi Māori: first, the attack on Te Tiriti o Waitangi—besides all of the attacks on everything else we’ve had to endure over the last 18 months—and here we are down to a plain-out attack on te taiao and all of the whakapapa connections and meaning that that has to te iwi Māori. We do not agree.

I want to give you a statement. I want to read you something from Ngāi Tahu: “Conservation Minister Tama Potaka mentioned, in a recent interview, that it will cost too much to save every single species and that we need to target only those of high value.” Who determines high value? “However, the whakapapa of te taiao relies on a collective of species to thrive, not individuals. Whakapapa stores key information, a reminder of where things come from, where to find them, when to use them and for what purpose. Māori can recite whakapapa from the beginning of creation, from the stars to the oceans, from the trees to the birds to the birth of the first human. This knowledge system connects us to our natural environment and everything in it, living as part of a system, not dominating or changing it.”

Those are the words of Ngāi Tahu, and they quite eloquently describe the natural relationship of Māori—the principal sovereign in this country, the partner that this House is obligated to listen to and work with—completely out of the picture. Nō reira e te Minita Take Taiao, māu anō ēnei kōrero e kawe ki te motu. Māu anō e hiki, e hāpai, e whakatika hei tōna wā. Kāore mātou mō te whakaae.

[So to the Minister for the Environment, it is up to you to convey this discourse to the nation. It is up to you to upraise, to promote, and to correct in time. We are not about to agree.]

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is not simply a disgraceful bill but a convoluted bill. We have seen, as we went through the committee stage, nothing other than grandstanding and politicisation from the Minister to try and justify this bill when all we are trying to do is to get some sense out of the bill, which we would have if this bill had gone through a select committee stage as per the normal parliamentary practice. Here we are, and here we are in Aotearoa, where the people of Aotearoa have not been granted their right to participate in our democratic system once again, and we have seen a troubling amount of that happening under this Government.

There are a couple of things I want to address specifically around this bill. We have put a number of questions to the Minister during the committee stage around the retrospectivity of this bill and the fact that what we are seeing is a knee-jerk response to what is a standard process, and the rightful process, under the separation of powers and under the constitutional arrangements of Aotearoa New Zealand to allow the judiciary to interpret the law as required. What we are seeing here is the executive overstepping the judiciary’s decision, and we have specific clauses in here that refer to that specific ruling.

This is really, really concerning. The part of the retrospectivity here that is the concerning part is that we haven’t yet had clarification on the extent of the authorities that will be granted and that will be affected, and also on the effect that it will have on our taonga, on our natural species. We would have got all of this if we had proper public consultation and were able to talk to and speak to, and ask questions of, the officials. Again, we have not been granted that very basic right as parliamentarians.

We have heard from people in the House saying, “We are looking at your average New Zealander who just wants to build infrastructure for Aotearoa and be able to do the work, and they care about the species and all of the outdoors.” Let’s be clear. This bill and the authorities have nothing to do with the New Zealanders who build our infrastructure but everything to do with the companies who may potentially just want to cut corners on squeezing every dime out of nature and out of New Zealand.

There are so many contradictions within this bill. This is fundamentally inconsistent with the purpose of the Wildlife Act, which is to protect. As much as we hear the Ministers and the governing parties trying to gaslight the New Zealand public by saying that “by killing, we are actually protecting”—how? Where? This is actually in the explanatory note on the first page. If the governing parties read the bill and did their job once in a while, maybe they would actually understand what was happening here.

We have heard before, from the previous speaker, that we operate within an ecosystem and we simply do not know the impact of this bill. I go back to what the Attorney-General said last year. The fact that we’re using urgency and are rushing through laws means that we’re making bad laws, and we will come back for this. What we are seeing is a Government that panders to the greed of international overseas companies at the expense of the taonga of Aotearoa and of our future generations. The debt that this Government refuses to acknowledge and refuses to take on is the debt against our future generations and our mokopuna. What this Government has done through this bill is give people licences to kill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise in support of the Wildlife (Authorisations) Amendment Bill. While we have just heard great theatrics and also some great scaremongering from the other side, the hyperbole is unbelievable. You’d think they’d been listening to the Counting Crows on repeat about paving paradise. Let’s be clear, that is just hyperbole and scare tactics. What we are doing is reinstating a system that has worked for many years.

The Department of Conservation only authorises projects when there’s incidental harm and only when it is minimised, and the permits are granted with very strict conditions to protect that wildlife population and its long-term viability. We’re not debating that. It is a good aim, and that is what we’re continuing to do. If you listen to the other side, you’d think that it was completely the opposite. This isn’t about allowing unchecked development. It covers things like pest control, which is actually an essential part of preserving our biodiversity. Unfortunately, in pest control, some things can have incidental harm. This piece of legislation is about restoring certainty, not about removing protections. Engineers and pest control specialists will still need to minimise harm, still seek to relocate animals wherever possible, and look after our environment. Therefore, I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, what an interesting time we’ve had during all stages under urgency on this bill. I did not expect to be called creative for suggesting that it is normal good practice for a bill that is going through all stages under urgency to have a review. Apparently, that’s creative. No, no, no. This is what the Labour Government did after the cyclones—a proper emergency. There is no proper emergency here. There is no need for the complete absence of a select committee process. It could be a short one. I take the point that the court case has resulted in the need for a fix.

We’re not debating the need for a fix and that general policy intent, but we don’t know what that fix is, because this bill is so badly drafted and the Minister refused to answer my drafting questions about clause 4 of the bill. It still makes no sense. We found out that, in fact, it seems like most of the Government bench speeches that have involved roads are entirely wrong. This bill doesn’t do anything about new road projects for Government roads, because all of those projects still need a section 71 permission or authority and that requires the concurrence of two Ministers, which is a much more arduous administrative thing to do than getting an authority from a director-general or delegate.

Government Ministers have crowed about how this bill that requires all stages under urgency is going to get us back on track. I don’t think it’s going to apply to railways, and it’s certainly not going to apply to Government roads. Yet I haven’t heard any acknowledgment of that from the Government members in their third reading speeches. All I heard is from the ACT member whose whole contribution was about Government roads and how this amendment bill would fix his problem. It does no such thing.

That is why I think the Government will be back here next week. We will be back in urgency next week. I do not think that this Government is good at learning lessons, and there is a very basic lesson here to learn, and that is that if you are drafting law under speed, not using the Parliamentary Counsel Office, I presume, and bringing a bill to a House under two months after a court decision, and not sending it to select committee, it will be muddled. There will be mistakes.

One way to get around that would be for a Minister to act in an engaged way with questions in the committee stage and take a little bit of time to go through some of the key sentences. That did not happen. The Minister could have kept us in committee stage and stopped at that point and not gone to third reading. I’m advising the Minister that he will regret not asking the Leader of the House to come down here late last night, just before midnight, when we were still in the committee stage, still on Part 1, to say “Actually, I’m ending urgency now so that this Government has some time to consider what this bill does.” At the moment, it makes no sense. It does not do what the Ministers say it’s going to do. That is a problem for them.

Another solution, which again I don’t think this Government is likely to learn from, is one of those so-called creative review clauses where this bill could be sent, before it commences, to the Regulations Review Committee or another select committee to review not the policy intent but the actual logistics of how the bill is supposed to work, and then come back. The Minister has disregarded all of these suggestions and quoted a lot of music at us. I note that he hasn’t quoted “Scorpio Girls”, because, of course, scorpios are not included under the protection of the Wildlife Act.

I do note that the wording of “Can’t Get Enough”—well, I was kind of wondering whether you can help me out with a problem that will kind of make you “Scream & Shout”. Whenever they’re coming, they’re “Bringing It Back”. Now, that, I think, is pertinent to how I have been feeling during these debates. There is a little bit of making me want to “Scream & Shout”, because I have tried over and over again to try and engage with the Minister about how it is that the words in his bill make sense and how it is that they don’t contradict each other. There is clearly confusion in the Government because we heard in question time, in real time, yesterday but still on 6 May in this House, that Acting Prime Minister Winston Peters at his first go at answering a question said, “No, no. This is just about culling.” But then we hear all these other speeches: “No, this is about housing.” “Oh, this is about Government roads.” Then we find out that, no, it’s definitely not about Government roads, because section 71 applies to those, not section 53. That is what the Minister said. It doesn’t apply to new Government roads.

Hon Tama Potaka: New roads.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: The Minister’s interjecting here, I think. His head is down, but he is saying “new roads”. That’s right; new roads. They have to go through section 71, which is quite different from the rhetoric that we heard in the speeches from Government members. This bill is a hot mess. I mean, it just shows the craziness of using urgency for all stages, particularly when the policy problem has only arisen recently, so there’s clearly not been much time to develop that.

That is me being positive rather than cynical about why this bill is in fact in front of us in urgency for all stages. A cynical version could be “Well, we know that the Minister for Resources doesn’t like wildlife protections of any sort.” He thinks that the only mammals we should be concerned about are humans. “Goodbye, pekapeka. Goodbye, Freddy the frog.”, he says. We know that he has already passed the terrible fast-track legislation that overrides environmental protections. One aspect of the fast track, which I don’t disagree with, is that you can be a one-stop shop. You can look at different permissions that you would need.

Often a big project, such as a large road, will require some sort of resource consent and also an authority under the Wildlife Act, so you can have the decision makers consider both of those decisions together. We know that there are projects on that fast-track list that get a private benefit by not having to abide by the normal environmental protections that other consent applicants would have to do. We know that some of those are in areas where there is wildlife. We keep hearing the Minister for Resources talk about Freddy the frog.

Is this bill really here under urgency for all stages because of Freddy the frog? We don’t know. We haven’t had a regulatory impact statement. We don’t even know if the applications under the Fast-track Approvals Act that might be in national parks might involve some ancient legislation that is mentioned in Schedule 9 of the Wildlife Act—whether this bill in front of us will apply or not; we don’t know that. We do know that this Government has cut funding to conservation, has cut funding to anything environmental, and has a total disregard for the importance of our economy being based on our environment. It seems that all you need are roads. You don’t need to worry about the air that we breathe if you listen to the ACT contributions on this bill.

That is why we are opposing this bill. It is a dreadful process. The Government doesn’t know what it’s doing, and shame on them.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. There’s been a lot of reference to New Zealand music, it being New Zealand Music Month, and I’m pleased to say that Homegrown, New Zealand’s largest music festival, will be held in the city of the future—Hamilton—in March 2026, so I’m looking forward to that. On that note, I commend this bill to the House.

Rachel Boyack—a five-minute call.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’d like to just indulge the House quickly, if I might, because the Brook Waimārama Sanctuary has, yesterday, reintroduced kiwi into Nelson Whakatū, and I’d like to congratulate them. I’ve got Kāpiti Kiwi here with me just to celebrate the immense achievement for the team at the Brook. I think it’s appropriate, when we’re talking about this bill, that I congratulate the team and acknowledge and bring Kāpiti Kiwi into the House. This is to the team at the Brook: thank you for all of your mahi over so many years to get us here.

Now to the bill, which is not something to celebrate. I might just start by focusing on the process that we’ve followed so far. My colleague the Hon Rachel Brooking has traversed this very, very well, but there are some really significant process reasons why we are not supporting this bill today. There was no regulatory impact statement, there are no Cabinet papers available, and there was no select committee. Now, we’ll get to, in a little bit, the impact of that, but the lack of a select committee has led to us having a situation where this bill is just not in a workable state. The Minister’s going to have to come back to progress further legislation, or there’s going to be stuff in the courts that’s going to come up as a result of it.

The other thing is that, last night in the committee stage, I must say it would have been really helpful if the Minister could have been more concise in his answers. One thing he said, I think, was a good example. He said, about the discussion in committee stage, that “We’re starting to stray … into feral space based on speculation and conjecture.” What does that even mean? The Minister could have spent some time answering questions properly—some really legitimate legal questions that we had yesterday.

As the Hon Rachel Brooking has said, there are a couple of matters that are quite critical to this. We don’t disagree that there’s actually an issue that has been raised by the courts that needs to be addressed. The Minister could have reached across the House and talked to us, and we would have been able to come up with some shared solutions.

Hon Rachel Brooking: Did that happen?

RACHEL BOYACK: It didn’t happen. I’d say to him, next time, to come and talk to us in advance because I agree, as the animal welfare spokesperson, that there’s an issue to be resolved. I’m quite happy to engage about what is the pragmatic solution, because this isn’t it.

The Minister finally admitted that section 53 doesn’t apply to Government transport projects, which was actually the court case. The court case involved a Government roading project, and it doesn’t actually address that specific issue. Why are they doing this? Why are we doing this under urgency? Why? I mean, what else could be going on here? We’ve got fast-track projects coming through. What is that going to mean for our wildlife if the Government, it appears, is seeking to make a more permissible approach to killing wildlife, potentially to get some of their little pet projects through, when it doesn’t actually address the very, very issue that came to the House via the courts?

The Minister also could have sent this to a select committee. I sat on the Governance and Administration Committee a couple of years ago where we had two bills related to Cyclone Gabrielle come through. On both occasions, we had short select committees—two or three days. We reached out to potential stakeholders and submitters. We heard from submitters, and that helped ensure that there was robustness around the select committee process. We got better law as a result.

There is a reason why Parliament has select committees. That’s what they’re there for. They’re actually there to directly engage with officials and with the Parliamentary Counsel Office. The Wildlife Act itself is well overdue for a rewrite. If you read through section 53, it’s challenging to interpret anyway. Now, you’ve added new section 53A, inserted by clause 4, which is written in gobbledegook, in my view, and the two combined together make it even more challenging. There’s going to be a huge job for lawyers and a huge job for the courts to actually try to get their head around understanding this bill. I predict the Minister is going to be back, because I think others, probably the Minister of Transport, might be a bit concerned to hear that it doesn’t actually apply to his Government transport projects. He might have a yarn to the Minister and ask for them to come back. I don’t commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This bill just validates existing permits, ensuring the holders of those authorisations can actually continue their activities without legal risk, provided they comply with conditions. It applies to a wide range of activities, such as infrastructure and environmental programmes like TBfree, which may cause incidental harm. It’s not about allowing unchecked development; it’s about protecting people who’ve followed the rules. We’re validating those authorisations granted before 5 March 2025 and restoring the ability to process new applications responsibly. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is the first opportunity that I’ve had to take a call on the Wildlife (Authorisations) Amendment Bill. To be quite honest, I just wanted to make a few comments around the process of this bill. This is the second bill that we have seen go through this House through all stages in urgency with no regulatory impact statement and with retrospective effect. Now, this is very similar to the last bill that we saw go through urgency, which had no regulatory impact statement and had retrospective effect. What kind of Government is this that puts forward these types of bills? These are not minor issues. These are not cleaning up tiny things. These are things like bringing in laws that would get rid of the pay in women’s pockets and allow, and most likely cause, further deaths for our wildlife and make it easier for those to occur in this type of legislation. This is absolutely shocking behaviour by this Government, and it’s something that everyone on the other side of the House should be ashamed of.

I haven’t been involved in this bill—there hasn’t been much opportunity, I have to say, to be involved in this bill. Normally, we’d say, “I wasn’t able to be at select committee.”, but, unfortunately, there was no select committee for this particular bill. This bill was really the result of a decision by the courts, which, as my colleague Rachel Brooking—and then my colleague Rachel Boyack added in a later contribution—explained, was a court case where there was a very particular finding that the Government is overtly reacting to with this particular legislation, bringing in retrospective law without any thought as to what it could be.

This is an area that I know is very important to a lot of New Zealanders. A lot of New Zealanders care very much about the natural environment. A value that many New Zealanders share is that we should protect our natural environment. In New Zealand, we have a very, very important natural environment with a lot of different animals that are there and that should be protected. We do have a lot of endangered species, and we have a lot of bird life and marine fish species. We’ve got a lot of native reptiles and frogs, and I know my colleague Rachel Brooking is very passionate about the fact that we should protect our bats.

We need to take pragmatic decisions as adults, sensible decisions, to make sure that, when we are implementing law change, we are not putting these species at risk. These species are obviously not in a position to advocate. It’s up to us to look at our biodiversity and make sensible decisions around the laws that we bring in. I’ve had a look through this particular law, and I have to say there are a number of aspects of it that are incredibly concerning. I don’t think it would take many New Zealanders very long to reach that same conclusion if they were looking at this particular bill. Essentially, it makes it easier and more permissible, as far as I understand—and I’m not the major expert here, but you’ve heard from some of my colleagues who are—and more likely that important wildlife will be killed, and I don’t think that’s acceptable. I don’t think it would be acceptable to most New Zealanders. I don’t think the legislative process is acceptable. I think this is bad law. I think the other side of the House should be ashamed not only at the content of this law but at the process that it has gone through.

The Labour Party will not be supporting this particular bill, and I would like the Government to really reflect on why it continues to take these reactionary steps when there have been well-thought-out decisions made by our courts and when these are important decisions to be made that have implications on our natural world, and to reflect on why they need to bring these through urgency.

Hon Rachel Brooking: All stages.

CAMILLA BELICH: All-stages urgency. It is absolutely shocking. I feel that, as my colleague Rachel Brooking said, this bill will be back in the House, so it will waste further time. This is the deep irony of urgency. When you bring a bill that isn’t fully thought through, that hasn’t had the opportunity of submissions from the select committee, and where there hasn’t been the opportunity to scrutinise all of the nature of the bill, often it needs to come back to the House as an amendment bill, and that wastes time. If the Government is trying to save time, actually, they will waste more time in the long run, and they will waste New Zealanders’ money, because there will be court cases and there will be aspects of this bill that are unclear. This is not how we should make good law. We saw that yesterday when the pay equity changes were rushed through under urgency, and we’re seeing it again today. Unfortunately, we do have other bills on the urgency agenda here.

The Labour Party will not be supporting this bill, and I, again, would ask colleagues on the other side of the House to really reflect on how they have determined to make law, what that says about them as a Government, and the future implications for New Zealand and our wildlife as a result of this terrible bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to take the final call in support of the Wildlife (Authorisations) Amendment Bill at its third reading. All we’re doing here is just getting things back on track so that we can go out there, we can do the pest control, we can control the possums in the bush, and we can build the roads, including the one over the Brynderwyns. I commend this bill to the House.