Biosecurity Minister Andrew Hoggard has used the run-up to Budget 2026 to pre-announce an extra 79 million dollars over three years for wilding pine control, lifting the total three-year package to 109 million and roughly doubling annual spend from about 15 million to an average of 36 million a year.
The money will go to the nine priority management units that have absorbed most of the existing programme, including the Mackenzie Basin, the Whakatipu Basin behind Queenstown, Molesworth Station in South Marlborough, the Central Plateau around the Tongariro World Heritage Area, the Branch Leatham country south of St Arnaud, and Wanaka. About 30 million dollars of the new funding will be drawn from the International Visitor Levy, which means a portion of what overseas tourists pay at the border will go directly back into protecting the landscapes most of them came to see.
Hoggard said the case was simple. “Wilding pines threaten productive farmland, water supplies in sensitive catchments, and native biodiversity,” he said in the announcement carried by Scoop. He called the extra spend “a smart investment in rural productivity”. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, who joined the announcement, was blunter. “Every day, every month, every year that we go by not doing much is another year these things start winning, and we can’t have that,” he told reporters, as recorded by RNZ.
The numbers behind the rhetoric are the part worth dwelling on. More than two million hectares of New Zealand are now affected by wilding conifers, a figure that includes some of the country’s most photographed high-country basins. The infested area that is currently not being actively controlled is growing at about five percent a year, which is the kind of compounding curve that turns a manageable biosecurity job into an impossible one if it is left alone. An independent assessment cited by the government puts the projected economic loss at 3.6 billion dollars over fifty years if the programme is allowed to stall, and estimates that every dollar spent on control returns about 30 dollars in avoided losses, retained pasture and protected water yields.
Wilding pines are, on paper, ordinary plantation species, mostly contorta, Douglas fir, larch and a few radiata escapees. Released into the South Island high country and the volcanic plateau, where they were planted decades ago for erosion control and shelter, they spread on the wind into tussock, beech and braided-river country that has no natural defence against them. Within a generation a single seed source can blanket a basin. The control techniques are a mix of the brutal and the boutique. Crews use hand pulling for seedlings, chainsaw felling for adult trees, helicopter and drone spraying where the country is too steep for ground crews, mechanical mulching for thickets, and in a few places commercial harvesting where the trees have grown big enough to be milled.
Federated Farmers welcomed the announcement, calling the extra money “a major win for farmers” with land in the priority units. The Whakatipu Wilding Control Group, the community-led trust that has driven much of the work above Queenstown, said volunteer and contractor capacity was already “primed and ready to go” once the new funding flowed through the Ministry for Primary Industries.
The decision rebuilds a programme that the same government had quietly let drift. National funding for wilding control was cut sharply in the 2024 Budget, dropping from a peak of about 25 million a year to closer to 10 million, a reduction that local control groups warned at the time would let the infestation reclaim ground that had taken a decade and 175 million dollars of Crown money and another 38 million from community partners to push back. The pre-announcement effectively reverses that cut and then some, and adds a longer-term policy lever in the form of a National Pest Management Plan for wilding conifers, which MPI has now been instructed to develop. A national plan would replace the current patchwork of regional pest rules with one consistent set of obligations on landowners, nurseries and forestry companies, and it is the kind of structural tool that has been on the wish list of every wilding control coordinator for the better part of a decade.
Politically, the announcement lets the coalition put a tangible regional-economy number on the board ahead of Budget day without touching any of the harder fights over health, welfare or public service headcount. It also lets Luxon and Hoggard share a microphone with Federated Farmers, which is exactly the photo opportunity the government wants in front of a rural audience that has felt squeezed by rising input costs and falling on-farm confidence. Whether the renewed spending holds at 36 million a year beyond the three-year horizon, or is once again the first line item trimmed in the next fiscal squeeze, is the question the people doing the actual cutting and spraying are most interested in.
If you have not yet checked where the parties sit on rural and biosecurity spending heading into the 2026 election, our voting tool walks you through the policy positions side by side.
What do you reckon? Is doubling wilding pine funding a smart use of the International Visitor Levy, or should the money have gone somewhere else entirely? Leave a comment below and let us know.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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