Fisheries (International Fishing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries: I present a legislative statement on the Fisheries (International Fishing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

💬 Hon ANDREW BAYLY: I move, That the Fisheries (International Fishing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

This bill will update the Fisheries Act to better meet our international obligations, and it will strengthen New Zealand’s capacity to address illegal, unreported, and unregulated—or IUU—fishing. This bill has been considered by the Primary Production Committee, and it recommends that it be passed with amendments to a number of clauses, which I support in full.

I thank the Primary Production Committee members—and, of course, I’m speaking on behalf of the Hon Shane Jones—for their support and constructive participation in considering this bill. I appreciate the time and effort the committee has taken to understand this bill and the complexities of the international fisheries framework. I also want to acknowledge the submitters who took time to express their views on this bill. Finally, I want to thank the Parliamentary Counsel Office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Ministry for Primary Industries officials that contributed to this bill.

By way of background, New Zealand’s international fisheries regime was established in our Fisheries Act almost a quarter of a century ago, in 1999. Since then, international obligations against IUU fishing have evolved. As I stated during the first reading, this bill responds to this context by updating the Fisheries Act, aligning it to best practice and allowing us to exert greater influence to prevent, deter, and eliminate IUU fishing. This is important because IUU fishing threatens New Zealand’s interests in the Southern and Pacific Oceans. This was highlighted in the report on IUU fishing by the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee that was presented to this House in August last year.

I note that this bill was introduced by the previous Government and obtained support from all speakers in its first reading. This reflects New Zealand’s unflinching commitment to the fight against illegal fishing, which the Government expressed in our response to the report. It also shows the strong focus that this Government has on the delivery of outcomes that benefit all New Zealanders, and in particular those that contribute to our economic recovery. The bill will ensure that New Zealand continues to be a world leader in the sustainable management of our fisheries. Ensuring the sustainability of our fisheries protects our continued access to lucrative fisheries in the Pacific and the Southern Oceans, and seafood trade with important markets—a position our $2 billion seafood export industry benefits from.

The bill seeks to achieve these outcomes through two overarching objectives or aims. To remind you of these, they are, first, to enable New Zealand to better meet its international fishery management and compliance obligations in respect of IUU fishing; and, second, to improve the efficiency and clarity of the provisions and decision-making processes related to international fisheries. The bill will do these things by amending provisions in the following areas: first, the permitting regime for New Zealand vessels fishing outside our waters; second, the efficiency and effectiveness of actions against fishery violations; and, third, New Zealand’s capacity to prevent and combat IUU fishing.

It was against this international background that the Primary Production Committee undertook its scrutiny of the bill. I thank, once again, Mark Cameron for his chairing and committee members for their dedication. International fisheries governance is underpinned by a number of international legal instruments, and the committee has provided excellent insights as to how to best address this complexity. I thank you again for this.

The Primary Production Committee recommended six changes to the bill. These changes align with the policy intent of the bill and improve several aspects. The first one relates to the evidence of authorisation by foreign country. Our international obligations require that fishing is duly authorised and the flag States are fully able to exercise responsibility over their vessels. The committee recommendations improve the change in the bill around the decision making on permits to provide greater clarity and certainty.

The first recommendation in the committee report seeks to ensure that before issuing a permit, the fishing has been authorised by that country. Requiring a Ministry for Primary Industries permit for a New Zealand vessel to fish in another country is one main change in the bill. It enables us to strengthen our cooperation with the countries where New Zealand fishing vessels fish. Given that we share fisheries with our Pacific neighbours, strengthening this cooperation is in our best interest.

The second committee recommendation represents an improvement of the decision-making processes for issuing international permits. The committee recommends that, before making a decision, the Ministry for Primary Industries chief executive may take into account previous non-compliance in any jurisdiction. “May take into account” means that non-compliance is something that the chief executive may consider but is not required to; that is, that previous non-compliance does not result in a mandatory decision to decline a permit. This enables proportionality in the decisions; ensures that we maintain a risk-based approach to assessing and responding to offending; and prevents undue, disproportionate consequences for the industry. A risk-based approach has also been taken by the committee in recommending changes to the power to suspend or revoke a permit to fish outside New Zealand waters where there’s evidence of offending.

The third recommendation that the committee report notes is that a permit issued to fish in a foreign country and on the high seas must be fully suspended or revoked at the request of the foreign country. This addresses the risk that a vessel may offend in another country and continue fishing on the high seas, and ensures that New Zealand can exercise its responsibility to ensure that vessels do not undermine the effectiveness of international conservation and management measures.

The fourth recommendation is to enable the chief executive to suspend or revoke an international fishing permit when an offence has been allegedly committed against the Fisheries Act within our waters, and this offence is of the most serious nature—that is, knowingly making a false or misleading statement, using a false communication to obtain a benefit, or knowingly acting in contravention of the Act to obtain a benefit. This ensures that the powers can only be used for the most serious of suspected offending. It would also require a reasonable basis for the belief that the offending has occurred, and it would be limited to the permitted vessel, not to other vessels related to the permit holder. These limitations are foundational to ensure a correct and proportional application of these powers and to ensure that they enable New Zealand to fully exercise its responsibility as a flag State.

The fifth recommendation improves the process for operators, who can invoke a defence when breaking the permit conditions when it is necessary to comply with the laws of that country. The time frame to invoke this defence has been adjusted to make it more suitable to both the prosecution’s and defendants’ interests. Taken together, these recommendations are useful to improve the efficiency and clarity of the permitting provisions. Clear and efficient regulations are a fundamental part of the enabling environment to industry, and I thank the committee for recommending these changes.

Finally, the last recommended change is a fine point of international law, and I thank the committee for its thoroughness in their examination of this bill. The recommendation would amend the clauses related to the detention of vessels in port. It would further clarify that the serious violation for which it is detained took place on the high seas. The vessel must be released on request of the vessel’s flag State; whereas, if the violation took place in New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone, the vessel must be released on payment of the bond. This makes sure we correctly apply two cornerstones of international law on the oceans: the Law of the Sea, or U-N-C-L-O-S, and the UN Fish Stocks Agreement—

💬 Hon David Parker: UNCLOS.

💬 Hon ANDREW BAYLY: Yeah, UNCLOS—thank you, Mr Parker. Taken together, these changes improve the bill by continuing to meet all the obligations I set out earlier. The recommended changes ensure that the bill is clear and fit for purpose. It provides the clarity and certainty that operators need to support the seafood sector’s role in this export-led recovery of our economy and further strengthens New Zealand’s ability to take effective action on IUU fishing. In conclusion, I thank those who contributed to the development of this bill, and I commend this bill to the House.

Can I thank the Hon Andrew Bayly for that fair description of the bill. He’s a man who prides himself on his maths, and, unfortunately, he must have read a speech that was prepared last year rather than this, because he will recall—he’s not going to sleep tonight when he realises this—that he said that the 1999 legislation that this updates was prepared just about a quarter century ago.

💬 Hon Andrew Bayly: Well, it’s a little bit more.

Oh, it’s a little bit more, he now concedes. It is, of course, a quarter of a century ago, because the difference between 1999 and the year 2024—which we’re nearing the end of—is, of course, 25 years.

The main aspects of this bill that will be of interest to the House relate to illegal, unreported fishing—IUU fishing: illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. This occurs both within countries, but the bit that is dealt with particularly by this bill is fishing on the high seas. It’s been very hard for the world to develop rules to control IUU fishing on the high seas, because it requires treaties because it is no one’s territory. No one country can make laws that are effective to control fishing in that area. It’s not so many decades ago that people used to say, as a saying, “There’s plenty of fish in the sea.” Sadly, that’s not true in large parts of the world now because there has been overfishing of the fishing resource, including on the high seas. To combat that, you need an international treaty and then you need to give effect to the provisions of that treaty through domestic law so that Governments of the world can cooperate to enforce rules around fishing in the international waters.

Now, there’s a number of ways we do that in the Pacific—and let’s not forget that the fishery in the Pacific is the main source of not just food or protein for people living in Pacific islands; it’s also the main revenue source for those island States. Fishing within their territorial seas, their exclusive economic zones—their EEZs—and the international waters are all very important in terms of the sustainability of the economies in the Pacific and the lives that people can live there and the food they can consume.

The USA is a force for good in this. They provide satellite imagery that records the beacons that all vessels that are fishing in these areas ought to be displaying. Unfortunately deliberately, some countries sometimes “go dark”—is the phrase—and they turn off their beacons so that they can’t be tracked. In addition to the compliance activity, it’s interesting that Governments around the world aren’t doing enough and private sector NGOs are taking up some of the slack. There’s a very wealthy New Zealander, who’s been very, very successful, who’s one of the funders of Sea Shepherd, who funds a fisheries enforcement vessel in the Pacific. It does wonderful work. He’s also funding drones to police illegal fishing activity in the Caribbean and in parts of Central America, such is his belief in the importance of proper fisheries protection.

Now, in order for that sort of surveillance to create enforcement activity, there have to be powers for Government agencies to take action where they find suspicious activity, and that’s where this bill makes some important changes. This bill now makes it possible for New Zealand to enforce a licensing regime for New Zealanders and New Zealand - flagged vessels that are fishing on international waters, and creates enforcement powers to hold people to account for doing that properly. That’s not all that contentious.

Where this bill takes another step, which until recent years has been contentious, is the policing of actors that are not your own citizens who are fishing on the high seas. Until now, these people haven’t been able to be conditioned, essentially, by New Zealand enforcement because we haven’t had the laws to enforce rules on the international seas in respect of non - New Zealanders or unflagged vessels. These provisions are set out in, for example, clause 40 inserting a new section 113SA, and around there. There are powers now that will be conferred on New Zealand authorities to stop those vessels, particularly unflagged vessels, and to hold them up in port if they’re in a New Zealand port, if there is a suggestion that they’ve been involved in illegal activities.

Can I thank the Primary Production Committee for working through these issues, and officials for working through these issues, because these issues of extraterritorial jurisdiction are quite complex. I’m pleased that the Government is continuing with this legislation, which had input from the prior administration. It is good law and I commend it to the House.

I think I might be speaking next week on this! I appreciate the previous speaker, Mr Parker. We did have very substantive briefings from the ministry, on this bill. The complexities of the challenge of managing illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing at sea became well understood by us, I think. It is an inherently challenging space: you have vessels from multiple jurisdictions that may be operating both inside our exclusive economic zone and then outside our exclusive economic zone, different flagged vessels, vessels belonging to different companies. The challenges of how you enforce regulations around illegal, unregulated, or unreported fishing became very clear to us.

One of the things we canvassed somewhat was what does one do when a ship that is registered in New Zealand is behaving poorly in international waters. How do we manage that? Or vice versa, when there is a ship that is flagged to a different nation that is breaking international fishing rules in the jurisdiction that we have some say over. How do you manage the right to, for example, impound the vessel and take action that could be deemed as challenging in terms of the jurisdiction of our nation over that nation’s flagged vessel? One of the things we got to was the necessity to get the permission of the flagged nation to take that action.

This is an interesting instance of a bill that had a small number of very substantive submissions—I think a total of six submissions only, but they were of very high calibre and quality. It’s sort of a telling example of where scrutiny that can be made by those with sophisticated understanding of a complex issue is very helpful.

I note that the Environment and Conservation Organisations of NZ Inc. submitted expanding the scope of the bill to include wider international obligations relating to the conservation of biodiversity and marine pollution, international human rights, environmental impacts, and impacts on host communities and indigenous people.

We have major challenges with the way that vessels operate outside of exclusive economic zones in international waters, and one of the obvious ones is slavery, where extremely poor and challenging working conditions are experienced by workers. There was a suggestion that we could broaden the scope of the bill to allow that; it was determined and advised by the ministry that we should not do that. Some of us on the committee would have liked to have done that, but we determined not to.

Another submission we received, from the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, made several requests: relating to the criteria that must be met before issuing an international fishing permit, and offending in New Zealand waters should be included in the IUU fishing definition—in a way, a definition that would trigger the automatic decline of a permit—and the post-offence stand-down time frames precluding vessels from being issued permits should be extended. Where a vessel has been restricted, or when there’s an offence alleged to have been committed, the challenge is that that vessel still may be able to operate until such time as that a resolution is made about that offence, so there is a need for there to be some sort of right or jurisdiction of the authority to actually suspend that vessel. It’s analogous to putting somebody on remand before their case has been heard, though they are regarded as innocent until proven guilty—it still may be regarded as necessary that the vessel should be restricted until such time it’s deemed that they did commit that offence.

There’s questions about how readily a company can get back a vessel that has been restricted, with a liability fee placed on that vessel. It could be that it’s too easy: in some instances, the cost of the bond may in fact be less than the cost or the value of the fish that was illegally fished. That is something that could potentially be improved in future.

On the whole, this is an example of New Zealand trying to keep pace with the inherent challenges of managing that commons that is the oceans; that resource that is of good for all of us, for our environmental health, for the provision of nutrition to people. We are part of that global challenge. This legislation is an example of us working within the international community and within international law to achieve the best outcome for our fisheries, for our oceans, and for, indeed, all people of this planet. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

This debate is interrupted and set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 22 October 2024.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 6 p.m.