Conservation (Indigenous Freshwater Fish) Amendment Bill

Kia orana, Madam Speaker. I move, That the Conservation (Indigenous Freshwater Fish) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

Our indigenous freshwater fish are special and they’re in trouble, with over 72 percent of our native species threatened with extinction. We know that freshwater fish are important for iwi and for recreational fishers and as part of the Kiwi culture, so this Government wants to ensure that our fisheries management for our native fish improves so that people can go fishing now and in the future without affecting fish populations.

So to ensure that these threatened native fish species like the kōaro and the giant kōkopu are improved in number, there are some key things that we need to do. One of those is getting rid of the issue of fish passage barriers and ensuring that when culverts, bridges, and the like are constructed, they don’t create barriers for our migratory fish to move upstream and downstream to go out to sea. It’s also involved with ensuring that we protect our spawning sites and that the freshwater habitat for adult fish is also protected. If there’s nowhere for fish to spawn safely, the populations won’t increase.

This Government is committed to improving freshwater management overall. Minister Parker is leading a whole programme of reform work around the Resource Management Act and the Essential Freshwater programme. But what we’re doing here with this bill is ensuring that there is better provision for our indigenous freshwater fish. It’s a bill which fixes some of the issues that I inherited in the Conservation Act, and the very outdated freshwater fish regulations, and it will provide much better tools for managing indigenous fish.

For quite a small, technical bill, it attracted quite a remarkable degree of public attention, and I think that reflects the importance of whitebaiting for many New Zealanders and the importance of native fish. But there were some specific aspects of the bill that some in the trout fishing community thought would affect their fishing activity. So I’d really like to thank the Environment Committee for their excellent work that they did to analyse submissions, hear those concerns, and then suggest improvements to the wording of the bill to resolve some of the drafting issues, and what they have provided in the reported-back bill is now a very tidy and valuable piece of law reform.

A lot of the submissions were from concerned whitebaiters, and despite the comments by members of the Opposition, this bill does not change the general controls on whitebaiting or prevent the fishing of whitebait. There are no intentions of this Government to have a blanket ban on whitebaiting, as one member of the Opposition has misinformed the public. What I have done as a Minister is initiate a review of the management of whitebaiting, and many submissions, both on this bill and the contributions to the Department of Conservation’s issues paper, sought changes to improve the management of the whitebait fishery.

There will be further work done in this space and further work in terms of public consultation before there are any changes to regulations, and there will, obviously, be further consultation with iwi. But that was the overwhelming thrust of submissions—that there needed to be improvement to fisheries management—and what this bill does is ensure that we can better tackle the threats to whitebait population, particularly the loss of spawning sites. If our fishery was healthier, there’d be less need for the community to be concerned about fishing rules, and whitebaiters could always be assured of getting a decent fritter.

The bill does affect whitebaiting within protected areas. It requires that any fishing in those areas needs permission, and that’s because our native fish deserve the same level of protection that we provide our native birds—from the kiwi to the kākā and to the kākāpō. So the committee has recommended that there be a one-year transition period to ensure that careful decisions are made—

I’m sorry to interrupt the Minister, but the debate is now interrupted—it is 10 p.m.—and it is set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. tomorrow.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.