NZ HUNTER SITS DOWN WITH THE MINISTER OF CONSERVATION HON. KIRITAPU ALLAN
Q You were brought up in a small community where hunting, fishing and mahinga kai are an important part of everyday life. Can you tell us a bit about your background and how those experiences have shaped your views on the place of hunting in our communities?
Okay, so, right here we are situated on State Highway 35. This is a highway that is laden with hunters, farmers, people that depend on the environment for our survival.
Economic survival, recreation purposes, you name it. And so I think when you live in, when you’re raised in, rural NZ you see the world around you differently. There’s a couple of things: I think that one, the environment is something that we see not just as something to kick about but as something that’s necessary to our sustenance. It’s necessary to our community values. Just round here for example on a Thursday/Friday night, we’ll all try and go up the bush, hunting and all of that meat is shared out amongst the entire community here. I’ve had people drop off just this weekend whitebait, koura, crayfish, mussels and it’s a part of life. Especially venison. It’s such a big part of the way we see ourselves, and each other. It’s a great way to spend time but also it fills people with a sense of pride, that we can be a little bit self-resilient.
So I think the way that forms my views when it comes to the way that we manage our environment, it’s very much through a lens of ‘use’. Like, who uses the environment, how does the environment sustain us, how do we monitor the way that we engage with the environment. And it’s got to be quite community led as well, like here along this highway I’m pointing to, these are the people that know those tracks intimately. Know what’s where and can note the changes over periods of time. So it’s not a really academic application of views and theories, it’s a really intimate knowledge that’s been accrued over time. Mud under the fingernails and that type of approach.
I think that’s one of the things I bring to a conservation portfolio, it’s a real practical application of who does what – do we have the necessary regulatory tools, or are there processes in place to ensure that we can
