Game Animal Council (Herds of Special Interest) Amendment Bill

Third Reading Hon JAMES MEAGER (Minister for Hunting and Fishing) (16:46): I move, That the Game Animal Council (Herds of Special Interest) Amendment Bill be now read a third time. I would have loved to have gotten up here today and spoken at length to the members of the hunting sector about the importance of this bill, about how today is all about hunter-led conservation and the efforts they make in our great conservation estate, but I am wary of the clock. I am wary that it’s a Thursday and we all want to get this bill passed, so I will say but two things to the House and two things to our hunting community. First, today is about one simple change. It is about clarifying the law to make it clear and undeniable that, from today, a herd of special interest can be designated in a national park and that the requirement in the National Parks Act to eliminate animals as far as possible will not apply to that herd. Instead, a sensible, adaptive, management-focused herd management plan will manage those animals down to a level which achieves acceptable environmental and hunting outcomes. If we want to improve our conservation estate, we will support this bill. If we want to empower hunters and their families to contribute to our conservation estate, support this bill. If we care at all about the rights and interests of hard-working New Zealanders who slog their guts out at work all week and just want to go for a hunt on the weekend with their son or their daughter, for a truly magical outdoor experience, we’ll support this bill. Let’s be clear: our hunters are conservationists. Hunters have done more for conservation than probably anyone in this room has, and possibly ever will. They are the ones that are removing animals from our national parks. They are the ones maintaining our public walking tracks. They are the ones that are checking, setting, monitoring traps to protect our native birds. They are the ones that are establishing, maintaining, and restoring public huts for all New Zealanders to enjoy. Our Government strongly believes in the ethos of hunter-led conservation as one of many tools to achieve better environmental outcomes on our conservation estate. We empower, and we will continue to empower, the hunting sector to contribute to New Zealand’s conservation estate. We will never apologise for that; we will never back down on that. To our hunters, to the deer stalkers, the pig hunters, the guides, the educators, the community foundations, and the conservationists, thank you for your work, and, most of all, thank you for your patience. This bill is the right thing to do. We won’t back down from it, but we will back you. I commend it to the House. Hon RACHEL BROOKING (Labour—Dunedin) (16:49): There were some interesting contradictions in that speech from the Minister. On the one hand, he says he’s all about conservation, but on the other hand, he’s very definitely not. Hon James Meager: I shot three goats the other day. How many did you shoot? Hon RACHEL BROOKING: Oh, and now this is all fun and games, isn’t it? How many deer have I shot? I’m happy to report to the House that I’ve shot one, with one shot. It was a very good shot, right into the lung, from over 300 metres away. But the thing is, with our conservation lands at the moment, you don’t have to be 300 metres away from a deer to shoot it, because they’re everywhere. And that is what we should be focused on, in this House, is: what do we do with all of those ungulates wreaking havoc in our conservation lands? Not: why are we trying to protect some of them? That seems a very strange thing to be doing when we know we have this huge problem. I’m sure some of the people in this House have heard me say it before, but here I am, wearing my pekapeka earrings, and, of course, pekapeka bats are the only indigenous land mammal in New Zealand—we’ve got, obviously, beautiful mammals in the sea, but not on the land. And what that means is that our intriguing and wonderful biodiversity has evolved without the types of mammals that deer represent: the ungulates that go and eat all of that—they browse all that low-lying bush. So what happens is that they eat the seedlings, they eat the saplings—it’s all very tasty if you’re a deer, I’m told—and we know that to be true. We also know that in New Zealand, most New Zealanders, as evidenced by a lot of noise in the past week, are very proud of our conservation lands. They don’t want them sold off, and I don’t think they want them to be mined willy-nilly either, or having restaurants on Mitre Peak or anything like that, because people care about these lands and they want them to do well. Of course, we know that there are different categories of conservation land, and the pinnacle of this is the national park. This is the jewel in our conservation estate, and that is exactly what this bill relates to. It relates to saying, “Oh, we know we’ve got a huge pest problem in our national parks, but what we’ll do is not deal with that; instead, we’ll defund the Department of Conservation, we’ll talk about economic opportunities, which appear to be selling off a whole lot of conservation estate—that is our idea for conservation—and we’ll protect some animals that we know to be harming that conservation estate.” We had evidence in the Environment Committee—here is a submission we had from the New Zealand Plant Conservation Network, and they have photos, that nobody will be able to see, that demonstrate they’ve done some good ecological studies where they have a plot of land that was eaten by deer and then they’ve restricted the deer to that area, and voila, a whole lot of saplings and biodiversity has come back. You’ll see in this photo, there is Sir Alan Mark, who is a great conservationist, who has worked hard for New Zealand to protect some of our most precious spaces, and who I was lucky enough to have as one of my ecology professors when I was at the great University of Otago. It’s a shame the Minister didn’t take those classes—some would say. But, of course, we also see in the submission a good outline of the biodiversity crisis that New Zealand faces: 46 percent of vascular plants, ferns, flowering plants, and conifers are threatened with extinction or of at risk of becoming so; additionally, 19 percent of hornworts and liverworts and 14 percent of lichens are threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming so; 82 percent of our indigenous birds are threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming so, as are 94 percent of our reptiles and 80 percent of our bat species. Many of these birds, and all the reptiles and bats, rely on plants for their existence. So we’re talking about habitats here—habitats of our precious flora and fauna that the deer eat. They think it’s tasty, and that is a problem. So how the bill works—it’s very simple; it’s just a couple of clauses, and I know people were debating this just recently in committee of the whole House—but what it does is the National Parks Act says: this is our very precious, precious space and we want to let the biodiversity do well in these spaces. We also want to maintain them so people can come and visit them as well. To enable that good biodiversity, we want to exterminate the pests—and ungulates are pests, as I’ve just been explaining; they eat that undergrowth. And so what we’ve got the Minister saying is, “Well, what is more important than that biodiversity is the rights”—the word he used was “the rights”—“of hunters to go out and hunt.” So national parks, the pinnacle of our conservation estate; national parks where we’re supposed to care about your biodiversity—“Oh, we can care about that some of the time, but not all of the time, not when some hunters are involved.” That is what the Minister said. And I think this does a disservice to hunters, because we on the select committee had a lot of hunters come and talk to us. And they did talk about some great work that they do—the Wapiti Foundation does wonderful work in distributing its meat from what it catches, and has also done some other good conservation work. In no way do I dispute that, but now this Minister just seems to be saying, “Well, because those hunters do some good conservation work, we should leave it to them.” We should just say, “Oh, that’s OK. We need those hunters to do the good conservation work because we don’t want to do it. We’ll just have it for the hunters to do it.” And that is this Government’s approach to our nature, to our biodiversity, to our conservation estate, as we have seen throughout the week, and shame on them. Hon James Meager: Fake news. Total fake news. Respond so it’s in the Hansard. Hon RACHEL BROOKING: I’m not sure what the Minister is referring to, but apparently something is fake news. That Minister just stood here and said it is the rights of the hunters to go hunting. That means, “Be gone, national parks, as our pinnacle, as our high biodiversity areas; we can’t look after you.” We are being defeatist, he says. We have to rely on the hunters. That must be his argument, and it is a terrible argument to be making, because we want people to go and kill these deer. We know that the deer are all over Fiordland, all over our national parks, and great if hunters can go and kill those deer; that’s wonderful. That will help improve our biodiversity. But to then say, “Well, within the rest of that biodiversity, our undergrowth, we don’t care about it. It doesn’t actually matter if somebody wants to go and hunt a specific species.”—that is what the other side of the House is saying. We have to enable those people to keep hunting something that is causing damage to our biodiversity in an area that where, apparently—I’ve heard Tama Potaka say this week “he’s the most pro-conservation person there is”. This is the opposite of that. This is giving up on the conservation estate. This is admitting to wanting to see a decline in biodiversity and shame on them. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Maureen Pugh): The member’s time has expired. CELIA WADE-BROWN (Green) (16:59): Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is a very short bill, but it has quite a dramatic effect. My colleague, and hunter and conservationist, Scott Willis, has been very clear. We have both attended the hearings on the select committee and we’ve read submissions and we appreciate that most people on either side of this bill care deeply about conservation. The question is: how can we make sure that our national parks, perhaps particularly our international heritage areas, that it’s not only people who are here today, this generation, people residing in New Zealand; it’s people from overseas, people who care about this biodiversity crisis across the world? When we talk about the sixth extinction, that isn’t actually happening somewhere else. I think some of you may have been at the Young Ocean Explorers. We often forget that something like 80 percent of our endemic species are in the marine. But, equally, people will see some of our iconic species. They’ll know that kiwi are well-looked-after in one place; they’re coming back to the western hills of Wellington. They’ll see the kākāpō returning to, perhaps, the Murchison Valley, the numbers increasing, or the kārearea over the Tararua Forest Park. But those people see those signs, which are great signs, and they think all is well. My colleague Rachel Brooking talked about ecosystems and habitats. A less-informed eye will often look at a forest or a tussock land and think it’s great because there are plants there. They’ll think it’s great because there are native plants there. They’ll think it’s great because there are some of our wonderful, iconic bird species. But if they are not a highly informed ecologist, they will miss that ungulates can take out species that you and I, even with our iNaturalist on our phone, would not know about. They sometimes talk about deer taking some species as the “ice cream” of the bush. Every plant species has got moths or butterflies or other insects that depend not on general different trees or general different flowering plants, but they have a specific requirement for that plant. I’m really concerned with this Government’s defunding of a lot of the Department of Conservation (DOC), and even the reducing of the DOC Community Fund over the last three years, that we will not be able to have sufficiently qualified people monitoring the comparison. I do agree that most of the hunters that came in and said that this should happen have got the best of intentions, but they are not usually ecologists. Some of those that do both did come in and say they were not happy about this bill. It is really expensive to do helicopter culling. But as the Ruahine pilot showed, that was the only effective way not just of maintaining herd sizes but of reducing them. If you don’t cull half the population of deer in a herd every year, it increases. If you want to reduce it, you need to cull it by two-thirds. These are mathematical results. Again, maybe they’re not qualified population scientists, as well as not being qualified ecologists. I think one of the most moving submissions was from Edward Ellison, who chairs the New Zealand Conservation Authority. One of the things that concerns me is how this is not a small bill in isolation from everything else; you have to see it within the context of the attack on our conservation realm. Whatever may be changed over select committees, we all know that putting economic exploitation at the top for DOC to have to look at—is it the greatest extent practicable—must undermine conservation of species for their intrinsic state of being as well as the advantages to tourism, as well as the advantages to our towns that are downstream from national forests, the sea that is downstream from national forests. If we find the forests being destroyed at the top of the catchment, that has, literally, flow-on effects: sediment into the rivers—that’s the habitat of our whio. We have to make sure, if this goes through—and, given the numbers, I’m sure it will. I would like some real commitment from the National Party—that thinks it has the environmental credentials, which it certainly did have in the past—to extraordinarily good monitoring and comparison so you can really see that maybe there are going to be one or two places this will work. But I am very sceptical, and I think that you need to prove to the people of New Zealand—and not necessarily people who have left school without NCEA level 1 science, as it used to be, but you need to show people like the New Zealand— ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): No, I don’t need to show anyone anything. CELIA WADE-BROWN: I beg your pardon, Mr Speaker. Through you, I would like to see that DOC is empowered to do a really thorough before and after measurement of comparable plots. Yesterday, I showed two pictures of a similar ecosystem. That was really obvious that one had too many deer. I’m sure that all of the people who are promoting this also know that was too many deer. I would say the deers’ feet are different from moa feet; the deers’ mouth and food preferences are different from moa. Moa co-evolved with the plants. You look at all those divaricating plants; you look at the way the small-leaved coprosma hold themselves in, the kōwhai criss-cross against each other—that’s a defence against moa; it is not much of a defence against deer. Rather than me going through the whole list of all of the plants on my iNaturalist account, I would just move to a couple of points that have been made by our submitters. One of the examples was the 2024 Landcare Research paper. Again, why are we so nervous about this? It’s partly because science has been under-funded. The Landcare Research paper on deer browse shows clear evidence that deer consume tonnes of native vegetation daily, fundamentally altering forest ecosystems and preventing natural regeneration. The thing is: once plants are gone from an area, they don’t magically come back. They’re not mobile like fish might be. You have to think about what effect this will have in the long term. The Green Party opposes this bill, although we recognise the sentiments of many good hunters. CAMERON LUXTON (ACT) (17:09): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is late on a Thursday, so I won’t take long, because hunters have waited long enough, and conservation outcomes have waited even longer. This has been promised since the 2013 Game Animal Council Act, when we could start moving in this direction to have some herds of special interest. I’m glad to see bills like this coming through the House, making practical changes that enable the real conservationists—the hunters who are out there in the bush, getting stuck under the punga, bluffed on hills, but seeing parts of the bush that many of us can only dream of seeing. I like to think that I have had some amazing experiences in the bush that grew my love for the New Zealand that we all are endowed with, and I wouldn’t have got those opportunities without chasing the quarry of deer and other animals throughout the bush. This does not have to be a binary argument; there is nuance in-between. Hearing the speeches from the other side, members who I sat across from in the select committee seem to have taken so little in from this long process. This is about management plans. This is about outcomes for nature. This is getting biodiversity right by having people who are in there, in the game, hunting and getting outcomes: trapping mustelids, maintaining tracks, doing things in our environment that actually improve it, not just for everybody else but so that they can get out there and go in and enjoy that to hunt as well. This is not going to be across the country; this is in specific areas. I think the scaremongering that we’ve heard does a disservice to the people who have been giving that scaremongering. This is a great day for hunters—the real conservationists. Thank you, Mr Speaker. ANDY FOSTER (NZ First) (17:10): Thanks, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak in support of this bill. Look, I think we know what the bill’s all about. I think the key bit that I want to say here—a couple of key things—the first one of them is that it is going to be subject to a carefully prescribed process, which is set out in the legislation already. As you heard from Cam Luxton, it’s likely to be used only in special and limited circumstances. I just want to point out a couple of things there. The Minister is required to make sure that the management of animals for hunting purposes is consistent with the overriding considerations—that’s the National Parks Act. The Minister is to have regard to the status of the land—National Parks Act again, in this instance, we’re talking about. And the Minister must have regard to an extensive range of advice from the likes of the Ministry for Primary Industries, the Department of Conservation, councils, the Conservation Authority, conservation boards, and any representative organisations the Minister considers appropriate. There are a lot of safeguards in there, and then the Minister also has to make a herd management plan. Now, if the herd management plan shows that there’s a real problem for the national park, you’re going to have to change direction. There are a lot of safeguards that are in there. We know how much our conservation estate means to New Zealanders who get out and enjoy it, whether it’s tramping, skiing, kayaking, hunting, fishing, just looking at it, or visiting for tourism purposes. For all of those reasons, we value our conservation estate. I’ve got to say, on this occasion, it is really great to stand up here today and be able to say how good it is to have heard from the Minister of Conservation that there is going to be some clarification that we are not interested, we never were interested in selling off a large chunk of the conservation estate, because New Zealanders love our conservation estate. The Minister has got up there and made it clear that we are not going to be selling off a large chunk of the conservation estate. That is a good thing. Hunting is a greatly valued way for many New Zealanders to enjoy the outdoors. Recreation, camaraderie, putting food on the table, connection to land, and actually to our origins as a species, I would say as well. Hunting is greatly valued by many people. The conservation estate is also valued by many people, as I said, for intrinsic landscape, ecological values, the kinds of things that Celia Wade-Brown was talking about. I’ve got to say, we know that these values are under pressure, but they’ve been under pressure since the first human beings set foot on these islands. We need to turn that around over a period of time. There will be challenges when deer numbers get out of hand, and that’s the kind of place where the management plan will say, “Actually, there’s a problem here. We need to intervene. We need to do something differently.” That is a requirement on the Minister under this legislation. Finally, there’s been extensive debate between hunting and conservation interests for many, many years. I would dearly love to see people coming together to try and reach an accord between those people who get out and enjoy it for hunting purposes, for conservation purposes, and so that we can reach that sort of balance, because that’s what this is all about. New Zealand First is a party of balance. As my friend Cam Luxton just said, this should not be a binary issue. We should make it one that all New Zealanders can celebrate and enjoy our natural outdoors. I commend the bill to the House. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): Five minutes—Lan Pham. LAN PHAM (Green) (17:13): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m very pleased to say I’ve come from the Environmental Defence Society conference, and one thing that struck me there was the very compelling and very concerning presentations around the state of biodiversity. By the time it came to one of the Government Ministers, Minister Bishop, speaking after the biodiversity session, he made a statement that “environmental protection is at the core of the National Party.” What the response from the room was, was the room erupted in laughter. I couldn’t help but feel that same response when I heard Minister Penk standing up earlier today, talking about the Government’s response to the Conservation Amendment Bill and saying that the Government was committed to “strong environmental outcomes that will stand the test of time.”, because this bill is exactly the opposite of that. We’ve been hearing so much about the conservation space recently because of this Government’s incredibly short-sighted—and I don’t even know how they got themselves in this situation—terrible decision-making to have a crack at the heart of the conservation purpose and the heart of our public conservation land. This bill is just another avenue in which they’re doing that. What I’m hearing, and what I hope the Government members and the whole of Parliament are hearing, from people who are out there and so concerned about this chipping away at the heart of conservation is that they’re just wanting basic stuff. They’re just wanting to see the Government actually protect public conservation land. It’s not too much to ask. It’s actually very basic. If the Government just followed through with that, we wouldn’t be in this place with this bill being pushed through. We wouldn’t be in the place with the Conservation Amendment Bill that’s being proposed having to be walked back when it’s just been announced and we’ve yet to see changes actually come in. New Zealanders want to see, and they want to have secured, conservation as the purpose at the heart of public conservation land. When we keep coming to this bill, it’s just astounding how far away we’ve gotten from that, because the third thing that we’re hearing is that New Zealanders actually want to see science, evidence, and mātauranga at the fore of decision-making. If we did that, we would know that there are already statutory management plans in place for things like tahr. The example with tahr is a classic one. It’s been in place since 1993, with agreed limits that have never been met. Population-monitoring data shows that those tahr numbers are at about three times the agreed limits. This is the knowledge and information that we have. Time and time again, ecologists, environmental professionals, and people who are out in the bush, and a lot of the hunters that we heard as part of the submissions on this, were saying that some of our most intensively hunted areas, places like in the Kaweka Forest Park, are completely devoid of understory, and the ngahere—the forest—is dying. That’s not helpful when it comes to us turning the tide on our absolutely clear biodiversity challenges, and when the Government are also putting the Department of Conservation in this $400 million structural deficit where they don’t have enough funding to actually put in their functions over the next four years. It is completely unjustified to put through this bill. New Zealanders are seeing this for what it is: privatisation, exploitation, and against the interests of New Zealanders. The Green Party do not support it. CATHERINE WEDD (National—Tukituki) (17:18): Look, let me be clear: on this side of the House, we are 100 percent committed to protecting our conservation estate. Part of protecting our conservation estate is with our amazing hunters across New Zealand, who are the best in the world at conserving our conservation estate, protecting our conservation estate, because hunters are conservationists. I think that those Opposition members need to realise that. This is what this bill is all about. It’s about protecting regional economies and protecting our conservation estate with our amazing hunters. I commend this bill to the House. INGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri) (17:19): This bill isn’t about conservation; it’s actually about trophy hunting, as my colleague the Hon Dr Duncan Webb pointed out in the first reading of this bill. It’s not a technical bill; it is actually a substantive change to how the National Parks Act will operate. What was very clear from the committee of the whole House stage was that the Minister does indeed know a lot about a hunting—he is the Minister for Hunting and Fishing—and, sadly, I wonder if the fact that he knows so much about hunting has got in the way of what he knows about good process. Certainly, what is very apparent to us is what is missing from this whole debate, and that is the lack of process around how this bill was arrived on, landed on, drafted. It was not tested and it was not developed at any stage in the lawmaking. Let’s be clear about what happened. We don’t know how the policy was initiated. There was no outline of the analytical framework behind it and no evidence that the usual disciplines of good lawmaking had been applied. In fact, there were real questions about some of the drafting that were asked in the committee stage, and we didn’t receive adequate answers. We also note that it alters the National Parks Act and the way it operates and it overrides the existing legal framework that has been interpreted and applied through the courts. Rather than allowing the courts to work through that process of analysis and test the framework that was there, the Government decided to jump in ahead and do a favour for the trophy hunters that it likes to hang out with, because this would be a good—maybe should I say vanity project for the Minister rather than having anything to do with conservation at the heart of it. The reason I say that is not because I’m a mean person; it’s because there was no inquiry, no review, no regulatory impact statement, no impact analysis, no cost-benefit analysis, and no external consultation to justify the change. That became very apparent in the committee stage. We continually asked the Minister questions about process, and the Minister gave us quite long and convoluted answers that demonstrated a great knowledge about hunting in different parts of the conservation estate but didn’t tell us anything about the process that was used to make this significant policy change. When we look at the evidence, what this bill is doing is it’s going in the opposite direction of what the evidence says. In 2024, a Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research report examined almost two decades of monitoring across Fiordland National Park in Te Waipounamu—one of the islands in New Zealand that will be most impacted by this—and it concluded that it’s not really about the numbers of deer herd that we should be looking at; it is about the ecological impact. That is a much more sophisticated conversation to be happening, and that is not one that is being allowed by this bill. The research found a whole lot of other things as well that I won’t go into, but I think it would be important for people on the Government side to have a read of it, because having an evidence base to a policy brought into this House is a really good starting point. That report basically says that conservation should be measured by the health of native ecosystems, not by assumptions about deer numbers or by changing legislation to accommodate particular hunting—or should I say trophy hunting—interests. That’s exactly what’s missing from this bill. The bill doesn’t evidence that changing the legal framework for national parks will improve or even balance biodiversity. It comes as a result of a series of ministerial reckonings, but it really changes the law first and it leaves the evidence for another day. The speaker from New Zealand First indicated that and, in fact, at the committee stage, we also heard that the management plans would have intentionality around them. But as the Green speaker has alluded to, there is nothing in the bill that requires measurement of what is happening to those outcomes, so it’s all done on a bit of a wing and a prayer. It’s all done on a great deal of faith put into the hunting community, who I have no doubt do have good intentions, but nobody is measuring it, and if we don’t measure it, we don’t know what’s happening. As has been said, Labour’s got nothing against hunting. We support responsible hunting and we do recognise that hunters make valuable contributions to conservation in many parts of New Zealand. But this debate is not about whether hunting is valuable; it’s about whether Parliament should weaken the conservation framework applying to our national parks without first demonstrating that doing so will improve conservation outcomes, and that evidence hasn’t been presented to the House. It is basically assertion without analysis and with a lot of reckonings. Recognising that the Government side had the numbers to get this through, I did my best as somebody who—this is not my wheelhouse, but I did my best to try to strengthen the bill so that there could be some mechanisms to provide the critical measurements that would be needed or to make sure that the attention of this House is drawn back to that bill at the correct intervals so that we don’t just give the deer hunters a free pass to say, “We trust you. We agree with your intentionality. Go out into the world and do your thing, and we’re not going to measure that or look at it.” My amendments—there were a number of them—all of them were rejected. One of them actually responds to what the Green member was asking for, which is about animal ecological monitoring and reporting—that was rejected. I also suggested that we have no designation of a herd of special interest unless the New Zealand Conservation Authority provided advice and the Minister was to give due recognition to that advice. In fact, the New Zealand Conservation Authority submitted to the select committee about how disturbed it was that it hadn’t been sought and consulted on its opinion, and that it was going to be left out of this process. Here was the ideal opportunity for the Minister to adopt my amendment, get them back into the picture so he could at least balance the trophy hunting with the conservation rather than tipping the scales in the way that he has. I also suggested an amendment to require the management plans to have ecological measures. As I said, there was a discussion and lots of rhetoric from the Minister about the intentionality of the hunters. I don’t doubt their goodwill and their intentionality, but there is nothing in the management plans that requires that to be measured, and that should have happened by statute—not in some future secondary legislation, not in some other law, but in this particular law so that we could be sure that this was going to come into effect. I also asked that there be an independent statutory review after five years—that was rejected, and no adequate answers as to why. Finally, perhaps out of desperation that perhaps there might be different members on the other side, we could quietly put in a five-year sunset clause, which would simply allow this bill to quietly die off after five years so that when the damage has been done, we at least are able, within a generation, to recoup the losses to our conservation land. But, no, the Minister rejected all of them, and that’s a real shame. If you look through the bill, there just are not the safeguards that are needed to even give a hint that this is about a balance rather than about putting the interests of one group first—i.e., the trophy hunters. When we got to the title, we wanted some more transparency around what the bill actually did, and, fair enough, the Minister thought there were some facetious titles being proffered, and I won’t say that he was wrong. But there was an opportunity to change the date, instead of being the date of Royal assent, to at least allow court processes to run through, but also to allow there to be adequate resourcing and systems set-ups for implementation of what is a fundamental change. The fact that the Minister thinks that this law can pass into law after Royal assent shows that he’s not intending to have any resourcing, he’s not intending to do anything different to the management plans, and that this really is just about creating a nice little carve-out for the mates that he supports and he supported in his Facebook posts and in the Otago Daily Times—nothing wrong going hunting, nothing wrong with supporting them, but when there’s no evidence base of what actually caused this change in the law, it does make me wonder whether it’s kind of like the coffee on the Gold Coast situation with the Minister of Education or other conversations that happen. Suddenly, magically, we have these bills before the House, and what we have is the arrogance of the Government who think that because they know a little bit about a topic—or maybe or a lot, as the Minister does—they don’t have to follow due process, and that’s the biggest concern. It would be better if the Minister knew nothing about hunting, in my view, because then maybe he would have done his homework and followed the processes of good governance and good lawmaking. But it’s like a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and it’s particularly so in this House of Representatives. As much as I applaud the Minister and his knowledge of hunting, and I did appreciate his fulsome and quite entertaining answers in the chair, when it comes to lawmaking, this is a terrible piece of law. It doesn’t deserve to pass in this House, and I look against seeing what the impact is going to be on our conservation estate. RYAN HAMILTON (National—Hamilton East) (17:29): With this bill, both hunting and conservation values will be improved. Property management is based on sound scientific approaches to game animal management achieved at low or no cost to the taxpayer. I congratulate the Minister for Hunting and Fishing, and I commend this bill to the House. Debate interrupted. Personal Explanations