Hauraki Gulf / Tīkapa Moana Marine Protection Bill

I call the next speaker, which was call No. 6, which is a split call for Te Pāti Māori.

Tēnā rā koe e te Pīka, otirā tēnā rā tātou e te Whare. E tū ana ahau ki te waha i ngā kōrero mā Te Pāti Māori i te rangi nei.

Mōkau ki runga, Tāmaki ki raro, Mangatoatoa ki waenganui, ko Pare Hauraki, ko Pare Waikato, ko Te Kaokaoroa-o-Pātetere ki Te Nehenehenui.

E mua i taku tīmatanga o tēnei o ngā pire, ka tika me mihi ki ngā mana whenua o Hauraki whānui. Nōku te maringa i tae ā-tinana atu au ki tētehi o ngā marae i tērā wiki, arā ko Ngahutoitoi Marae. Ngāti Tara, Ngāti Tokanui, Ngāti Tāwhaki anō hoki, ngā hapū, ētehi o ngā hapū o Hauraki.

[Thank you, Mr Speaker, indeed greetings to all of us in the House. I stand to give voice to the statements on behalf of Te Pāti Māori today.

Mōkau to the south, Tāmaki in the north, Mangatoatoa in the centre, the Hauraki Plains, the Waikato basin, and Te Kaokaoroa-o-Pātetere to Te Nehenehenui.

Before I begin on this particular bill, it is appropriate to acknowledge those who hold the mana over the land in the greater Hauraki region. It was my good fortune to attend in person one of the marae last week—i.e., Ngahutoitoi Marae. Ngāti Tara, Ngāti Tokanui, and Ngāti Tāwhaki are the hapū, several of the hapū of Hauraki.]

I was privileged to be in Hauraki last week, as it is my electorate base in Hauraki-Waikato, and to meet with the mana whenua and meet with the local iwi marae within Hauraki. So nōku te maringa nui. [So it is my great honour.]

This bill seeks to contribute to the restoration of the health and mauri of the Hauraki Gulf / Tīkapa Moana. The bill introduces two new tools called high protection areas and seafloor protection areas.

Te Pāti Māori notes concerns from the Hauraki Gulf Forum, a statutory body responsible for promoting conservation management of the moana, and this statement by the forum’s co-chair Nicola MacDonald: “Years of collaboration with successive Governments with iwi, communities, and industries have been undermined.” Regarding existing Treaty settlement arrangements, we also note concerns raised by Te Ohu Kaimoana, which has opposed this bill in its current form, citing that the bill—I quote—“prohibits … and inappropriately imperils [those] customary rights … affirmed to Iwi/Māori, (and … poses a [significant] threat … to customary rights recognition and protection [across] all Aotearoa).”

We support the existing tools and arrangements currently utilised by the iwi, but they are often underutilised by central, regional, and local authorities. The Hauraki Māori Trust Board iwi management plan and other tools should be brought to bear upon any discussions regarding the restoration of taiao, including under the Fisheries Act.

Finally, in their recent submission to the Environment Committee on the bill, the Hauraki Māori Trust Board said—I quote—“The iwi of Hauraki, through many submissions to Parliament since 1869, have opposed attempts of Government to take greater control of Tīkapa Moana and placed limitations of the exercise of tino rangatiratanga over our taonga for the iwi of Hauraki. Tīkapa Moana is an integral part of the tribal territory over which our iwi exercises mana and tino rangatiratanga, which has never been extinguished or annihilated.”

Te Pāti Māori supports aspirations for the protection and restoration of Hauraki Gulf / Tīkapa Moana. Te Pāti Māori does not support efforts to undermine the protection and restoration of the moana, and while the bill may have started with the right intentions, it has landed in the wrong place. Therefore, Te Pāti Māori oppose this bill. Tēnā rā koe, e te Pīka.

Tīkapa Moana—the Hauraki Gulf—is one of Aotearoa’s most valued and loved coastal areas. It has sustained people, culture, and identity for generations. It is a taonga tuku iho—a treasure passed down through the generations. It once had flourishing shellfish, kūtai, and scallop beds over thousands of hectares which helped ensure that the water was clean and provided kai for all. It was a food basket. It contained some of the earliest areas settled by tangata whenua Māori. It is critically important to local iwi, and it is critically important to all New Zealanders; that’s why the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park was established 24 years ago.

We want to acknowledge the mahi of mana whenua, activists, organisers, and local community continuing to keep up the pressure to get us to where we are and how we must continue to fight to get this bill right, because, sadly, last month it was revealed the Government will be making last-minute changes to allow a type of fishing known as ring netting to take place in two of the new high protection areas—zones which had been explicitly designed to exclude both commercial and recreational fishing and provide a safe haven for marine life to recover. It is an affront to all of those who have advocated tirelessly for the gulf that this coalition have allowed themselves to be lobbied at the last minute by the fishing industry to allow fishing in high protection areas.

Sadly, this Government is pushing their exploitative regime into these high protection areas, into public conservation land, overriding water conservation orders and our outstanding natural landscapes through the Fast-track Approvals Act. Now, this high protection gulf agreement, which was a mark of multipartisan agreement on the need to protect this magnificent gulf, is under threat.

Marine protected areas are places where activities such as fishing and mining are limited. They are essential for ensuring marine species and habitats thrive. There is no reason that this bill needs to be amended to allow a handful of fishers to contribute to the 57 percent decline of key fish stocks in the gulf, a 67 percent decline in seaboard birds, and a 97 percent decline in whales and dolphins. Commercial fishers will still be able to operate in over 90 percent of the gulf outside the high protection areas. The Government’s most recent amendments will allow commercial fishing in 52 square kilometres of the gulf’s high protection areas. Aotearoa’s ocean protection remains pitiful, frankly, and this bill is one step—in its original inception—towards saving the gulf from the brink of ecological collapse.

Recognising customary rights by enabling authorised customary fishing to continue to occur in high protection areas, supporting Māori culture, knowledge, and learning as well as kaitiakitanga in the marine area—it was an unanimously supported bill at the Environment Committee. Many members on that side of the House spent months listening to the concerns and support of our communities. Can this Government not be bold enough to commit to the bare minimum of not allowing commercial fishing in areas explicitly designated for protection? Today should be a day of celebration, a celebration for the hard work of communities, but, sadly, New Zealand First have ruined what should have been a happy story for the National Party at the last minute by allowing Shane Jones to lobby the Minister of Conservation after he himself had been lobbied by the fishing industry. It is not too late, though, for the Government to follow through with actual protection and not put forward these damaging amendments.

The Department of Conservation advice said that changes would be incompatible with the purpose, will undermine biodiversity outcomes, and create significant equity issues. I urge the Minister of Conservation to reconsider. I urge the National Party to step up to your better instincts. This important and historic bill offers the best and perhaps the last chance to halt the decline of that taonga in the Hauraki Gulf—that magnificent thing that we should all treasure and we should all care for. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I had the privilege of chairing the Environment Committee towards the end of the select committee process into this piece of legislation. I wasn’t on the committee, nor did I chair it during a period of time when most of the submissions were being heard, but, as the member Steve Abel has just indicated, there were a lot of submissions, and that is an indication of how important the gulf is to so many New Zealanders.

It is the most intensively recreated piece of marine space in our entire exclusive economic zone, and it has been for decades deteriorating, and I’m sad to report that degradation continues today. Now, Steve Abel made the very good point that the Environment Committee reported back to this House unanimously in support of this legislation. Subsequent to that, there has been indication that Cabinet want to make a change to just two of the high protection areas to allow a small number of individually named fisherfolk—I think five or six. Now, we’ll have an opportunity during the committee of the whole House to discuss that potential change that may be introduced by the Minister.

Today is not the day for that debate, in my view, but I think it’s important just to remember the evolution of this bill and how it came to the House. It was in, literally, the dying days of the last Government that the bill was introduced and sent off to a select committee. At that stage, at first reading, the bill had unanimous support across the House, in the last Parliament. I thought that was a very good indication of intent and desire, cross-party, to improve the gulf, because what was being proposed was legislation that would see the protected area in the gulf—largely through a new concept of high protection area; a concept that has not been available to us in the past—go from a very meagre 0.3 percent to just 6 percent. That would be, undoubtedly, the largest attempt, or the most significant protection attempt in the history of the gulf. It was something that, personally, I was very proud of.

Is this piece of legislation perfect? No. Is this piece of legislation going to achieve everything for everyone? No. Is this piece of legislation going to keep commercial fishers happy? No. Is this piece of legislation going to keep recreational fishers happy? No. Is this piece of legislation better than nothing? Absolutely yes.

I think that we should, in the words of Raewyn Peart from the Environmental Defence Society, who is an acknowledged expert on the gulf and the history of the gulf—she’s said in a very good thoughtful piece that we should not in this Parliament let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It’s my desire and hope as the member for Coromandel, which encompasses a very big part of the gulf, that this House does pass this legislation.

I want to put on record that I am in favour of more protection, not less, and I know that there are many members of this House that share the same view that I have. The gulf is deteriorating; all the indicators, all the science, point in the wrong direction, and we have, I think, an obligation to make good and do the best we can while we have that opportunity, as members of this House.

Now, I also want to make it clear that at first reading I was concerned and suspicious and unsure what a high protection area might mean, particularly for recreational fishers that fish on the eastern seaboard of the Coromandel. I made my concerns and questions clear in my first reading speech but since then, the concept of high protection areas has been made clear. It’s a new type of reserve; it’s a new type of marine protection of the sort that, as I said before, we have not had an opportunity to implement. I think it’s worth a shot. I think it’s worth a try because, as I say, we do need to do a lot more to protect the gulf.

I think that, on this side of the House, we support this legislation. We’ll look forward to the debate in terms of the committee of the whole House, and it will be very interesting to see which members of Parliament—and for what reasons—support protection of the gulf and which do not. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Unusually, I don’t disagree with most of what the previous speaker, the Hon Scott Simpson, just said, and I wish the member for Coromandel a very merry Christmas. Look, this is a really important bill that many people have worked on for a very, very long time, and of course it represents a large area that is important to our largest city, but also the member’s constituents in the Coromandel, and further south in the electorate of one of the previous speakers as well, and, of course, further north.

I was very pleased, when I was the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries, to work with the then Minister for Conservation, the Hon Willow-Jean Prime, to get this into the House before the end of the last Parliament. In this term, I’ve been very happy to be part of the Environment Committee, making way for my conservation and oceans and fisheries spokespersons on that committee, but also spending a good amount of time with the submissions, and on a site visit as well, which was very useful indeed.

However, it is concerning that, whilst the select committee was unanimous in its support for the bill and in the discussions that we’ve heard about from the chair of the select committee, the Hon Scott Simpson, there wasn’t a New Zealand First member on the select committee, and somehow everything seems to have changed since the select committee reported back. We don’t know all the details of those changes yet. The chair of the select committee has said, “Well, we can have that debate during the committee of the whole House”. Of course he is correct: there can be a debate during the committee of the whole House, but whether or not questions are answered is a very different matter.

The member just said that there’s going to be individually named fisherfolk, and that these are going to be commercial fishers. We’ve heard from Ministers some ideas about how they’re going to be feeding people who can’t otherwise afford kaimoana, but nothing in the press releases that I’ve seen demonstrates how that will be done.

Of course, there could already be Amendment Papers in front of members so they can go away over the Christmas break and think about them, but there are none. When I last checked about an hour ago on the legislation website, there were no Amendment Papers explaining what the Minister’s intentions are. It’s very upsetting that this legislation could be turned on its head at this late stage and that the only opportunity for scrutiny of the benefit to private individuals—again, it appears—seems to be in a committee stage of the whole House. This a very dangerous precedent that this Government is getting into. We’ve seen it with the fast track last week, and then it seems like we’re going to see this with this bill when it’s in committee stage. I implore the House and the Government to not take that approach. If the changes are so important and if they are significant changes that are going to give benefits to individuals, then, at the very least, put it back through a select committee process. As I say, I don’t know what it’s going to be.

I want to again thank all the people who’ve been working for over a decade to protect this beautiful taonga, this important part of our ecology. We’ll leave it there.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak in support of the Hauraki Gulf / Tīkapa Moana Marine Protection Bill, and I concur with others that have spoken on this. This has been a long time coming, it’s a major win for the environment, and it’s been multiple years in the making. It’s a major win as it’s about contributing to the restoration to the health of the gulf by establishing new marine reserves, seafloor protection areas, and high protection areas.

I would just take a moment to acknowledge all the submitters that submitted during the select committee process, and I would also acknowledge our fellow Environment Committee members as well as thanking the ministry advisers and committee staff for all of their hard work. In farming parlance, the gulf’s overgrazed and the best remedy is to shut the gate and let it recover—and this is what this bill seeks to do by creating 19 new protection areas. I commend it to the House.

Thank you for the call. Can I again express the Labour Party’s support for this second reading of the bill.

As others have said, there’s been a long, long history to this. Civil society action actually gave the impetus to break an impasse because Governments couldn’t seem to make progress, despite the fact that the Hauraki Gulf has been declining in quality for some decades, and the causes of that are well known. There’s both population pressures because the Hauraki Gulf is adjacent to New Zealand’s largest centre of population. There are land-use pressures coming down from the Firth of Thames—a huge sediment load from some of those rivers. The Piako River is—there’s an old post about 100 metres from the mouth of the river which marks where the mouth of the river used to be. That is the amount of accretion of land at the mouth of the river caused by sediment flows. There are complex issues that need to be resolved.

There are also very complex Māori issues relating to multiple overlapping iwi and hapū interests. The people who, from a parliamentary side, gave this a kick along were the Hon Eugenie Sage—the then Green Minister of Conservation—alongside the Hon Stuart Nash, who was the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries in the 2017 to 2020 period. They made significant progress with the non-Governmental group Sea Change, which was a collaborative process that brought the parties together and tried to chart a route through to protecting more of the gulf. Substantial parts of the gulf are already protected, but substantial parts aren’t.

This advances the protection through these new highly protected areas. I had a role in this for a couple of years as the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries and tried to advance it myself. As the Hon Rachel Brooking said, we are somewhat weary about the changes that are being made to allow more fishing in the highly protected areas. In respect of the reference that is made to people catching fish who need to catch fish to eat, I think we have to be careful that we don’t create different standards of access to the recreational fishery. That would be a big step in New Zealand that we’ve so far avoided and would lead to conflicts within communities that I think are best avoided.

That said, we do support the bill. I haven’t much to add except at the committee stage when we’ll be looking at the detail of these changes to the protected areas, which do worry me. Until we see them, we really can’t comment on them in detail.

It’s a real pleasure to rise and speak on this bill. I have been on the Environment Committee, I was part of all the hearings, and I think it’s a really very nuanced issue as we did all vote unanimously.

We do feel very strongly that protection is required, but one thing of interest and of note is the variety of submissions that we heard, most of which we heard in Auckland, some of which we heard remotely. There is a lot of care for this area, but there are so many different people that are involved, and that was something that became very apparent to us through this process.

I do believe that we have come to a good place. I look forward to what we hear in committee stage and where we get to with this bill, and this is very good. I support this and commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Many members in the House today have discussed the importance of Tīkapa Moana—the Hauraki Gulf—to Tāmaki-makau-rau Auckland. I acknowledge the words and sentiments that have been shared in this House this afternoon on this particular bill. Everybody acknowledges the cultural, the economic, and the environmental contribution and value that this area really places not only for Auckland but for our country as a whole. We all agree that it needs protection, and, in fact, the terms that have been used are “high protection”—or one of my colleagues from across the other side said that he wanted more protection, not less.

I just don’t know how we reconcile that with what Aucklanders have called an absolute betrayal, when the Minister, Minister Potaka, added in commercial fishing at the eighth hour before the first reading. That has created a level of uncertainty. This is after decades of people advocating and campaigning to protect Tīkapa Moana, knowing that it needs this level of protection. To hear today in speeches as well that there’s still some uncertainty here about what will come next—whether that be for Māori, whether it be customary issues, whether we are discussing surprise amendments that may or may not come. I just really urge my colleagues in Government to step up to be incredibly responsible about the decision that you are making, moving forward, because high protection—high protection—does not include commercial fishing. It absolutely doesn’t.

I also call on my next-door neighbour, my friend and colleague the Minister Simon Watts. He has been an advocate over many years for the protection of this area. He understands how important Tīkapa Moana is to North Shore people and the level of support that we must provide to protect this area.

Labour introduced this bill. We got it off the ground. I was there on the day that Chris Hipkins announced it, alongside Rachel Brooking and Willow-Jean Prime and Helen White. We absolutely believe in this. We know it’s timely. We just don’t believe that it includes commercial fishing.

Without further ado, can I wish you a Merry Christmas. Meri Kirihimete ki a koutou katoa. Tēnā tātou.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I take great pleasure to rise and speak in support of this bill. I do just note I do come from a landlocked electorate and I am speaking on marine protection, but I think kind of everybody in New Zealand appreciates the importance of protecting our marine space. Of course, this bill is a crucial step towards the safeguarding of the health of this invaluable ecosystem, which has suffered significant decline due to human activity over decades. It probably is one of the most populated recreational areas and, of course, we’re leading up to that Christmas period where we’ll be extremely busy and there’ll be a lot of pressure on the ecosystem of the gulf.

Now, this bill is the outcome of decades of work with input from a wide range of parties. It was a great privilege, as part of the Environment Committee, to actually hear from a lot of these communities and their views, and I appreciate not everybody’s going to be happy with this protection area—of course, some people want to continue fishing, others might not think we’re going far enough—but this is a very highly targeted way to protect our ecosystem.

We saw great evidence in the select committee about kina barrens and other things that are plaguing the gulf, and I think it’s really important that we can extend the protection of the gulf since so little of it is currently protected. This bill aims to rectify that, and it’s a great privilege to be part of the journey of this bill to make sure that we can have that protection. I think, really, the goal of this legislation is clear and that’s to kind of make sure that we can protect our biodiversity, ensuring targeted and appropriate management of our fisheries, and I think that’s really key clear.

Of course, it hasn’t been without its challenges. There have been some unique protection areas that we are putting forward here. But I just really want to thank the select committee for the work putting it through and also the officials from the Department of Conservation and also from the ministry of fisheries and their advice as we went through it.

We had a great time looking at the gulf and hearing from the local communities, and it was a great introduction for me in Parliament. This was the first bill we really considered in the Environment Committee, and so, therefore, I commend this bill to the House.

Bill read a second time.