Flogging the estate that pulls above its weight

Conservation_Amendment_Bill_Submission_Forbes (1) 2.pdf

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I've just lodged my submission on the Conservation Amendment Bill 2026 with the Environment Select Committee. For those who want the full version, I've attached it above.

And those keen peeps who want to read the bill for themselves - you'll find it here.

What I want to do with this post is put the bill into its wider context: That of an overworked, overdelivering, underfunded Department and a country with disastrously undervalued natural capital.

Against this background, our Conservation Minister offers us a bill that, under the guise of an administrative tidy-up, is fundamentally changing the purpose of the Department of Conservation, making it possible to sell off about 60% of conservation land, and reducing checks and balances in the decision-making process.

Despite this, Conservation Minister Tama Potaka protests: "The Bill doesn't set up a plan or a programme to sell 60% of the conservation land...I've said that so many times. I've said 'bits and bobs!'"

The minister doesn’t seem to understand that his Bill is actually about pushing the conservation estate further into service of the economy when exactly the opposite is required. The conservation estate needs to be regarded as ecological infrastructure on which a large share of the country's long-term economic productivity depends on. Yet our natural wealth is being treated as a portfolio to be optimised for net present value and is governed by a minister who doesn’t seem to understand the potential of the Bill he’s promoting, no matter his personal intention. That might all sound a bit over the top. Still, if you bear with me, I’ll go over the figures as context for my submission to show that this Bill is actually asking waay to much of an agency that is already overperforming and operating past the edge of its capacity.

The Department of Conservation manages roughly a third of New Zealand's land area and is expected to manage roughly 2,800 species we already know are threatened, at risk, or vulnerable — on appropriations far too small for the job. In her speech last week, outgoing DOC Director General Penny Nelson said her team needs an extra $207m annually just to prevent further extinctions. Her speech is well worth a read. DOC has been underfunded relative to its mandate for years, asked repeatedly to do more with less, while everyone from tourism operators to economic development agencies points at the conservation estate as a driver of regional and national prosperity. Recent DOC-commissioned research puts the net value of ecosystem services flowing from that land at $10.9 billion a year, $4.2 billion of it from National Parks alone — water management, flood and waste mitigation, the lot. Tourism value-add on conservation land and waters has averaged $3.4 billion a year over the last few years, down from a pre-Covid high of $4.3 billion. The Southern and Eastern South Island — our patch — generates 52% of that on its own. These figures come from the DOC Budget 2024 overview — published on DOC's website.

And how much of DOC's own budget comes back from tourism on that land? Picture DOC's

funding as a dollar-shaped pie. Eighty-three cents of it comes from general taxpayer funding — the same pool that pays for hospitals and schools. Just three cents comes from concession fees, the money tourism businesses pay DOC for the right to operate on conservation land. Add in the international visitor levy and other visitor-related charges, and all visitor income combined to get the rest.

Now put DOC's whole budget next to the value it generates. DOC runs on roughly $650 million a year, from every source. Conservation-related tourism alone is estimated at around $4 billion a year. DOC's entire funding is a small fraction of the value that the land it manages produces in tourism terms alone, before we even count the $10.9 billion in wider ecosystem services. A tiny sliver of a vast value stream flows back to the people actually maintaining the asset that creates it.

Into this situation comes the Conservation Amendment Bill, which instead of fixing the funding mismatch, does pretty much the opposite. It writes economic development into DOC's purpose, "to the greatest extent practicable." It asks an underfunded department to prioritise economic generation over the conservation function it exists to perform, on an estate that is already a quiet, undercompensated powerhouse of the national economy.

It opens a pathway to dispose of up to 60% of DOC land. Mr Potaka is correct in saying this

doesn’t mean they’ll sell all that land, but a foot is firmly set in that door - beautifully enabling for Minister Jones's mining companies et al.

The Bill also strips the New Zealand Conservation Authority and conservation boards of their

decision-making functions and hands that power to a single ministerial office.

Generally, this bill is an own-goal that we'll live to regret if it goes through as written. That said, some important 'tidying up' around concessions and potential land swaps is needed. Get on and do that please Mr Potaka, the tourism industry needs a better pathway, but in exchange, they need to also contribute more to the restoration and protection of the natural resource they profit from. Land swaps too, when they can be justified, should not take 10 years or more to go through.

What I support

• The concessions regime genuinely needs fixing. It's slow, fragmented, and expensive for

operators and DOC alike.

• The statutory timeframes, pre-approved activity classes, and the ability to decline weak applications early are sensible administrative improvements.

• A well-designed land exchange framework could improve the ecological coherence of the estate over time.

• Visitor levies are a legitimate, overdue mechanism with strong precedent overseas.

Where it goes wrong

• Land disposal. This shouldn't proceed at all. My objection isn't really about whether the

Minister or DOC would make good judgement calls on what's "surplus"— though the

record on that front isn't reassuring. It's that we don't have the ecological knowledge to

make irreversible decisions with any confidence. The Bill's disposal test — not important

for threatened species, not the best example of its habitat type, Director-General

recommends it — is concerning. For example, wetlands were considered "waste land" for most of the twentieth century, drained without a second thought, until we understood what they actually did. Soil microbiome science, fungal networks, climate refuge mapping — every advance in ecological knowledge has told the same story: land we wrote off had value we hadn't yet understood. This is why the precautionary principle exists, and the disposal provisions in this bill ignore it entirely.

• “To the greatest extent practicable.” This phrase inverts the basic logic of

conservation legislation. Normally, activity on protected land has to justify itself against

conservation values. Under this framing, DOC must enable economic development

unless there's a specific legal barrier — practicability becomes the test, not ecological

appropriateness. The economy will have precedence over conservation. Short term gains precedence over long-term restoration work.

• The first NCPS, exempted from scrutiny. The National Conservation Policy

Statement sits above everything — every area plan, every existing strategy, every

pre-approved activity class will be measured against it. And the Bill exempts the very first

one from the standard consultation and Conservation Authority process that every later

amendment will have to go through. The document that sets the baseline for the whole

new system gets built without the oversight the Bill itself says is necessary everywhere

else.

• Revenue with no ringfence. I agree it’s a good idea to collect revenue from visitors.

But how do we trust the government to put that money back where it belongs without cast-iron ringfencing? For example: The 2019 international visitor levy raised real money that wasn't reliably directed back to conservation or tourism infrastructure as specified. This Bill repeats this structure: levy revenue, concession fees, exchange proceeds can all be governed by regulation rather than legislation, which means a future government can redirect it without coming back to Parliament. If the purpose of these charges is to fund conservation, that purpose needs to be locked in, not left to ministerial discretion.

• Power concentrated in one office. The Conservation Authority and Regional

Conservation Boards currently have real decision-making functions — approving

conservation management strategies, plans, with independent statutory standing. Under

the Bill they become commentators. Combined with ministerial control over the first

NCPS, activity classifications, exchanges, and disposals, power sits with the minister

with none of the previous checks and balances. That's not a good structure regardless of

who's holding the pen.

• Treaty settlement redress, softened. Ngāi Tahu has been clear that "the same or

equivalent effect to the greatest extent possible" isn't compatible with the full and final

character of their settlement, and I support that position."Full and final" is a specific

obligation. "To the greatest extent possible" is a qualifier the Crown can lean on

whenever compliance becomes inconvenient. Iwi must not have to renegotiate rights

they've already won.

All of this sits on top of a deeper issue: New Zealand’s failure to value its natural capital in

decision-making. This Bill embeds economic development as a purpose of conservation

planning while adding no mechanism to measure or protect what's being traded away.

My full recommendations are in the submission — remove the disposal provisions, fix the

practicability/possibility language, bring the first NCPS back under proper process, ringfence the revenue, restore the Conservation Authority's powers, strengthen the Treaty provisions, and keep the land exchange concept but test it against natural capital values, not just conventional conservation metrics.

This paragraph from Penny Nelson's speech addressed the bigger issue and needs to be heeded by us all:

"One of the biggest problems we’ve got as a country is that collectively, we act as though nature is free. It’s treated as a free backdrop to economic activity and recreation, rather than as critical infrastructure that underpins prosperity, resilience and wellbeing.

For decades we have relied on nature to absorb pressure, support livelihoods and provide resilience. The reality is that in terms of natural capital, we’re living well beyond our means and are racking up debts for future generations to pay.

We risk running down our natural capital and calling it growth. New Zealanders like to think of ourselves as people who love nature. We call ourselves kiwis, we market ourselves to international tourists as clean and green and 100% pure."

As always, happy to hear what you think.