Wildlife Act reform – where to next?
Deidre Koolen-Bourke1
1 Environmental Defence Society, PO Box 91736, Victoria St West, Auckland 1142, New Zealand (deidre@eds.org.nz)
The Wildlife Act 1953 is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most dated pieces of conservation legislation. It constitutes our core species protection statute and yet it is a relic of another era: focused as much on ‘game management’ as species protection. The Act does not distinguish between indigenous and introduced species, nor between the common and the critically endangered. It is not linked to species status assessments and is narrow in scope, excluding all plants, freshwater fish and most invertebrate and marine species. It predates both the climate change and biodiversity crises, as well as modern Treaty settlement legislation. In short: the frame, the definitions, the tools and the Act are no longer fit for purpose. The Act is currently up for review and for the sake of our imperilled species, it is important we get this right. The changes made now need to help us traverse the numerous and significant challenges our indigenous biodiversity will face over the next thirty some years.
The Environmental Defence Society (EDS) has been undertaking a raft of work on the Wildlife Act as part of our Conservation Law Reform Project. Our first issues report, Conserving Nature, was published in July 2021. That report highlighted critical defects in the current legislative framework and argued that there is a compelling and nationally significant need to rethink how we manage the conservation estate, threatened species and biodiversity. Accordingly, phase two of the project—Restoring Nature—shifted to focus on solutions and options for reform. The findings of our work at phase two, which includes a more detailed report on the Wildlife Act, is due to be released shortly. This presentation discusses those findings and highlights some of the hard conversations the Wildlife Act review will need to traverse.