Disclosure: Prior to working in Parliament I worked at the Department of Conservation for about two years in the digital team.
The Conservation Amendment Bill has become one of the Coalition Government’s biggest political headaches of the year. Over the past fortnight New Zealanders have been told the Coalition is planning to sell off conservation land, open national parks to commercial development, and fundamentally rewrite the purpose of the Department of Conservation. These messages exploded onto social media and spread like wildfire. The Coalition, meanwhile, has accused its critics of scaremongering, insisting it only ever intended to tidy up a handful of low value properties and modernise a conservation system that has become bogged down in bureaucracy.
