Issue 108 - August / September |
On Sale Monday 11th September

I hope plenty of you have been out and about in the hills recently, because I haven’t!

Hopefully you all got your submissions in on time on the Game Animal Amendment Bill by the cut off of the 24th of July. Unfortunately this issue of the magazine has come out too late to remind you all. The next step is presenting to the select committee, but we don’t know yet who is going to get that opportunity. This is a crucial step in getting the message across to politicians on the select committee who will actually make recommendations on just what will be included in these amendments.

It’s been a real eye opener to me just how rabid the ideological opposition is to any sort of user-pays, hunter-led management in NZ - despite the proven gains for biodiversity and conservation the perfect example of this that’s been operating for 15 years has shown – the Fiordland Wapiti example. I sit on the NZ Conservation Authority, appointed by the Minister of Conservation to represent the public’s view in what happens to our public conservation land in NZ. I am absolutely flabbergasted by the willingness of people in all sorts of public positions – governmental and lobby groups like Forest & Bird, and the general urban dweller, prepared to cut off their noses to spite their faces trying to maintain some ideological sort of “natural state” long since gone done the plughole - and the sad thing is they’re doing it on behalf of all of us without any consultation and therefore don’t have the mandate from the wider public.

There is such an unbelievable lack of knowledge about what it’s really like out there in our National Parks and other public lands. There is a whole raft of introduced species, both Valued Introduced and pest, established in our National Parks. We have lost numerous native species already over the last many hundred years, and there’s no current way either practically or affordable for the country (now or in the foreseeable future) of getting those native species back, nor of eradicating any introduced species. We will have to live with a modified state in our National Parks no matter how high the horse the rabid ideologists climb up on. There are many introduced species that no New Zealanders value ,that no one including DOC is doing anything at all about – ie one of the the biggest threats to Aoraki Mt Cook National Park is the pest weed Hieracium slowly but surely taking over all the alpine meadows. No one is doing anything about this, but if one tahr eats one piece of tussock it’s the beginning of the end, despite a very large percentage of the users of our public conservation land really valuing them. Sure, we all know how damaging they and any introduced browsers can be if allowed to expand their population unchecked. But that is the whole point of Herds of Special Interest, to manage at no cost to the taxpayer the numbers of specific herds of valued introduced species so they are having a minimal (and agreed to by wide consultation) impact on native vegetation, while providing a highly valued and many including me would say essential contribution to future conservation efforts and the physical and mental health of our country.

I have no time for people who sit in ivory towers lecturing those of us putting a huge amount of time and money into trying to make a real, measurable impact on biodiversity and conservation in this country, when the vast majority of them spend little or no time in the back country, have a completely rose tinted view of what’s its really like, and a conversely unjustified totally negative bias towards the huge contribution being made by the valued Introduced Species sector to conservation in this country. I am sick and tired of feeling like a second class citizen to these people.