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New Zealand has a unique opportunity to reshape the future of 1.2 million hectares, or 5% of the country. Since 1990, land clearance and development in the South Island high country have removed large areas of native vegetation, destroying already tenuous endemic species populations, and rare and threatened ecosystems. Important ecosystems and ecological values have been subtly or dramatically degraded through tenure review, discretionary consents, and invasions of plant and animal pests. Natural heritage has been transferred from public to private ownership, and a pest management burden created for future generations. Here, we argue that high country land administration has followed the 'give-hope-defend' model of governance. For 25 years, successive governments gave decision-making power to officials in Land Information New Zealand and Department of Conservation. Governments then hoped officials would follow ambiguous statutory direction. All the while, governments ignored their governance responsibilities by assiduously defending officials' freedom from public accountability for decisions that the public found nonsensical. Indeed the Commissioner of Crown Lands, with whom the proverbial buck stops, is accountable to neither the Minister nor the public. We conclude that if the government wants enduring stewardship in the high country, revised legislation needs clarity of purpose and accountability to the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To develop genetic markers for differentiation between pathotypes of the clubroot pathogen Plasmodiophora brassicae, DNA polymorphisms of 85 P. brassicae genes were investigated by comparing the sequences of these genes from published expressed sequence tag libraries to their sequences in the two released whole genomes. A significant portion of the identified sequence differences across all polymorphic genes are between an isolate from New Zealand and the two whole-genome sequenced isolates. Four genes with a high density of polymorphisms were selected and their partial sequences were amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) from the old pathotypes 2, 3, 5, 6, and 8 (based on the Williams differential set) and the new virulent populations 3-like and 5-like. On the sequences of two of the four genes, the old pathotypes are all identical to the two whole-genome sequenced isolates and all of the new virulent populations are identical to the New Zealand isolate. Based on the dimorphism on the sequence of these two genes, an RNase H-dependent PCR protocol was developed. This protocol was demonstrated to be useful for virulent pathotype identification and may also be used to study the population dynamics of P. brassicae and the in planta interaction of different pathotypes.