A great environmental idea from ACT

David Seymour announced:

ACT Leader David Seymour today proposed selling Landcorp and putting the proceeds into a Sanctuary Trust for applicants who wish to operate inland sanctuaries for native wildlife.

“Landcorp is a business the Government should never have owned and which is responsible for considerable dairy conversion and deforestation.

“The new Trust’s grants would be conditional upon the applicant reaching targets for predator exclusion, biodiversity, and community participation.

“The model is not so very different from what ACT has done with Partnership Schools.  Invite social entrepreneurship, measure performance according to agreed targets, and get out of the way.

“Over 100 years, Sanctuary Trust would radically transform the abundance of New Zealand’s most endangered species.”

This is a great idea. We shouldn’t have a state owned company anyway running farms and the like. But I like the idea of selling Landcorp (which as Seymour notes is often converting land into dairy use) and using the proceeds to fund conservation sanctuaries.

Landcorp has 140 farms and is valued at $1.4 billion. I suspect it might go for even more than that. That would be a huge boost to conservation efforts.

A very nice way of combining fiscal conservatism (asset sales) with environmentalism. This policy would do more for conservation than nay previous Government has done.