Doc budget breakdown

That bar chart is interesting, albeit possibly misleading for earlier years because I doubt the only actual operational spending in 13/14 and 14/15 was supporting investment in tourism. Battle for our Birds funding is gone, but it's happening alongside the Predator Control budget increasing massively. Are these two actually different from each other? There's a big increase in Tourism infrastructure maintenance.

Any info why "Battle for our Birds", as such, disappeared ?.

possibly because it was a National party initiative and Labour put the money into a programme that is called something else now... national cant take credit for it if it continues. all battle of the birds seemed to do was borrow from next years budget to cover themselves for bad years. without an additional top up they'd litteraly have to stop predator control for a year.

Maybe just a branding thing. Pest control implies an ongoing expense rather than something that's going to be won or lost. I won't complain if they get rid of the stupid war metaphor, anyway.

Battle for our birds (and operation ark which preceeded it) are not ongoing pest control operations as I'd call it - they are one-off responses to mast years: reactive stuff that happens in the few peak risk years and not at all in the majority of 'normal' years. Budget is near-zero most years - just paying for monitoring of seedfall and pest numbers. In a mast year budget is allocated on a one-off basis based on the conditions. It's not felt like that because we've had an atypicalally frequent series of mast years lately. But that's the intent and funding model. Ongoing pest control to me implies an annual commitment to controlling pests over an area. Nb not necessarily covering every area every year as it may be a multi-year cycle of control. But a fixed annual budget with fixed desired outcomes.

What's up with no increase for Kauri disease? Basically we got no clue what to do next? We're already maxed out in resources?

Biodiversity Initiatives is another massive new spend for which the intent hasn't been explained very clearly yet. Go ahead to 2021/22 and DOC's spending considerably more on it than pest control.

The kauri dieback response is funded through MPI.