Urgent Debates — Fisheries—Heron Report on Fish Dumping

I have received a letter from the Hon David Parker seeking to debate under Standing Order 389 the release of the independent review of Michael Heron QC into the Ministry for Primary Industries’ handling of the illegal dumping of fish. This is a matter of recent occurrence involving ministerial responsibility. Earlier this year I declined an application to debate the launch of this inquiry because at that time it did not warrant setting aside the business of the House. However, the inquiry has now concluded and the Government has accepted its findings.

Commercial fishing makes a significant contribution to the New Zealand economy. Its continued success requires effective management of the quota system and effective compliance activity. The Heron report goes to the very integrity of New Zealand’s fisheries management. This issue is of such significant importance to warrant setting aside the usual business of the House. I therefore call on the Hon David Parker to move that the House take note of a matter of urgent public business.

I move, That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance. On 16 May the University of British Columbia, in concert with the University of Auckland, released the report on the fish returns in New Zealand, saying that the only way that the New Zealand fish landing records could be correct is if somehow New Zealand fish, unlike those in the rest of the world, miraculously sort themselves into good fish and less valuable fish, and all the good fish line up and go into the net and all of the low-value species and all of the specimens that are below good commercial value and all of those that are too big somehow escape the net and they are never reported. That is, essentially, what the report said on 16 May. It said that the New Zealand returns are wrong and that New Zealand grossly—not just by some marginal amount, but grossly—under-records the number of fish that are caught in the quota management system.

What was the immediate response of the ministry? The ministry said: “No, there’s nothing to look at here.” I have got the release of 16 May 2016 quoting Dave Turner, the Director Fisheries Management in the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), saying that the ministry had concerns about the methodology and conclusions. Then, on the second page of the release, it says: “MPI takes any suggestion of illegal fishing activity, including dumping seriously. Where evidence is available MPI will investigate and prosecute.” Who was that? Dave Turner from the fisheries management team at MPI.

Within a couple of days of that, a leaked report came out of MPI—in fact, a series of leaked reports, the most serious of which is probably the Achilles report, Operation Achilles. What did that report show? That report showed gross breaches of New Zealand’s fishing laws. I have got the report here—there were two reports. The first report recommended that all permit holders who had been shown to be grossly under-reporting catch by chucking the bycatch away—it recommended that all permit holders and skippers be dealt with by way of prosecution. It said, at paragraph 1.4: “These recommendations are based on each of the parties satisfying the evidential and public interest tests as set out in the Solicitor-General’s Prosecution Guidelines.”

When that came out, what happened? Well, we had the same officials who had leaked in the defence of the ministry at the time say in respect of the Operation Achilles prosecution—and I am quoting from what was said on TV3 by the same Dave Turner: “We ended up with a legal opinion that we could not prosecute the fishermen for discarding fish because the cameras had been placed on the vessels for the purposes of a monitoring trial in regard to protected species.” Was that correct? Did the Heron report find that correct? No. In fact, the Heron report found that that was not correct.

Who else took to the media that day? Another senior person at the ministry, Deputy Director-General Scott Gallacher, and what did he say on that day, on TV3? He said: “Unfortunately, there was not enough evidence to prosecute.” Really? What did the Heron report say in respect of that? The Heron report said there was enough evidence to prosecute. Although one of the reports from Crown Law to the ministry of fisheries has not been released in full because privilege has not been waived, it is pretty clear from the report that the Crown Law advice was that there was enough evidence to prosecute, and yet there was no prosecution. And for 3 years the ministry not only sat on its hands but it supressed the reports, so much so that the lower-level officers within MPI, which were aghast at this protracted and illegal practice—which was so pervasive in the industry and not being policed—in the end leaked the document, which is why it has come into the open.

What did the Minister say back then? The Minister said—and this is Minister Guy on 18 May 2016, regarding the investigations into the illegal fish dumping—“There has been no cover-up here. These are internal, draft investigations, part of which has been unfortunately leaked.” So the Minister is getting in on the lag. “There’s nothing to see here, nothing that’s been done wrong by MPI. There is no evidence of illegal fish dumping. There’s been no cover-up.”—that is what the Minister was saying on 18 May.

It became, within a matter of days, incredible for the Government to maintain that stance and to continue saying “There’s nothing to look at here.”, and so it got Michael Heron QC to carry out a report. What does he say? Mr Heron has done a thorough report.

💬 Andrew Little: He’s a former Solicitor-General.

He is a former Solicitor-General—the lead prosecutor for the Crown in the land. He starts by recounting the University of Auckland study that it had done with the University of British Columbia, and, unlike the Minister and the ministry, he is not quick to wave it aside. He does not say “This is a junk inquiry.”, which is still the ministry’s position in respect of these things. He says that as a result of the news that followed that up and the leaking of the Achilles report, amongst others—there were two others. One was Operation Hippocamp. I do not think I will have time to go into all of them. But in respect of those, he says that it is wrong, the assertion that was being made—that there was not enough evidence to prosecute—and he says it is wrong, the assertion that there was some deal that somehow this could not be prosecuted.

I want to divert just slightly into another issue, which I will not deal with in as much detail, but the camera footage on this Operation Achilles also showed the bringing on board in nets of dolphins that had been caught in the nets and killed. They had drowned—the dolphins had drowned—and that is a terrible thing. What did the video footage show? It showed the fishermen letting the net out again and flushing out the dolphins. In fact, one was so entangled, they could get rid of the evidence of only one of them, and they actually had to bring the other dolphin on board. Again, was there anything public about that at the time? Did the ministry say: “We’ve got problems in respect of dolphin bycatch and we’ve found evidence of this.”? No—absolute silence. Why is this level of silence and incompetence at upper echelons within MPI allowed to continue for year after year after year?

I am going to go back to the issue of the bycatch. Mike Heron QC, in his report, goes through the law and says that, subject to limited exceptions, if it is a quota species, then you are meant to take all of the substandard ones as well—you are not meant to dump them—and if it is bycatch and it is not the quota species that you are targeting, you are meant to take that and you are meant to return that in your fish returns, and you have to pay for a right to fish that bycatch as well. He goes through some of the complexities of that, and he points out that it is not easy to police. But then he says: “Well, it can’t be too hard. At least one of the vessels that was being looked at did it all legally. If one of the vessels can do it all legally, why can’t the others?”.

If one of the vessels can do it legally, why is it that MPI does not think it should be requiring the others to, because the other thing that has become clear in these reports is that this is not just a one-instance breach. This problem has been there for years, and it appears—although I have not quite got to the bottom of this—that for the last 5 years the ministry has been talking about doing something about it, but it is just that in the last 5 years it has not. For 5 years, during the period when it has been developing these new electronic techniques for better monitoring, the widespread illegal practice that it has known about and that has been occurring has not been prosecuted. The most obvious example is the Operation Achilles example, but I suspect that that is just the tip of the iceberg. If the report from the University of Auckland and the University of British Columbia is right—

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Five minutes.

—thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker—then the amount of this illegal dumping is enormous. It is not just a small amount; it is enormous. Indeed, in Operation Achilles it found that fully half of the elephant fish being fished—it is quite a common species—was being thrown away. Half of it—not 10 percent, not 5 percent—

💬 Hon Member: Unbelievable.

—but half of it. It is unbelievable, as my colleague says. So, for this to go wrong, was it some isolated person making a mistake within the ministry? No, this went up very senior in the ministry, and there is correspondence between Scott Gallacher and David Turner, who were both very senior within the ministry—at least one of whom has moved on. We are told it is for unrelated reasons, but I think that deserves a little bit of scrutiny as well. These two people, effectively, had to agree between themselves before the prosecution would be dumped, and did they? Yes, they did.

There is another aspect that worries me in this. There is an internal memo that is dated 2 October 2014. It has got the names obscured, but you can work it out from the report that it is actually from Dave Turner to Scott Gallacher, the two people whom I have talked about, and I am sure of that when I reconstruct this. At the end, having discussed the pros and cons, he said: “If you do decide to warn rather than prosecute, I would suggest talking to [name blanked out].” I am curious as to whom that person is who is blanked out. “If you do decide to warn I would suggest talking to [name blanked out]. [This same person] has swung onside on a lot of issues lately, and walking him through this matter would give him a good understanding of the issues that I think he knows are real anyway, but would show how we are being considered in looking at the big picture. He has a lot of influence over fishers and could be an important driver of change.”

Who is that? I reckon that is likely to be an industry participant, and I think that is evidence of the fact that the ministry may have been captured by industry interests. Why else would it be saying: “Well, look, don’t prosecute. Just talk to this person on the side who’s been helpful in the past.”

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: Talley or Goodfellow? Which do you reckon—Talley or Goodfellow?

I do not know who it is, Mr Mallard. I do not know who it is. It could be someone completely different.

The other thing is, why did ministry officials choose not to prosecute? Well, again, Heron says, it was for the wrong reasons—partly because they were embarrassed that it would show up that previously they had not prosecuted. So this was not the first time—

💬 Andrew Little: It perpetuates it.

This just perpetuates it. They say: “Well, look, we’d be embarrassed because it would show up that previous times we’ve let people get away with it and not prosecuted them.”

This really calls into question the validity of what we think is the sustainability of our quota management system. These data errors are not minor; they are large. We do not know how pervasive they are. We have got independent research coming out of the universities saying that the data is complete rubbish—well, not complete rubbish, but the flaws are so gross that you would have to question it. There is no doubt in my mind that there is serious doubt as to whether our fishery is being fished sustainably and whether stocks are being driven down.

I know the ministry comes along and it says “Oh well, there’s plenty. There’s abundant fish. Therefore, there is no problem.”, but that is not so much these days based on science as on catch effort, and we do not know whether as a consequence of this misreporting it has got those calculations wrong. And, to be perfectly honest, I do not trust the ministry to do that independently by itself. The first time we have had an inquiry independently into any of this, we have found serious wrongdoing and we have had a cover-up for years, which that inquiry has shown to have taken place, despite the Minister’s queries.

I feel very misled by those senior officials who said there was no evidence and there was a deal that meant that they could not be prosecuted. Both of those assertions were made in the media to protect the position of the ministry. They were both made directly to the media, deliberately. One time, it was also backed up in writing at the time. I think we need to question those ministry officials, and I think we need to get to the bottom of this with some further independent scrutiny of what has been going on in MPI.

I welcome the Heron report. In fact, I welcome the debate this afternoon in the House on this very important issue. What is really important is transparency in this matter, and Queen’s Counsel Michael Heron was brought in to have a look at three reports: Achilles, Hippocamp, and Overdue. When the director-general commissioned this report—[Interruption]

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! I wonder whether the Minister would resume his seat. The member who is yelling out constantly, and who did so through question time, was given a warning. The urgent debate is for a purpose. The debate is to hold the Government to account. That is what the Hon David Parker has just called upon the Minister to do, and he is endeavouring to respond to that, and so he should. That is the purpose of an urgent debate. Let us hear it.

Thanks, Mr Deputy Speaker. I think that if Mr Cunliffe wants to make a contribution, he should get to his feet and do it properly.

The Director-General of the Ministry for Primary Industries, Martyn Dunne, established the terms of reference and got Queen’s Counsel Michael Heron in to have a look at these three reports, which I was alluding to before. In terms of Operation Overdue, he determined that the decision not to prosecute was understandable; in another one, Operation Hippocamp, he determined that the decision not to prosecute was indeed understandable then as well; and in regard to the one that is primarily the focus of this debate this afternoon, Operation Achilles, the decision not to prosecute was understandable given the circumstances, but the particular process leading to this action was flawed. As I have told the House this afternoon, I am very disappointed that that did occur.

There is no doubt that the decision not to prosecute in the case of Operation Achilles, when the option was available, is indeed highly regrettable. Given that the limitation period for prosecutions in this case has expired, it is also regrettable that we cannot now hold these fishers to account. However, it is important to note that Michael Heron QC made some other relevant findings specifically in regard to Operation Achilles. He said that it was a very complex matter and that it was approached professionally and in good faith by those involved. Overall, the Queen’s Counsel also went on to state that the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) prosecutes hundreds of cases per year, and he added that its processes are generally robust and its people experienced and professional.

There will be some very important lessons for MPI from this review, and some of those lessons are already in train by the director-general. He has already confirmed to the public that he will act swiftly to put these measures in place.

As Minister, I have two main focuses that have come out of this report: to ensure that MPI will take whatever internal measures are necessary to prevent an issue like this from occurring again, and to provide policy support to give MPI greater oversight over issues like discarding and dumping to help restore the public perception of the fishing industry. And, of course, MPI cannot do that; the fishers need to do that.

In regard to the first point, MPI’s response has already signalled that it has got a review of the compliance functions under way, it is reviewing and updating its prosecuting policy guidelines with input from Crown Law—I think that is going to be very important—and it is ensuring that formalised protocols and agreements are in place for responding to any potentially illegal activity that comes to light as a result of science or any research activity. Also, MPI is developing the standard operating procedures for engagement and communications between the compliance officers, the fisheries managers, and also the scientists around advising on non-fish bycatch events such as Hector’s dolphin captures.

In regard to the second point, we currently have the Future of Fisheries operational review under way. In this broad review, there will be an opportunity for public engagement and consultation on ways that we can improve our fisheries management. The review will look at all policy levers in fisheries management, such as deemed values to make sure we have the right mix of incentives and disincentives that will allow for a more sustainable use of our fishing resources going forward.

I have already signalled that the rights around quota ownership and bag limits will not be part of this review. I believe that the fundamental tension in the quota management system between sustainability and the economic value of our fishing resources is sound—in other words, fishers have a vested economic interest in ensuring that stocks are plentiful. This means that their quota actually has more value, and, in my view, this is a good thing. Also, there is no indication that quota ownership or bag limits are major issues around discarding or dumping. Therefore, we should not undermine the confidence in the rights that fishers have in quota ownership by putting these up for consideration. But what we will be spending a period of time looking at through the process is some of those incentives and disincentives.

As I mentioned before, the rest of the review will be fairly wide ranging. One of the major policy initiatives that we have already started on is to do with electronic monitoring. When I talk about electronic monitoring, I mean a vessel monitoring system (VMS), which is, basically, a GPS system, electronic reporting, and cameras on vessels.

💬 David Shearer: How long has that taken? Four years ago you announced that—4 years.

We have learnt from Achilles, and—if Mr Shearer was connected to fishers in the Hauraki, he would already be aware that cameras and this electronic reporting—[Interruption]

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

—are on these vessels for the inshore fishery in the Hauraki. So Mr Shearer should keep up to speed that that is already under way in the Hauraki as we speak, and it is actually proving to be very, very beneficial.

I have also said to my officials that we need to crack on and do the next stage with some urgency, because that will be a powerful deterrent to illegal discarding and it will significantly strengthen the enforceability capability. Also, this is going to be very important when you think about adding more value to our precious resource. You know with cameras and VMS exactly where the fish were caught, then you move into the next stage of Precision Seafood Harvesting, which has a fantastic new net design, where fish species are selected at sea for size. They come on board the vessel in a lot better quality, and then you can QR code them because of cameras, and add a premium to our export markets.

So GPS technology will mean we will know whether commercial fishers are fishing where they say they are and not where they are not meant to be. Also, we will know, when they are out of the line of sight, exactly what they are doing. Importantly, in terms of the compliance, we have doubled the number of observers on these vessels in the last 10 years, which has been hugely important for overall transparency.

Also, the industry needs to pull its socks up because at the heart of this issue are fishers. MPI does not go out fishing; the fishers do, and it is hugely important that the public perception here of fishers in the commercial sector improves. So my challenge to those in the commercial sector is that they need to pull their socks up and get on board with these changes, because if they do not, our international reputation will be tarnished. What we should be aware of is that MPI already carries out 300 prosecutions a year across all of the different fisheries, about 3,000 infringements, and 1,000 vessel inspections.

In conclusion, I welcome the Heron report. I will do whatever I can to support MPI to make the changes. When we go through the next stage of the public consultation document—which will, hopefully, be out later this year—I am sure there will be a huge amount of feedback on this particular issue. I think, fundamentally, it will mean I will have to come into the House and change the law, which I am hopeful that I will get broad support across the House for.

I support the director-general, Martyn Dunne, to be able to make whatever changes he deems necessary within MPI. I think it was very telling that the State Services Commissioner, Peter Hughes, came out last week and said that when issues were raised, Mr Dunne commissioned an independent review to look into the matter and to report back to him what happened. Mr Dunne has fully accepted the findings of the review and has a substantial programme of work under way, which I have already alluded to, and he has done everything that I would expect a public servant chief executive to do in a situation like this.

So I welcome the Heron review. I welcome the findings of it. I will do what I need to do to make sure the changes are made, and I want to ensure that the commercial sector steps up as well.

Tēnā koe, Mr Deputy Speaker. I think the Minister for Primary Industries had a bit of a Freudian slip there when he started talking about his review of fisheries management being about restoring public confidence in the fishing industry, and then he remembered that that actually is not his job. It is interesting that this review, which the Minister has previously talked about as being a “high-level review” and which the ministry’s own website says is only a “pulse check”, has now been expanded slightly. But I do not think we can have any confidence in this review actually being independent or robust, because of the very sorry tale that we have seen in the Heron report about the way the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) actually operates.

That report shows that senior managers in the ministry actually made the decision to block prosecution when there was good video footage of this major problem of fish dumping in the investigation report for Operation Achilles. That could have gone to court, it could have been robust, but what did MPI do? It blocked that prosecution. I think we are seeing a Minister in denial about the issue of fish dumping. His responses in question time today to my questions just showed that he does not appreciate that it is a major problem. What the Minister and the Government are saying, in relation to the Simmons report—which was a comprehensive investigation involving interviews with several hundred people in the industry and amongst fishers showing that fish dumping is a problem, that the commercial industry is responsible for a major gap in the information that is reported to the ministry and what is actually caught, and that the industry is actually catching more than double what it is reporting to the ministry.

Why is this whole issue of fish dumping important? It is a problem not just because it results in fish being killed and wasted—fish that could stay in the sea and be available to recreational and customary fishers—but because it goes to the heart of fisheries management, because the catch information is critical to understanding what fish stocks are and then setting the catch limits. So if there is inaccurate information, if fishers are catching more than double what they are reporting, it means that the very information that fisheries management is based on is wrong and, therefore, we will not be getting sustainable management. It leads to very poor decisions in estimating fish stocks and then setting those catch limits.

As Dr Glenn Simmons said in his comprehensive report: “Reliable catch data is a basic and essential requirement for the effective management of New Zealand’s fisheries. It is fundamental to the assessment of fisheries stocks and for setting of [total allowable catches]. … Without reliable data, scientists, practitioners, and policy advisors cannot properly interpret fisheries trends, the effects of technology, or accurately evaluate the social and economic impact of actual or projected fisheries management measures. This inevitably leads to flawed decisions …”. So we have had what the Director of Fisheries Management just last year called a systemic problem that has been at the heart of the quota management system since day one, in 1986, yet the ministry and the Minister have failed to get on top of it.

We have had a discards working party going for 4 years—that has failed to get on top of it—yet we have the ministry keeping this quiet. It would not have come into the public domain if the Operation Achilles report had not been leaked and we had not had the Minister and ministry being pressured into establishing the Heron review. At the same time, in October 2014, when the Director of Fisheries Management was highlighting this systemic problem of dumping, we had the briefing report to the incoming Minister. Yet that briefing report fails to even bring to the Minister’s attention the issue of fish dumping.

We have had a ministry that is progressively reducing the attention it pays to fisheries management. The ministry was created in 2011—the stand-alone Ministry of Fisheries was absorbed into that big superministry. In the latest strategic intentions document, fisheries does not even get a separate stand-alone section in this document about what the strategic intentions of the ministry and the Minister are.

Under this Government, the whole key fundamentals of fisheries management are being disguised. The Government is not being transparent, despite the Minister claiming that transparency is a priority of his. In the strategic intentions document, fisheries barely gets a mention. We have not had the ministry bringing the issue of dumping to public attention; it has only been brought to public attention by the three universities—the University of British Columbia, Oxford University, and the University of Auckland—in the Simmons report highlighting the scale of the problem.

The Minister and the ministry are in denial. A third of New Zealanders say that they love to go fishing. They love to drop a line off a wharf; they love to drop a line off a boat. People want to ensure that we have healthy oceans and that we have enough fish in the sea. Yet this Minister seems to think that there will always be more fish in the sea without taking any action to stamp out fish dumping and ensure that every fish that is caught is used and used well. What we have is extensive wastage, and yet the Ministry for Primary Industries and this Minister are doing nothing to stamp that out.

This review that he has set in place is only a high-level review. If the Minister is saying that video cameras and surveillance are the answer, why is he allowing Trident Systems, a company that is owned by 14 fishing companies, to run that video camera monitoring? The public cannot have confidence in a system that has the fox in charge of the henhouse. That is what is happening with Trident Systems being responsible for video monitoring. We have had an independent company, Archipelago Marine Research, that has been shut out. It was Archipelago Marine Research’s work in Operation Achilles that provided the evidence that MPI could have used to prosecute, but did not.

Everyone is interested in healthy oceans and healthy fisheries, but there has been a huge undermining of public confidence when we have the major agency that is supposed to regulate fisheries management and is supposed to be promoting sustainable fisheries failing to prosecute those who break the law by doing extensive fish dumping. That has been a pattern in this ministry. We saw it last year with swamp kauri, where, again, the ministry failed to enforce the law and require that only manufactured and finished timber products were exported. This Minister is allowing his ministry to get alongside industry and fail to be independent. He is allowing his ministry to be captured by the industry by the way it pays for a lot of the administrative functions, and not do its job in enforcing the law.

Sustainable management is supposed to be the purpose of the Fisheries Act, yet when we have massive fish dumping, which not only wastes fish but also ensures that the information that is used to set catch limits is inaccurate, the industry is getting away with it and all the Minister can say is that it should pull its socks up. When you have got an industry that stands to make major profits by dumping fish that are too small to get a good price in the market, they will continue to dump fish. It will not be stopped until the ministry takes action, and, under this Minister, it is failing to do that.

We need the public to be confident that we have an independent regulator, not one that is captured by industry. That is why we need a full commission of inquiry, an independent and robust review into the quota management system, not just the Minister’s pulse check, which is the equivalent of a slap over the hand with a wet bus ticket. People want healthy oceans, they want healthy fisheries, but under this Government, which is prepared to allow the industry to continue to dump fish in large quantities, we are not going to get that. We need a change of Government.

Here we are at the beginning of a process that should have been begun possibly years ago, certainly months ago. I think it is a bit ironic—a bit on the nose—to hear the Greens suddenly start to jump up and down and call for a commission of inquiry, when that is exactly what New Zealand First did 3½ months ago. In fact—going back through some notes over just this year alone—as long ago as April, New Zealand First was calling for serious measures to be taken to prevent illegal fish dumping. What we were calling for then was increased surveillance on fishing boats—not simply on the decks of a few boats in a certain areas—but on all commercial boats that were bringing in catch, and also in the holds of those boats. It is one thing recording what comes on board a boat; it is quite another to turn a blind eye, or not have any kind of surveillance possible at all down below decks where there is still sorting, there is still high grading, and there is still dumping going on.

Back in May we repeated that call for New Zealand to move to a “land all catch” policy, as is followed by some other jurisdictions, notably Iceland, which has turned around its entire fishing industry from a very low-value industry to a very high-value industry by using some very sensible methods. Back in June, as I said, we called for a commission of inquiry because the quota management system (QMS) is now 30 years old. When it was first brought in, it was regarded as world leading, and back then it quite possibly was. But the world has changed. We have moved on. We have developed. We have evolved certain fishing practices—certainly in the more civilised parts of the world, where we like to count ourselves. The Minister does deserve some credit for the Fisheries (Foreign Charter Vessels and Other Matters) Amendment Act, which went through a couple of years ago, in which we moved to reflag foreign charter vessels from overseas flags to the New Zealand flag so that we could impose upon the owners of those boats decent wages, decent living conditions, and subject to New Zealand labour laws crews who were living in rat-like conditions and were, effectively, operating as slave labour. So they do deserve credit for that, but there is a great deal more that they could have done and should have done, and should really have started doing months ago when it was first suggested.

The short answer is that the QMS—although it was meant to be a measure which addressed the issue of too many boats chasing too few fish and overfishing being rampant—is actually now a cause of some of the problems that this industry faces, because of the way it has evolved over the last 30 years. High-grading—where fishers discard lesser-quality fish in order to bring in as much better-quality fish as they can within their quota allocation—happens because of the deemed-value provisions of the QMS. Any catch that is brought in over quota is deemed to be of a given value, which value fishers must pay to the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI). It is most frequently more than what the fish can be sold for. So if a fisher brings in an extra tonne of snapper or an extra tonne of any variety that is over and above the quota that they hold, and they cannot find somebody else who holds additional quota that they are willing to lease or sell them, they need to pay that value to MPI. It is meant to discourage overfishing, but, in fact, it is the cause of it. Fishers know that landing catch outside of their limits is going to cost them, so they dump it instead.

The problem with that is the waste that it causes, because—and the Minister for Primary Industries mentioned the Precision Seafood Harvesting system, which is, effectively, a high-tech form of trawl net. I acknowledge that it is a better system than that which has been used in the past, but it has not had wide uptake yet. It is very much in a pioneering state, and it will take a while and a lot of investment before the industry begins to use that kind of technology as a standard. In the meantime, we still have people using traditional, old methods to bring in enormous catches of fish. When you pull a fish out of the water in a net, it is dead anyway. If you have careful handling of fish by people who know what they are doing, they can return undamaged fish to the sea in such a state that they remain alive—but the practical upshot of commercial fishing is that there is neither time nor the methods available in order for that to happen, so it just does not.

There is an allowance within the total allowable commercial catch for what is called “discard”. It is a given quantity of fish that is deemed acceptable for the industry to dump overboard, for various reasons. The problem is exacerbated by the market side of the fishing industry, where fish buyers specify what they want to fishers and to quota holders, in terms of size and species, and either they will not take or they will pay very little for anything that falls outside those parameters.

Our solution is to adopt the Icelandic system of “land all catch”, where all fish that are caught must be landed and must be processed, whether they are undersized or over quota or non-target species or whatever. Any fish that the fisher does not have the appropriate licence or quota for, in the Icelandic system, is then sold at auction, and the proceeds from those auctions go back into the industry. They go back into fisheries management, they go back into fisheries research, and they go back into fisheries policing. This incentivises fishers to target their desired quota species more accurately—the penalty for missing that target being that they do not make as much money as they could, rather than actually losing it by having to pay MPI a deemed value for fish that are not worth what they are being charged.

It also means that under that system the fish buyers do not get to dictate the market. One of the things about a consumer economy is that retailers, wholesalers, want to try to sell a particular product to a given target market that they believe has a desire for it. When we are dealing with a wild resource, sometimes that is just simply not sustainable. With a “land all catch” policy, the power to distort the state of the fishery itself is taken away from fish buyers. It results in a market that is much more honest, that is much more traditional, and that is much more sustainable.

The issue that we have with the results of the investigation released this week is that although the ministry was using its cameras to look for unintended dolphin bycatch as a result of incorrect fishing practices, what it also discovered was illegal dumping, which it chose not to prosecute on the grounds that this would discourage future cooperation from fishers. As we have heard from the Minister for Primary Industries, that may have been able to be partially justified in one case, but it certainly was not at all justified in the other. We are not yet confident that heads have rolled in a sufficient number and in the right places. In actual fact, it is something I think the Minister could do with taking a good, hard look at himself over.

We say that New Zealand as a society allows commercial fishers quota access to the fishery, which is a common property—it belongs to all of us—at no cost but within rules and guidelines, and that fishers have to remain within those rules and guidelines or get out of the fishery. We have created quota access to the fishery as a tradeable property right and gifted it to the industry. It might be that that was a mistake, but that was 30 years ago and that was the decision that was taken then. The solution may be to renationalise the fishery and move to a licensing system, as is operated in some other parts of the world, or it may not. The potential fish-hook in that—no pun intended—is that commercial fishers do have a right to make an honest living, and they do need some surety of access to the fishery in order to justify their continued investment and presence in it. So any licensing system that we brought in would have to be more than simply a lottery. These are the sorts of questions that need to be asked and answered by a commission of inquiry, which is why we keep calling for one.

It is all well and good for the Minister to say he is having another internal review. The time for internal reviews is over. We need a full commission of inquiry into the totality of fisheries management in New Zealand, recreational and commercial, starting at the top and working all the way through. Thirty years on from the beginning of the QMS it is time for this to be completely reinvestigated, and I am glad that we have got this opportunity to debate it this afternoon. I am disappointed that we had the likes of the Greens jumping on the bandwagon. It is good that people are backing our call for a commission of inquiry, but trying to claim credit for it themselves is a bit on the nose. If we do not move to a more sustainable system for managing our fishery, we will have no fishery left in very short order. Thank you very much.

Mr Deputy Speaker—[Interruption] The place is falling apart.

💬 Iain Lees-Galloway: That member’s falling apart.

Ha, ha! The Government welcomes the Heron report into the New Zealand fishing industry. As so often happens in these cases, it is inevitable that these reports lead to a great improvement in practice. I think that without reports and without investigations into the methods that we use as a country, for whatever it might be—whether it is fishing, farming, animal welfare, or whatever—it is very difficult to improve practices, so I am confident that this report will lead to the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) improving its practices significantly.

Just a little bit of background to the report: there were three fisheries investigations put out into the public arena some time earlier in the year. This is the third of them. In the first two, MPI made decisions not to prosecute commercial fishermen who were allegedly undertaking illegal activity. The reports found in those two instances that MPI was justified in not taking prosecution. In the third instance—this one—MPI’s decision not to prosecute has been found to be somewhat flawed. We heard from the Minister for Primary Industries, and he assured us that MPI will move swiftly to improve and rectify its processes. We also expect that fishers and fishing companies will improve their practices and obey the law where appropriate. The industry has proven in the past that it is capable of changing its methods very quickly, and I am sure this will be no exception.

I will go into a couple of instances where those changes have happened very quickly. A couple or 3 years ago, this Parliament debated the foreign charter vessels legislation, which, effectively, banned the use of foreign charter vessels in New Zealand waters. It was very hotly debated at the time by the fishing industry. There was significant concern that some entities in New Zealand would not be able to use their quota and they would not have access to the fishing vessels and practices they needed in order to catch the number of fish that they were entitled to catch. That has proved to be flawed, as the foreign charter vessel fishing legislation was introduced very quickly into New Zealand and picked up very quickly by the companies and the entities that owned quota or fishing vessels. It is a little bit like a farmer getting rid of his “Fergie” TEA—it significantly improved the equipment available to the fishing industry. So, as this sort of process happens, it enables the fishing industry to pick up new technology and move very quickly.

The other thing that has happened in the fishing industry that I think has highlighted a very successful activity—and, interestingly, has come about as a result of the Primary Growth Partnership between the fishing industry, Aotearoa Fisheries, Sanford, and Sealord—is the Precision Seafood Harvesting system, which has enabled the fishing industry to make great progress in the way it catches its fish and the way fish are preserved and not damaged as they go through the process. So this sort of technology will come along, and will continue to come along, and will improve our opportunities as a country to lead the world in fishing practice, with our monitoring systems and the way our fishing industry preserves fish for its long-term future.

If fishermen do not have the appropriate quota for the species that they catch, they pay a penalty for what is known as a “deemed value”. The Ministry for Primary Industries sets these penalties. If you think about the way the deemed value is set, it is hugely important that the balance is right in this respect, as it encourages those fishing companies that are catching fish that they do not have quota for to dispose of those fish—return them to the sea. If that balance is not correct, it is going to create a practice that is not necessarily in our best interests. It is very important that that process is managed in an appropriate manner, and MPI has a challenge with how it does that. I think also, when you come to dealing with things like deemed value and a catch that you cannot manage, there is clearly room for significant improvement in the types of processes and the methods we use to catch those fish. If we can either retain them and use them or return them to the sea intact, we will be a whole lot better off. So there is some progress that I think will be made in that area. It is important that we do—and it is important that MPI moves very quickly to encourage the fishing industry to, I guess, pick up new technology—find new ways of managing the process and get on with their business of fishing in a satisfactory manner.

The Government, as I said earlier, welcomes the report. There are opportunities for us to improve very quickly what is going on. The ministry will move very quickly, and it has proved that in many other areas in the last few years—when you think about MPI, it has some significant challenges. It manages our biosecurity, and it manages almost everything related to our farming systems, which, of course, produce most of New Zealand’s income. I think it has been impressive in the way it has picked up a lot of the challenges it has had around animal welfare and biosecurity particularly. I am confident MPI has the ability and the strength to move very quickly in this area as well. I do not think there is any doubt we will see a significant improvement in processes around this industry and around these practices as we move forward.

The Government will respond to this report very quickly. There are a number of actions that MPI will undertake: obviously, a review of the compliance functions, with an aim to providing clearer national leadership and accountability for fisheries compliance; and, secondly, reviewing and updating MPI prosecution policy and guidelines, with input from Crown Law. I think it is quite apparent that towards the end of this year the Minister will be coming back to this House with legislation to capture some of the actions that MPI deems necessary to rectify some of the issues that have been identified in this and the two previous reports produced this year.

I will not take any more time of the House on this issue, but I am confident that the Government, as a result of this report and as a result of this debate today, will move very quickly in this area. I think, like many other challenges that we face as a country, we will deal with this very quickly. Thank you.

I have to say that this issue really brasses me off. To go online, download the video, and see a half-hour-long video of fishermen hauling in fish and throwing hundreds, if not thousands, of fish over the side into the water, dead, just absolutely makes my blood boil.

You see, I am a keen recreational fisherman. It is an intergenerational attribute. My grandfather was a keen fisherman, as is my mother. My father-in-law, on my wife’s, side was a keen fisherman. My brothers and brothers-in-law are all keen fishermen, as I am, and now even my son is a keen fisherman. But here is the thing: we play by the rules. When we go fishing up North—I have got a boat, and we go out fishing on the boat. I have got a net. We can go out to Ninety Mile Beach and we can net for mullet. We have got flounder spears. We go out at night with the lights and spear flounder. We have got a longline. I have got a kite—you set it out, you put on your 25 hooks, and let it blow out to sea. When it comes back in, hopefully you have got a catch for the day. My son and I go right up to the end of Ninety Mile Beach, and we camp overnight and we fish together. It is something that we love to do.

So it just makes my blood boil that people like myself and all the other thousands of recreational fishermen and fisherwomen who play by the rules will get penalised and, potentially, prosecuted if we get a 29-centimetre snapper instead of a 30-centimetre snapper. If we get eight snapper instead of seven snapper, we have the potential of having the law thrown at us, and most probably will. We just need to watch that documentary Coastwatch, where the honorary fisheries officers are going around the coastline and pulling up people for having 200 pipis in their bucket instead of 150 pipis in their bucket. All us little people will get the book thrown at us, but we can go online and we can see commercial fishermen throwing thousands and thousands and thousands of fish—tonnes of fish—overboard. And what happens to them? Absolutely nothing. I thought this Government was the one that was tough on crime. Well, let me tell you, it is a crime to throw fish overboard. What happens to the fishermen? Nothing. Why is that? Because those commercial fishermen are the mates of this Government.

Just imagine how many people all that fish could feed. I was brought up to not waste a single skerrick of fish. You eat the heads, you eat the eyeballs, and you save the backbones and you fry them up the next day. I have not gone so far, I have to admit, as to do what my uncle does. When he catches a snapper he just cuts it open, takes the liver out, and eats it raw, on the spot. I have not actually graduated to that level yet. But the fact of the matter is that if you could make the scales palatable, we would probably be eating those as well. We do not waste anything, and yet we look at the amount of wastage that we are seeing in these videos and see that these people have been able to do it. Six companies were investigated, and what happened to them? Five of them were seen to be throwing fish overboard, and nothing whatsoever happened to them.

What evidence do we need that something is wrong? We just need to look at the video footage, the video evidence, and make a decision based on that. But, instead, we have had a report that has come out and says: “The Ministry for Primary Industries accepts it made flawed decisions in deciding not to prosecute fishing boat skippers”. I say it was not flawed; I say it was downright dumb, absolutely stupid. What happens if somebody gets away with doing this sort of thing and they are not held to account? It is just an incentive to do it again. The Minister stood here and said that he has told the industry to pull up its socks. That is an intimidating threat, is it not? I was a school principal and a schoolteacher for 20 years. When I told kids to pull up their socks, that was an invitation to them to just keep their socks down. That is what the fishing industry is doing.

It is very interesting to see that Martyn Dunne, Director-General of the Ministry for Primary Industries, dumped the report on a Friday and that very same day said that it was time to move on. Well, time for who to move on? Just sweep it under the carpet and pretend that this did not happen? That is wrong. These people need to be held to account. They need to know that it is unacceptable to just dump fish overboard.

Actually, I remember the day when three mates and I jumped in our boat. We went fishing out on the East Coast, in Doubtless Bay, from Mangonui. We got out a couple of kilometres, threw the anchor in, and were sitting there, enjoying the sun, enjoying the fishing, with our four lines over the side. Then my mate goes: “Oh, there’s a dead fish.” We looked over. “Oh, so there is. There’s a little snapper, belly up, just drifting past us.” Then we go: “Oh, there’s another one, there’s another one.” We looked around, and drifting past us was probably a couple of acres of dead snapper, just drifting by, floating past us. We thought: “Hmm, OK.” It was actually the time when all those algal blooms were going on, and we thought that maybe these fish had died because of the bloom. But it was interesting that there were only small snapper. No other species were floating by us.

I wonder, now, whether some fishing boat fishing off the East Coast of the North Island, off Northland, had realised it had all these, basically, goldfish, and so it just dumped them and let them float, hoping that they might float out to sea. Unfortunately, the wind and the tides worked against the fish and they floated back towards land, where we saw them. Thousands and thousands of fish were being wasted. We were sitting there not getting a bite—not a skerrick of a bite—and we wondered why. It was because some fishing vessel had probably been past and whipped up all the fish, and there was nothing left for the recreational fishers.

While I am on it, here is an issue that absolutely drives us mad up North, particularly around the time of the Snapper Classic in March up on Ninety Mile Beach, when a thousand recreational fishermen come by. You can always guarantee that a week to the day before that fishing competition happens, there will be these commercial fishermen coming in at night. People on the beach can actually hear the crews talking while they go past and dredge up all the fish. Basically, if you actually catch a snapper in the Snapper Classic in March you are pretty lucky, because the commercial fishermen have been coming in to within a kilometre of the coastline catching up all the fish before the recreational fishermen have an opportunity to have a crack at it.

It is the recreational fishermen and fisherwomen who are actually having to pay for the fact that commercial fishermen are able to go out, rape and pillage the resource, and dump the fish they do not want overboard. We are threatened. I read something within just the last couple of weeks where there is talk that perhaps we do have to drop the recreational fishing catch down again. In 1986 it was 30 fish—well, 30 is a bit excessive. You do not need 30 fish to feed your family. It is now seven fish, up North, and they are talking about maybe having to look at a catch of two. My son and his three friends went out, as you do up North, a couple of weekends ago at night with the longline. Four 17-year-old teenagers put out the torpedo—25 hooks. They pulled it in and they had 12 fish. That is three per person. What you do up North, of course, is you take the fish home and what you do not eat you give to the neighbours, aunties and uncles, or friends, so it never ever goes to waste. What would have happened if the catch was reduced to two is those four teenagers would have actually broken the law by catching 12 fish, because if the catch had been reduced to two—as has been contemplated in the article I read—they would have overcaught by four fish.

Our way of life up North and our way of life around the country—your right to go out and catch a feed for your family—is jeopardised, not because we are overfishing as recreational fishers but because these commercial guys are able to go out, fill up their nets, chuck away what they do not want, and keep the other ones. I saw on that video that the commercial fishermen were catching dogfish. Dogfish is absolutely beautiful to eat. My son and I, when we have been up the beach, have pulled in a dogfish, filleted it on the spot, cooked it for breakfast in butter—it is absolutely beautiful. I saw these dogfish just being chucked over the side. What an absolute waste. The commercial fishermen are the people who need to be held to account. They should have been prosecuted. Thank you.

I am pleased to be able to take a call in this urgent debate, because I have the privilege of representing an electorate where fishing and what goes on on the water and in the water around my electorate of the beautiful Coromandel is terribly important to tens of thousands of people who use that area for recreational fishing, but it is also important for those people who earn their living commercially fishing in the waters around my electorate.

I listened very carefully this afternoon to the opening contribution by the Minister, the Hon Nathan Guy, when he said that he welcomed this report and that there were some valuable lessons for the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) in it. He said that he accepted the Heron report and that there is no doubt that the decision not to prosecute in the case of Operation Achilles when that was an option is indeed regrettable. Absolutely, I endorse the Minister’s comments made earlier this afternoon.

I know that MPI places an enormous importance on sustainability, and that is important not only for us who are fishing today but for those of us who have children and grandchildren who want to fish in years to come. MPI has, I think, learnt a valuable lesson from Operation Achilles, and one of the important learnings from that regrettable non-action is that there needs to be better, more obvious use of the cameras in enforcement, and of the material and the footage that can be gained from those. These are matters that are very important to me as a local member of Parliament.

I want to make the point to the House that it is my understanding that even though that trial of cameras is going on in the Snapper 1 region in my electorate, that footage—the footage that is gained from those cameras—can now be used in cases in court as legal evidence, and that is a very big step forward. There are, I am told, 15 vessels commercially fishing in the Snapper 1 area, and so those cameras are terribly important in terms of the compliance and the future compliance of those operators in that area.

One of the important things about the Snapper 1 region that encompasses my electorate is that it is the mix of the commercial fishing, the recreational fishing, and also the customary fishing that is important. The Minister has set up a multi-sector working group for Snapper 1 made up of those three interested stakeholders—the recreational, the customary, and the commercial fishers—and, for the first time, such a multi-sector working group is looking at a long-term plan to increase the total fishing biomass in the area. The plan is to increase the biomass by 40 percent by 2040, and by 30 percent by 2025. That, ultimately, means that there are going to be more fish in the Snapper 1 region, and that is good for those people who come from near and far to fish the waters around the Coromandel, but also for those people who live in and around the Coromandel who fish there now.

I want to pick up on a point that was made by Mr Prosser in his contribution to this debate, and that is the undoubted benefit that can come from the new technologies that are going to be available to commercial fishers. The precision fishing technique clearly has advantages for the sector, and that will mean that the fish stock that is caught will be in better condition, alive when it is hauled aboard, and will possibly gain a better price, a higher price, in markets both domestically and internationally. But more importantly, it means that the bycatch can actually be sorted and returned to the sea in a state that means it can continue to thrive and prosper.

These are important technological advances. This is an important debate. The Minister is on the money; he was right on the mark accepting the report. There are valuable lessons here for MPI to learn, and we all acknowledge that.

There is an old saying that goes “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”, and something stinks here. People are joining the dots and they are thinking about Skycity, they are thinking about the Saudi sheep deal, and now they know something really stinks with the illegal dumping of fish.

The question I want to ask in my brief contribution is: how long did the Minister sit on this information? We know it was for years, based on some of the information that was gathered; but he just sat there. It had the potential to erode the reputation of our fishing industry, and the Minister did nothing—nothing at all. It was an issue that had the potential to erode the confidence in our sustainable quota management system (QMS), and he did nothing. Why was that?

There was information out in the public domain. The Ministry of Fisheries had raised it with the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), but MPI and the Minister did not act. Why did they wait until 2016, when ex-Solicitor-General Heron produced a report that said that the decision in 2012 not to prosecute those ships that dumped fish was flawed? Why did he wait so long? That is the question that everybody will be asking. You can rationalise everything after the event as much as you want, but people right now are looking at this issue and saying: “Something stinks. Why didn’t he act when he had the information, and do what he should have done when he could have?”. It is as simple as that, because if we do not have accurate reporting of fishing and what is taken, and if there is not reporting of what gets dumped, then how can you have any credibility in your QMS?

New Zealand was seen to be a forerunner of moving into the sustainable fisheries space when it introduced the QMS. But it did rely on good reporting and accurate information, and here we have compelling evidence to do more. The fact that in the bycatch, in the large number of dumpings that have occurred, a Hector’s dolphin was a part of that bycatch—it is all in the report. Still, the Government just sat and did nothing. We want to promote New Zealand as a country that wants to protect the marine ecosystem, yet nothing was done when it could have been.

The other issue, which I think is of more concern to laypeople who are trying to peel their way through this particular issue, is how it is, at a time when we are trying to promote New Zealand as a sustainable country—one that has a high-quality export product in our meat and in our fish—that we are not doing more to try to regulate the system. That is a real worry because, as my colleague David Parker has identified, no one was really policing illegal practices, yet they knew something was happening in this space. So, more needs to be done.

We need to get on top of illegal fish dumping and ensure that we can breathe confidence back into the QMS and better manage fisheries stocks. But I think this will be a matter of trying to do things on the backwash—trying to make good of a very bad situation. The Minister had the opportunity to act, he had information—compelling evidence that was captured by video tape—yet he chose to sit and do nothing. That is just not good enough. The fisheries quota is worth approximately $3.5 billion to our economy, so to not do anything at a time when necessary decisions need to be made, I think puts everything at risk.

But most of all—and this is a comment raised by my colleague Kelvin Davis—it erodes the confidence in those fishers who fish legally, who are doing things by the book, who want confidence in our QMS, and who want to ensure that there is greater regulation within the sector. That is what doing nothing has meant to those who do it by the book, who do it the right way—it is that everybody now comes under a cloud of doubt.

There has been some comment about fishers in Hauraki. Can I say that, yes, they are doing very well there. They are concerned, however, about the way in which the marine protected areas legislation is going to be brought into effect, about not basing decisions on good evidence and practice in the Hauraki, and the impact it will have on those 15 commercial fishers. I have met with them. They are not entirely happy with the Government’s moves in this area.

There is more to do. Let us hope that the Minister does not sit for a long period of time and that he comes up with some practical solutions to this very difficult situation. As for illegal dumping of fish, the Minister sat for far too long before he did anything.

Well, like the Minister, I welcome the Heron report. I think it is a good report, and although we might not like some of the things that have come out, or the reason for the report, that is precisely what good governance is about—it is about ensuring that we get to the bottom of these things. In the report, Mike Heron found that the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) decision not to prosecute in two of the three cases was the correct decision. In the third case, Operation Achilles, both the decision and the methodology used—or the process leading up to that decision—were flawed. But the report also acknowledges that it is a very complex situation, and there was quite a bit of confusion around the legal admissibility of the camera footage.

As someone who was involved in the formation of a sustainable wine growing programme, sustainability is something very dear to my heart. It is something I care deeply about, and I think I would like to see more of those processes across other industries than just the wine industry. So seeing this situation and how it is played out, it is very disappointing. But I think we have heard some very long bows being drawn in this debate this afternoon. The assertion that recreational fisheries have been impacted and that all of the blame is on commercial fishing is naive. I think doing that does not admit that everybody has an impact on the environment in some way or other, and you have got to own your part of it. I think it was very disappointing to hear that, and we have also heard some other strange things come out as well.

I want to focus on sustainable management in our fisheries. There are three aspects to that: customary, recreational, and commercial fishing. I would like to point out four key points. The Minister has been involved with and has moved very quickly in a multi-sector group, the Blue Cod Management Group, managing a fishery that has a commercial aspect to it as well as a recreational aspect in the Marlborough Sounds. That group worked solidly together and got right to the bottom of the issue—the very nub of the issue—going right down to what impacts on the breeding of fish, as well as the impacts of fishing itself. That management group worked for quite some time. The Minister recognised, I think, the wisdom of getting everyone together to work on these issues. The work of that group has led to a decision to close the fishery, and then to get rid of the slot rule, to lower the bag limit, and get all of the rules around that fishery and how it is being managed done in a right and proper way. And it has got community buy-in. People who told me they did not like the rules, and were breaking the rules because they thought the rules were an ass, are now actually right in behind it and they own that fishery. I think that is really a major step forward and I take my hat off to the Minister.

Also, we have seen likewise in the scallop fishery. The scallop fishery in the Marlborough Sounds is now closed—for both the recreational and commercial fishers. The damage from the dredging in the Marlborough Sounds is a subject of fierce debate. As a former farmer, as well, I know that you cannot keep ploughing the ground over and over and not have an impact. Dredging on the bottom of the seabed is absolutely having an impact. In effect, you are seeing the fines coming to the top. The mud is so fine that it is going through—when the scallops and other shellfish filter the sea water through their systems those fines block them up, and that is believed to be one of the main issues causing a problem. But there is also a theory that it is impacting wider on the cod fishery. There is no evidence of that at this stage, but it is a theory. So all of the sustainable management has been looking at that, and commercial and recreational fishing is completely banned in the Marlborough Sounds as a result of that group—yet again, another sustainable step put forward by the Minster.

The third point I want to make is about pāua. I have had commercial pāua fishermen in my office really lobbying me to lobby the Minister to lower the commercial pāua catch in the Pāua 7 fishery because they are very concerned about the sustainability of that fishery. The Minister announced just a little while ago that in Pāua 7 the catch is, in fact, being reduced by 50 per cent to manage that fishery sustainably. I applaud the Minister for taking that bold step. There are people who are not happy with that, but they are putting their own interests ahead of the fishery. If we do not manage the fisheries, there will not be a fishery. That is pretty simple, really.

The fourth point I would like to make—which has already been touched on by my colleague Ian McKelvie—is about precision harvesting technology, which was a result of a Primary Growth Partnership (PGP) project. That will go a long way to dealing with undersize fish being caught, because the fish self-select through the device in the net, so they do not end up in the net. Fish are brought on board alive, which opens up a market for live fish going overseas that as yet has been unable to be accessed, which is worth a lot of money for New Zealanders. I think it is a marvellous piece of technology. I take my hat off to the Minister, actually, again, because the PGP project is exactly the type of thing and result that we would hope would come from this sort of technology—that it goes right through to the market, reaching further up the value chain, which is exactly where we want to be.

I think some of the other issues that we need to remember are that GPS and camera technology, which are now being put on those boats, is going to go a long way to managing these issues and ensuring these things will not occur in the long run. I come back to the issue and all of the shroud-waving that has been going on across the other side. The quota management system—if it is really such a problem and is as big a problem as everyone is saying, then perhaps we have underestimated the size of the fishery. It would be in severe trouble if what has been mentioned today was actually really the problem. The Minister will move, I am sure, very quickly and adopt the recommendations from the Heron report. I think the Minister did what one would expect from anyone in that position—to wait until they got right and proper advice and then to move on it, and I think that is absolutely the right thing to do.

So I would like to finish just by circling back and reinforcing the point with actions such as the Blue Cod Management Group in the Marlborough Sounds and how that fishery is being managed, with the management of the scallop fishery in the Marlborough Sounds and how that is now a closed fishery, and we also have Pāua 7, which is now being cut by 50 percent to manage that fishery. We see precision harvesting technology that is making a large difference and will go a long way to dealing with these issues in the future. The technology, such as GPS and camera technology on fishing boats in the future, I think will go a long way to ensuring these sorts of issues do not happen again. It is not great when we are in these situations, but it is not the situation you are in, it is how you manage it, and I would put the point very strongly that it is being very well managed. Thank you.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.