Has the minister been overseas too long? His principal job is Minister of Trade and, as a former trade negotiator, he cannot perhaps be as familiar with the goals and achievements of the conservation movement in this country of the past 40 or more years as he should be.
Mr Groser is a member of a Government which has declared that the legislative restraints on "development" need to be eased somewhat, that those irritating objectors and environmental conservationists are preventing the nation's progress. Surely, the minister is not trying to have his cake and eat it, too?
Mr Groser did have a good message to sell - that, after all, is the chief task of ministers - and it was couched in the form of a plea: he wanted to "highlight the very considerable economic stake New Zealand has in conservation".
The vital word in this phrase is "economic", for, as he said, " . . . the more the general community understands the economic stake it has in conservation, the more solid the future is likely to be". In short, he believes insufficient attention is being paid to the part conservation can play in the economy. He is correct, but it all rather comes down to who is and has been paying insufficient attention.
Is it, for example, the dairy sector of our agriculture industry? After all, if this country's export produce is to continue to hold a trade advantage based on the "clean, green" brand - what Mr Groser calls our "point of difference . . . based around world-class environmental standards" - then more recognition needs to be made by this productive sector that the brand requires constant, recognisable improvement and maintenance.
Or, in the words of the Prime Minister to farmers the other day, they need to meet the environmental challenges that will shape the future of their industry. But indifferent farmers are by no means only those who need to give more acknowledgement of conservation values if the national brand is to be sustained.
Industry generally has, at best, a mixed record and most of it is bad. To which can easily be added local government for its long-standing lackadaisical attitude towards sewage disposal and ensuring the quality of fresh water, and successive national governments through the encouragement given to "development" projects that have chipped away at finite resources and at what has become popularly known as the "conservation estate".
As to the latter, it has been argued here and elsewhere that the very department charged with protecting the estate is deeply compromised by its current policy of embracing, where at all possible, those industries and individuals who wish to modify it, such as by damming rivers, building wind farms, using natural resources or even the construction in sensitive estuaries of marinas for boys' toys.
In terms of protecting the New Zealand "brand", a department which is responsible for managing a third of the land, all the seabed and foreshore, all protected marine areas and all marine mammals, native animals, birds and freshwater fish and pest animals, has greater power within its capability, should it wish to use it, than any other institution save Parliament itself.
And in this regard, Mr Groser's "second leg" of the economy double - tourism - assumes a significance at least as important as the first, agriculture, with which it is so often in conflict.
Without the appropriate protections for the environment - that is to say, the greatly modified environment as it stands now - to underpin the tourism basis of the economy, it is manifest that the New Zealand "brand" would cease to have any value whatsoever.
Indeed, traditional agriculture itself is already also seriously threatened by the errors of the past and present, especially in degraded water quality and in pasture management - both "conservation" issues. Surely, few would disagree with Mr Groser's comment that compliance should be seen as an integral part of both individual and national business success.
Yet from whom does the community hear, usually first, when the environment is shown to be threatened, its protection absent or its proper management inadequate? Not from government, not from local government, and certainly not from industry or agriculture.
Rather too often, as our history during the past 40 years has amply demonstrated, it hears first from the great many New Zealanders who do appreciate "that conservation is not only in our hearts and minds, but is also the lungs of our economy".
Conservationists, as the record will show, have never been opposed to supporting the natural environment as being the basis of growth in the national economy; quite the reverse, in fact.
The point at issue has always been managing the sustainability of finite resources, a cause that has been advanced since the Save Manapouri campaign, but - and here we agree with Mr Groser - it is a cause that needs to be everyone's priority.
