 Ini iwe katoa, na mihi ike kotoa, iro rangatira ma tina kotoa, i ti iwi tuna i tina ko, tina ra, tina koto kotoa. I do acknowledge our treaty partner and Aitira and this phenomenal country that they came to 800 years ago that must have been the most incredible place on earth. You imagine getting out of the walka and this place was teeming with invertebrates. This place had the highest number of vertebrates on the planet, so the whole forest would have been alive. I do want to talk about the challenge that New Zealand faces and the time we're in because I think we're at a really interesting point in time. New Zealand had a massive transition in 1984 and I think we're due for one now and I really think it's no longer about the economy and the environment. It's about the environment and the economy and I think that we will see a transition when nature becomes the backbone of New Zealand. We've spoken for years about farming being the backbone of New Zealand. I think we're seeing a transition to our natural resources are going to be at the heart of this economy and how we restore them, how we treasure them, how we nurture them will be the gift we leave to future generations. But I want to go back to a poem written by Rudard Kipling about Auckland City in 1880 and he termed it the last, the loneliest, the loveliest. At that time in 1880 Auckland City would have had phenomenal bird life. It would have had that kōkākau kiwi teeming with bell birds until this was just part of the DNA of our Te Arawa. In 1880 was also about the same time that European bought in stoats, weasels, ferrets because we tried this, you know, Māori had come here with conservation principles, you know, the first principle of rahui of how you, you know, Māori didn't own the land but European came in and decided you need to own the land and Māori had a philosophy of you look after the land and you look after it and we had this clash of creating what we call Little Britain where we tried to recreate Great Britain by bringing out gorse and we bought out possums from Tasmania. They failed in 1836 and we got them back ten years ago and got them really going and we bought in rabbits because we wanted fur. So, you know, fur was a big industry at the time with fur seals, rabbit fur, possum fur and then the rabbits just wrecked havoc right through central Otago so then we had our first conservation debate in New Zealand in about 1880 when the decision to bring in mustalids from Europe which was stoats, rats and ferrets and the science community really opposed the government bringing in these mustalids but the farming community won and we bought them in and within we protected those species for nearly nine years and within eight years our forests went silent and so we did this terrible damage to our natural ecosystems and what we're doing now is we're hard of a movement trying to fix it all and it's connecting communities, it's inspirational and I'm up here to speak to Conservation Week tonight because there's some really fascinating stuff happening in Auckland and right at the moment there's one of the most expensive so you've probably heard of the Maori creation of New Zealand I just want to take you into the geological creation because the last, the loveliest, loneliest is something we're very proud of is Kiwis, you know, last discovered, loneliest place in the world, loveliest and when these plates collided and we ended up with this amazing assemblage of nature Tuatara is the only living dinosaur on the planet 200 million years ago and this land bridge existed that the species drifted off onto Aotearoa 60 million years ago our frogs are 70 million years old, they communicate through chemical secretions we've got a miziptris, a little plant that grows on trees that's 80 million years old and Kiwi flew out of Antarctica probably 80 million years ago in the Rathite so we've got this phenomenal, you know, a country of birds the mohua is the ancient lineage of all the canaries in the world and the rock wren, our alpine rock wren is the ancient lineage of all the wrens in the world so we're a land of birds and what we're doing right at the moment fascinatingly, it's funded by President Trump and Angela Merkel and it's working off the coast we think New Zealand is sitting on the sixth continent so we talk of the word Zelandia and what they're doing at the moment with the International Ocean Drilling Project and this is a 108 million dollar project with a ship called the Geodias Resolution is going into the edges of the plate boundaries to understand where New Zealand came from and created this continent and did we actually go beneath the waves because the latest hypothesis is pieces clearly didn't when we look at this ancient, what we call ancient antiquity the carry trees, you know, where did they come from if New Zealand is completely submerged so President Trump and Angela Merkel are helping us answer this question of what is the geologic origin of our nature in New Zealand and how we came out of Antarctica and how we ended up with this tremendous assemblage of wildlife so, you know, we are a land of birds we've got 93 endemic, we've got 198 birds the UK has one endemic so that's sort of why we value birds of the 12 albacross species we've got eight of the 13 penguin species we've got nine, there's 300 seabird species in the world New Zealand has 25% of them and on the Snears Island to the south of Stewart Island you can go there in Azote and watch 5 million titi or sooty shearwater coming at night and that's the more birds than the entire British Isles on one island which is 250 hectares so, you know, and you only need to go to Houturu a little barrier to actually see what New Zealand was like and where we want to bring it back to the second, you know, biggest country in the world for snails there's one little gully in Te Hiku at Tapaki where you can put out your arm and there's 50 species of snails so, you know, just think when that first walk arrived here what this place was and we think we can get it back and what we're doing is we're a heart of a movement that wants to do this and we think, you know, we've already restored Houturu, Motehe, Mototapu, Teritiri Matangi Teritiri Matangi is now the most popular tourist attraction in Auckland, Day Attraction and, you know, it's literally booked out for people to actually go and have an encounter with birds and we're going to join forces with Auckland City to do this and we're going to try and, as we make more and more of these islands predator-free, we want to flow those birds through to the Hanoas where we've done a joint 1080 operation with Auckland City and we only launched predator-free in Auckland about two months ago I turned up to what we called the Pestival and we had 500 people each community group was only allowed three and there's now a thousand groups in Auckland or, you know, this is about getting New Zealand back backyard by backyard by backyard we need one in five people in a community to keep a $12 trap set and get rid of that rat, get rid of that stoke, get rid of that possum and we can actually take suburbs predator-free in Wellington we've got 14,000 people we've got, we had 500 people turned up to predator-free Brooklyn, I was a predator-free Muramar six weeks ago New World Supermarket was doing the barbecue Mitre 10 was doing the stoke boxes the local restaurant was doing Wellington on a plate they had Pest on a plate and, you know, I was watching young mothers with a pram putting a stoke box on top of their pram and heading home and marking their house and that's the sort of movement we want because it's more than Pest we're building communities and people, you know, I met a Syrian person there who hardly spoke English but had taken a, bought a house that was completely rat-infested and joining the movement, you know there were a refugee into New Zealand and working out that this was part, you know they could be part of a much bigger thing which was predator-free New Zealand and we could clean up their place which was totally infested with rats so it's completely exceeded our expectations reconnecting Northland where we've... Steven Tyndall's put quite a lot of money into how we connect communities all the way up, we've got the highest Kiwi densities in New Zealand now at the Bay of Islands we've got the Foriwi in the Far North, Te Hiku actually wanting to build a barrier across Te Rirau Wairau at Cape Reanga, North Cape and create a whole new place up there because that's actually where we think is one of the places in New Zealand as most of New Zealand's sunk under the waves we think that area is actually it has the highest biodiversity in New Zealand it's basically where we think so many of our plants came from our species that refuge was there the other one was in the Manuhiraki in the Alexandra where when early European farmers came there were so many mower bones they used mower bones to light fires and it had eight species of mower in one valley and it's got the most numbers of indigenous fish in New Zealand and it's got our only mammal which is a crocodile dinosaur down there so another fascinating one in Hawkes Bay we've basically brought all our resources together we've got 25,000 hectares of Hawkes Bay and a project called Cape to City at very, very low predator numbers on the Napier Taupo Road the president of Federated Farmers used to see 100 possums a night he now sees one possum a year he spends $3,000 a year fixing his windows from keriru flying into them and he says isn't that a much better problem to have and you can actually see flocks of 100 keriru and I was at Ocarito Ocarito is a tiny town just north of the Hawkewitika of the West Coast and I went down to see my mother recently and I went to Ocarito there's 15 people in the community there they've invented their own stote and rat box and I saw flocks of 40 tui so it's community by community by community we're doing this Rakiura, the guy that owns the Britain Norman Islander that flies to the plane he's got 40 stote boxes around his airfield he's been doing it for 14 years he now has enough kiwi coming out there that he can guarantee kiwi every night and that's just one person on an airfield and he's got a 99% guarantee of showing you a kiwi going to his airfield Mackenzie Basin we've just done 1080 does sit at the heart of this we use a lot of 1080 we get a lot of opposition to it we want something better we don't want to always be using 1080 but we've done it just near Haast we've done a complete piece of land we've done 10,000 hectares two pre-feeds four kilos per hectare of 1080 and in two months we haven't seen a single rat a single pos and a single stote so if we could move beyond using 1080 after 1080 but actually say this is it and we go pest-free and use our rivers as our boundaries and start to really expand these landscapes that's really where we want to be the Maori Treaty Settlement on Chathams Maui Solomon I met him the night they signed the Deedah Settlement and they had a pest-off meal at their marae on the Chathams to celebrate the fact that we actually might be able to put some money together to make Chathams predator-free and I think they had possum pies they had swan sausages and they had weka samosas but our Treaty partner does sit at the heart of this and the last government did two remarkable things with Tirawera and the Wanganui Awa, the river where it actually turned the whole dial on how we feel about parks and Tirawera was given its own entity so it is a living person and the attitude of Tuhoe is we don't take from nature we give to nature, we nurture nature and nature looks after us and the same with Wanganui River when Chris Finlinson announced that the Wanganui River has its own personality what was remarkable is six weeks later the Indian government gave the same legal status to the Ganges so that was New Zealand leadership and now we are relishing working with Wanganui iwi and Tuhoe of how we bring that vision to life I'll just touch on a couple of other things Joseph asked me to talk about freshwater and biosecurity and in 1999 New Zealand tourism launched its most successful marketing brand and killed 100% Tirawera at the same time there was an increasing interest in dairy and in 1999 we had 4 million cows and today we have 7 million cows and each cow equates to about 14 humans in terms of urea and waste and our farms started going bigger and I think the tragedy we had was this was happening in our generation is we could see that our freshwater was under threat with this increasing change of land use and we've got 40 species of native fish the most famous one is the enunga or the white bait and the longfin eels but 75% of these fish are threatened so we've been working with Fonterra they've given us 20 million to try and shift the dial to try and shift the... I think what we need to do is shift our and we tend to treat our rivers as our back door we need to treat them as our front door and I think what we need to do in New Zealand is create a movement similar to what we've done with Predator Free where everybody is involved in restoring their bit of it and treating that hour as something really, really precious and I think this election was about that and I think whoever's government has that challenge because I think everybody has felt the water issue has gone too far and we need to bring it back on biosecurity, I think all this effort we're putting into bringing back our nature is absolutely at risk if we allow our border some of these insidious species like myrtle rust like carried eye back like great white butterfly like rainbow skinks rainbow skinks and Australian skink our skinks breed annually Australians breed five times a year so you can see the potential we have for Australia to really nuke our wildlife and these rainbow skinks get around in containers we've just found the first one in Picton so we're going to go hard on Picton we've got the Maungrape Barrier they've come in through cargo ships into Auckland and sort of spread out from there but like great white butterflies came into Nelson we've managed to deal to them but myrtle rust is the one that really worries us it's come out of Brazil into California, across to Hawaii into Japan then all through the eastern seaboard of Australia and then it's blown into New Zealand through New Caledonia it was eradicated on Lord Howe Island currently we've got it confined to Taranaki and Kerry Kerry and we've found it on none of our natives so it's only a nursery stock so those issues of biosecurity are really important and I guess climate change was the last issue and that is what's happening as we've got the strongest westerlies we've ever seen as the ozone hole of Antarctica is creating this differential of heat going into Antarctica the winds spinning around Antarctica are going faster and faster the southern ocean is getting rougher that's drawing the warm water out of the south Pacific and the Indian Ocean so our whole climate systems have moved about 500 miles to the south if you go to Australia those climate systems the warming of seawater has completely nuked the Tasmanian Devillea and kelp forests so they're losing great ecosystems in terms and you're getting the migration of South Australia species into Tasmania the impacts aren't as great in New Zealand as yet but the area that really worries us most is the area from Pusiga around to Banks Peninsula creasing numbers of great white sharks yellow-white penguin in trouble New Zealand sea lion doing okay but we're seeing a sort of a retreat back to the sub-Antarctic with climate change so as we invest in these ecosystems we're going to invest in the west where we've got water it's going to get harder in the east places like Cape Sanctuary two years in the row we've had to go out and find who-who grubs whatever to feed the kiwis there and when we get places like the Next Foundation who are Neil and Annette Ploughman are putting 100 million of their own money into step change in terms of environmental education they're very, very careful with their investments and they're actually wanting to secure investments for nature that are going to be here for our generations beyond us so it's an exciting time it's a movement as Richard Branson said when he heard about Predator Free this could be the Noah's Ark of the World and it's really about putting nature at the centre of our economy cura