Fisheries (International Fishing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Fisheries (International Fishing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

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

Hon SHANE JONES: I move, That the Fisheries (International Fishing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

I want to acknowledge that these legislative changes flow from a body of work undertaken by the Primary Production Committee in a regime earlier than this one. They have come up with some sensible innovations and improvements. And why is it important? As I’ve already said, fisheries has turned into a currency of influence in not only the Pacific and other parts of the world, but it’s also been a vector for perfidy, where there have been problems that offend basic human rights. New Zealand has sought over the last 10 to 15 years to upgrade its level of assistance and to work more effectively with our neighbouring Pacific Governments. These are international obligations that relate to illegal and under-reported fishing, and the actual problem that we’re trying to solve is that, throughout our near neighbours, we have the Goldilocks zone of pelagic international fisheries. No group of nations have a more lucrative resource than our Pacific neighbours; sadly, they struggle, year after year, to maximise the dividend or the return from this natural resource.

Historically, it was dominated by the Americans. The Americans had an American tuna treaty, and that was used as a basis to meet the costs of gaining access to the fishery. And then a group of Kiwis—not the least of which is Mr Les Clark from Christchurch, married to a Kiribati woman—got together, several years ago, with the leaders of what’s called the Parties to the Nauru Agreement, and they created a collective of nations that decided to pool their political resource together. That enabled them to introduce a scheme that it is illegal to fish in their sovereign waters unless you purchase days enabling you to fish commercially for a defined range of pelagic sea species. No days; no fishing. That then drove vessels to fish in the adjoining international waters, thus denying the nations of revenue and increasing the prospect of illegal, under-reported fishing and a host of other illegal activities. So that is the problem that we’re trying to solve, largely.

Now it is nations from Asia who dominate that fishery. The Americans have largely withdrawn from the fishery because they could not match the cost of buying a day to fish in sovereign waters of our Pacific neighbours. This is a very lucrative entitlement scheme of catching after you have paid for the days. This scheme has, however, led to a host of challenges—not the least of which is policing what the heck is happening and finding a way to be more intrusive when vessels come to shore, because the concept of transshipment at sea is now illegal in the vast majority of the Pacific nations. By that, I mean that boats come alongside a big mother ship and they supply them with groceries and various other services and goods, and then they put the fish on the large vessel. Now these things have to happen at shore.

The changes that we have made through this legislation give greater powers and helps us play a better role in working with our Pacific neighbours. It also gives authority and greater opportunities to police our own fisheries vessels—very modest in size.

The final thing I’d like to say about this area is that we are in changing, volatile times when we look at our Pacific neighbours and when we look at how we spend the money that we have under our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) budgets, and what are we actually buying? Are we increasing the footprint of our influence? Are we putting conditions on our aid to ensure that the values that define us as New Zealanders are protected, extended, and projected? These are matters of political debate because often it’s said you should just give aid without conditions. I do not believe that. I believe that the taxpayers of New Zealand are spending money in the Pacific. We need to be absolutely confident that the footprint of New Zealand—an open, liberal, transparent democracy—is not sidelined or marginalised. We cannot have a situation where we’re spending money and not advancing the interests of our own nation to ensure that the Pacific remains a peaceful, open, safe, and secure environment. This is the tipping point where we’re at. Gone are the days where we could have a juvenile and naive view that everything we threw up there was going to lead to positive outcomes for New Zealand. We don’t have that any longer.

But these changes do represent an improvement in the legal powers that we have. Obviously, I should acknowledge the members of the Primary Production Committee, the most enjoyable select committee that I ever sat on in my time since 2005. I acknowledge the work of the Parliamentary Counsel Office—they’re extraordinarily busy—the MFAT officials, and the Ministry for Primary Industries officials. On that note, I’d like to thank all who have contributed to the bill, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The Labour Party endorses the comments made by the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries and agrees that the bill is a useful contribution to New Zealand’s help in the Pacific to enable them both to sustainably fish their fisheries, so that the environmental baseline is maintained, and also to maximise the economic value they can achieve within those environmental limits.

Responding to some of the Minister’s comments about the more general propositions he made about aid into the Pacific, we agree that the prosperity and peacefulness of the Pacific Islands is of fundamental importance to New Zealand. It’s important to our economic, our people-to-people, and also our security interests. The withdrawal of US aid does not help. Most of their programmes have been cut, and it does mean that New Zealand and partners, like Australia, are going to have to step up. We need to do practical things, I agree, Minister, like enable affordable banking services, digital telecommunications, renewable electricity, and sustainable resource utilisation, as we are doing here with fisheries, but I think there’s a lot more to be done on that, as I addressed in the committee stage. And, of course, we’ve got to help them with climate adaptation.

Now, I agree that reciprocity is the key. I think we have to be a little bit careful that we’re not completely zero-sum game here, because better educational, health, and civil society outcomes are good for us all, and they have a value that ought not to be too transactional. But, that said, I agree that reciprocity is the key to their prosperity and to our willingness to contribute. Now, we’ve got a couple of ideas out on that at the moment. We think we need a bit of a new framing to work with rising powers in the region, as well as the other Pacific countries, and we’re interested in pursuing a Pacific peace zone, which might enable us to pursue those issues well, in a way that meshes with New Zealand’s traditional role in the Pacific, relating to peace and denuclearisation, or the avoidance of nuclearisation.

We also think it’s clear that the decline in both soft- and hard-power spending in New Zealand has to be reversed, and we are actually still seeing declines in both, or particularly in recent—I don’t want to politicise this too much. There’s a long-term trend that has seen a decline, particularly in hard-power expenditure, and a recent decline in soft-power expenditure as a percentage of GDP, too. Now, the split between hard-power expenditure and military expenditure will always need to be worked through, but we’re out there on the record today saying that we accept that increases to both are needed. We think a good principle, to start with, would be that for every dollar extra we spend in the military, we should be increasing our soft-power spend as well. For the cost of one frigate, you’d just about form a fisheries fleet in the Pacific. There are substantial increases of expenditure needed.

The former Prime Minister the Rt Hon Chris Hipkins, our leader, has said that we agree the frigates need to be replaced—that it is fair for our partners to expect that they have military capabilities. And, as the Minister has outlined today, some of the work they do in the Pacific is quite dangerous already in respect of some of these shadow fleets. So we accept that that’s necessary. We accept that cooperation across Governments will be necessary to achieve that. We make the point that the last frigates were purchased by a Labour administration. The upgrades to the P-8s and the Orions were under a Labour coalition, with support from New Zealand First and the Green Party. There is a need, also, to change the way in which we defend ourselves, through the use of drones and things, which I won’t go into, but I think, at the core, this is, in my opinion, a very, very sensible idea. It’s hard to get political buy-in with people on these issues, and maybe we can leverage up both by saying we should link one to the other, because we actually need both, for the reasons that the Hon Shane Jones has already addressed.

Can I end by thanking the Primary Production Committee, because it was the select committee of this House that, essentially, led to this legislation, and the Government officials, as well as members of civil society, who then saw it through. We commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Of course, it’s a pity that I get the opportunity to acknowledge the excellent work of the officials on this bill after they’ve left the room. But I do want to acknowledge that, because at the Primary Production Committee, when we worked through the bill, there were a number of complexities. It certainly has the effect of strengthening the ability of inspectors and regulators to protect our oceans from the worst and most egregious actions of illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing. That’s why we’re obviously supporting it. It’s a good bill, and it’s great to have another instance of cross-party support on this. And it’s another instance in the space of two days of the Primary Production Committee having consensus—

Suze Redmayne: Best committee.

STEVE ABEL: —on—best committee—a bill that is for the our collective good as a nation, and indeed the entire environment of the ocean.

The Minister for Oceans and Fisheries spoke about the opportunity for economic benefits to the Pacific from a healthy fishery. I suppose, in a sense, the Green Party comes at it from the other way around, which is to say that when we have a thriving ocean ecology, we also have a thriving fishery that can then feed people and sustain people. And the starting point is that we protect the integrity of that ecology. Those magnificent benthic environments, those seafloor environments where we get these magnificent ancient coral forests, actually are a hub of ecological intensity—this is where the likes of orange roughy feed and exist. Around those environments, you get a diversity of species. It’s sort of like in shallow waters when you have a marine protected area, you get an abundance of fish and it ends up being for the benefit of those areas outside of that marine protected area, where fishing is still permitted. So by protecting, in the first instance, the health of the ecology of our ocean, we also protect the fishery.

It is concerning to us, in the broader scheme of things—that, rightly, we are taking a clear position on illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing that is consistent with our commitment to international obligations in the oceans. We had a very clear message from the officials on this. This is part of the broader principle of being part of the community of nations that take a care to look after the oceans, and we really needed to come up to speed to where other nations were on this challenge—these serious challenges, as the Minister rightly points out, in that wild and vast blue world that we live on. It is very challenging to deal with—he called them the mosquitoes, but the multitude of vessels out there that are doing things out of sight, out of mind.

In that frame, it is hard for us to not refer to our concerns about this Government’s failure to entirely be consistent on that front. I’m thinking of the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation—SPRFMO—where New Zealand, under this Government, under this regime and this Minister, has backed out of previous commitments we made to uphold things like protecting those hugely valuable seamounts from destructive fishing. The sort of things that happened on those seamounts are things that are done by illegal vessels. But, often, if we haven’t got very clear jurisdictions that state clearly that that particular benthic environment is out of bounds, then we cannot enforce the idea of illegal fishing because it hasn’t been designated yet as illegal. New Zealand needs to do both ends of the equation. We need to be part of international agreements to make sure that we do protect the integrity of those most valuable ecosystems at sea.

It is also hard, in the context of where we are in time, to not reflect on the recent voyage of Greenpeace out on a ship to have a look at what is going on in the deep. I note, from a recent email, they said, “We saw the beauty of thriving underwater communities, including deep-sea corals that support a myriad of ocean life. We also saw the absolute destruction caused by bottom trawling. After even years of campaigning to protect seamounts and coral, seeing hour after hour of destroyed coral on this scale was a shock.” This is information that’s just been garnered in the last few days, in the last couple of weeks. “Coral is absolutely crucial to ocean health. When bottom trawlers drag heavy nets over the seafloor, they turn coral forests into rubble. We know that what comes up in the nets is just a tiny indication of what has been destroyed on the seafloor, and recently we have had instances of rare and protected coral species being trawled up in New Zealand fishing nets. Seeing both the destruction and the beauty reminded me how important it is to protect seamounts and the coral that live on them.” We couldn’t express support for that statement more strongly.

This legislation before us is part of a very important context in terms of the ocean, and part of where we as a nation need to be stepping more forthrightly and more determinedly to ensure that we do protect that absolutely precious ocean ecology that makes up most of the Earth’s surface.

It is always a pleasure when we are able to sit on a committee and work through an agreement on a piece of legislation like this that does protect the commons, that benefits all of us, not just those of us who are directly associated with it in our exclusive economic zone, but also those international waters that we are all responsible for being the caretakers of because they are, in a sense, something that belongs to no one; they belong to all of us, therefore. So this is an instance of where we have a piece of legislation that allows us, as people, to step up to that greater duty of being caretakers, for our brief time on this planet, of this magnificent ecology that we enjoy, live amongst, and are part of as human beings. I commend this bill to the House. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise in support of this bill on its third reading. I think, firstly, all of us in this House can acknowledge the abundance that the Pacific offers, and its potential for our very vulnerable Pacific Island nations. The seafood industry is one of their key core assets, and it’s something that they hold very dearly to their heart. This bill, while it enables more powers for us to search vessels, for example, and to search for that illegal fishing, it also offers us a bit of an insight into other things that are happening out in the Pacific.

I think some of the discussion that we’ve been hearing today in the committee of the whole House, and bits and pieces that I’ve been picking up on—it’s quite nice to hear that, actually, some of the Opposition, particularly Labour, have actually come out in support of some of the things that we need to do within the Pacific as far as where we’re putting our financial aid. Are we getting value for money? Are we actually helping our Pacific Island nations with the things that they actually really want and need to thrive, in order for us to make some of our gains back, our political influence that we have lost over the last few years? I think that’s really important.

So it’s also good to hear that they also agree to an increase in GDP spending for defence, and I think this side of the House would be pretty proud and happy to see that. I also think that, for New Zealand as a whole, this signals that, actually, this Government and the Opposition see that our national security is a huge priority for us here, a tiny island nation at the bottom of the planet. We cannot find this more important, to make sure that we shore up our Pacific. So this has been well traversed, and we all know this a really good bill, and I’m really grateful to see everybody is supporting this, and I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

This bill’s about being a trusted and responsible global trading partner, and it’s about protecting the long-term interests of our vital fishing industry. I am very proud to commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka, tēnā tātou. E tū ana ahau ki te waha i ngā kōrero o Te Pāti Māori mō te pire nei me ōna kaupapa atu i te iwi Māori.

[I stand to voice the opinion of the Māori Party about this bill and its issues, that pertain to the Māori people.]

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing is obviously something you’ve got to combat, because fish are a finite resource, and we’ve learnt that many times in this country. So we support the bill in that regard. The protection of international waters and international species is a key theme to our local species. They’re never separated. A tuna that swims down from Tonga is just as important as a kahawai caught down at the harbour. These are all lessons that are often lost in these sorts of conversations. So the knock-on effect is key in this discussion.

Here’s a good knock-on effect theme that’s a classic example in New Zealand. This year, we’ve had one of the best yellowfin tuna seasons in this country in 10 to 15 years. There are yellowfin tuna everywhere, from Manawatāwhi / the Three Kings, all the way to the Cook Strait—unprecedented. Where the heck did all those tuna come from? Well, I’ll tell you what happened. They stopped all that tuna wrangling up in the Pacific. So the game fishermen in this country haven’t seen a run of tuna for more than 10 years. So the protection of international waters has a knock-on effect to our local waters, and those two things are as important as each other.

So I’m a bit confused, a bit bemused, at the extreme attention that the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries is paying to protecting and regulating international waters, when he’s happy to deregulate local waters. Those two things are the same thing, so if you’re going to do one in one place, do it in the other one. In terms of our species in fishing, despite all the hoo-ha over the quota management system over the years, I can rattle off 10 species that were deemed so numerous that they would never disappear, that—guess what!—almost disappeared. Here’s one of them, one of the most numerous coastal fish: kahawai. When it was opened up to netters, it nearly vanished—the good old kahawai that everyone can go and catch. So they’re not separate issues, is what I’m saying.

Yet we’ve got two separate approaches—I can’t work that out. Me, I’m a fisherman and a diver; my father was a fisherman and diver; my uncle is a fisherman and diver; my grandfather was a fisherman and diver; and my great-grandfather was a fisherman and diver. We’ve been watching these coasts, fishing them, using the resources for generations and generations. We understand all this stuff. It’s not hard. It gets confusing when people stand around talking about it, or bits and pieces of it—this thing, that thing, the other thing, international, local. It all amounts to nothing if you can’t feed your whānau in your own rohe, moana.

So where is it all heading? It’s got to be heading somewhere, and it needs to be heading to a place where they’re all looked after as a total. You can’t separate them out and say, “Oh, we’re going to regulate over here, but—you know what?—we’re going to let that bottom trawling continue.” It’s ludicrous and our country deserves better. Te iwi Māori deserves better, but our country deserves better.

Also, I will just pick up on Steve Abel’s point. You can’t ignore climate change. The unprecedented run of yellowfin tuna in this country was matched this year by a more unprecedented run of marlin in the Southern Ocean. I’m talking about marlin south of Taranaki—about 10 marlin were caught on the Kāpiti Coast. There has been a string, a massive run, of marlin caught in the South Island, on the West Coast, in Westport, and there have been marlin caught in Kaikōura. This is unprecedented. Never in the history of anyone counting fish has this happened. As I said, I’m a diver. I dive off Kāpiti Island a lot. Last weekend, we saw the first ever blue maomao at Kāpiti Island. I don’t know what to say, really.

I go back to the Minister. How can he expect the international community to take us seriously when he still allows bottom trawling? We are one of seven countries in the world, whānau—one of seven in the world—who allow legal bottom trawling. How can he do that? How can he expect the local people to take him seriously when he goes on national TV and openly says that the Māui dolphin doesn’t exist—

Jenny Marcroft: It doesn’t.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: —and that it’s actually just a small Hector’s? There you go. There’s the dull people over there. If that’s what he believes, perhaps he should immediately lift the ban on set netting currently on the entire West Coast of the North Island because of the Māui dolphin. If indeed it is a ghost dolphin, lift the ban. Kia ora tātou.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the Green Party to also support the Fisheries (International Fishing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. Like many speakers have mentioned before, this is one of those bills that has the House’s overall unanimous support. Again, thank you to the Primary Production Committee for examining this particular bill and also to the previous Minister, under the Labour Government, for introducing this bill in the first place.

When it comes to this bill, understandably, this is to do with international fishing and it’s specifically around illegal, unreported, and unregulated—IUU—fishing. There are various mechanisms that are in this particular bill that aim to address some of these issues, as well as quality-of-life changes to areas such as, for example, expanding the high-seas fishing permit to a more broadly international fishing permit to include potentially authorised fish in other countries’ national jurisdiction.

So, as part of the committee stage, it was actually incredibly enlightening. I would like to thank the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries for being very open in terms of his response, but also in terms of his broader experience in this area.

Other things that we did touch on in terms of the committee stage are around things like surveillance, and I think the Hon David Parker raised the really important questions, and some really important questions around—it’s great that we have some of these, but what happens if a vessel goes dark? You know, what happens if we are unable to see whether there are IUU activities taking place?

But, broadly speaking, I want to kind of address a couple of additional things that other members have spoken on, and I want to first address our broader responsibility, as Aotearoa, in the Pacific region. Now, we have heard in terms of the need for defence spending and all of those, but I think, from a Greens’ perspective, we maintain what is the value of that for our Pacific neighbours, in light of much greater issues in our communities at this stage, and what, honestly, our Pacific neighbours are asking us to do, which is to address climate change. That is one of the top priorities for them, in light of climate change and the issue of climate mitigation but also climate adaptation.

Look, we can’t outshoot the US and we can’t outspend China. So when we are looking at our defence spending going up to 2 percent of our GDP, which equates to $10 billion, exactly what are we actually going to be spending on in a stage where we’re also seeing cuts to the Defence Force and not actually sponsoring the core facilities and infrastructure that we all need such as education and health, etc?

But to bring it back to this bill, one of the other things that we did manage to talk about quite substantively is how this will interact with other potential international instruments and agreements. I really want to use this opportunity to also talk about the fact that we have signed, but are also in the process of eventually ratifying and implementing, the agreement on marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction—or BBNJ. This sets, supposedly, the pathway for us to do what the Global Oceans Treaty is meant to do, which is to protect 30 percent of our ocean.

I’m sure that many people agree that although we have these demarcated zones as exclusive economic zones, and this belongs to this country and that belongs to that country, our natural environment and our biodiversity, our marine animals do not see those borders. They do not factor in those borders when they are traveling through our open seas. So the way that Tākuta Ferris has mentioned, in the sense that we have addressed some of these things in international waters but not so much in domestic waters, doesn’t make a lot of sense in this case. Also, just a reminder to the House that New Zealand is actually still the only nation in the Pacific that bottom trawls in the South Pacific high seas, which is an embarrassment for us.

Lastly, I just want to say that in this particular agreement, it also gives acknowledgment of the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples. Mātauranga Māori is important for us and we look forward to this.

Thank you. This bill helps us meet our international obligations and, importantly, it actually maintains our international reputation, noting our commitment to being a leader in sustainability of our fisheries and including in international waters. This reputation’s quite critical to maintain our access to our export markets so that that export income can contribute to this Government’s goal of doubling export by value over 10 years so that New Zealanders can benefit with increased job opportunities, enablement of better infrastructure, and ultimately putting more money in the back pockets of all New Zealanders. I commend this bill.

Kia orana, Mr Speaker. Labour supports this bill. The reason for that is that we introduced it into the House—so of course we’re going to support it.

This bill is important so that we’re able to enforce and strengthen enforcement in the areas of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, and we also do need to align what is very strong and clear international practice in this space, and that’s what this bill does.

It is disappointing, though, that this is being progressed under urgency. The reason why I say that is because we’ve just come hot off the heels of a committee stage where questions were put to the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries in committee, and it’s rather disappointing that the Minister didn’t respond to any of the questions that I put to him. On this side of the House, we were not seeking to be obstructive around this—we are supportive of this bill; we want it to pass, but we want it to be good, clear legislation. The questions that were put to the Minister were in an effort to achieve exactly that. So it is disappointing that we are in urgency and that the Minister has decided not to play ball in the sense of giving constructive feedback, or even answering or addressing any of the questions. So that is a concern but I guess that’s what you get from the Government seeking to progress legislation under urgency, noting that this is a bill that has been on the Order Paper, actually, for quite some time. So it is disappointing, in that respect.

Despite that, though, when we step back and look at this bill, it is one that does give a real sense of achievement around reducing the gap between what the existing legislation is and what is good practice in terms of what our responsibilities are as a country. It is a bill that bases itself on the tenets of accountability and scrutiny, and so it is certainly our desire and hope that the bill will deliver on that. I commend this bill to the House.

This Government is committed to a strong domestic framework against illegal fishing. Illegal fishing in the Southern and Pacific Oceans impacts on our own fishing industry, and we must do all we can to prevent illegal fishing. I commend this bill to the House.

Five-minute split call—Glen Bennett.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. As my colleagues the Hon David Parker and Tangi Utikere have already made clear, Labour does support this legislation. The reason we do is because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it was a piece of legislation that Labour, in Government back in 2023, did introduce to this House—so it is appropriate to support it. But it’s also appropriate to support it because if we maintained the status quo, New Zealand would become an outlier in terms of this space, in terms of ensuring that we strengthen our ability to manage the fisheries and to enforce the rules to prevent illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. It’s good for us, it’s good for the Pacific, and I commend this to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Similar to the last presenter from the other side of the House, Glen Bennett, this bill brings New Zealand up to the international expectations to meet our obligations. It focuses on our trading partners, it focuses on our Pacific neighbours, and it helps—most importantly—our ocean environment and our fish stocks. I’m happy to commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is good to be speaking on this third reading of a bill that, as I mentioned earlier, was once in my name. I cannot claim to have done an awful amount of work on it when I was the Minister—I was able to have it introduced, but it is the work, as we’ve heard, from many officials over many years, and many people who have been very much involved in seeing the importance of international law around this shared resource, which is our oceans. So I want to commend all of those people who have done that work, and had the foresight to see—

Hon Mark Patterson: Even Shane?

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —how international regulations are important—

David MacLeod: Go on, say it!

Jenny Marcroft: You know you want to!

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: There are some heckles coming from the other side of the House that I have to even congratulate the current Minister for Oceans and Fisheries for shepherding this through the House. I do believe that in the committee of the whole House stage, I thanked the Minister a number of times for his comments in the committee stage, and I do think it is good that he has continued with this piece of legislation, and I don’t know if there needed much convincing for the other parties. They’ve all been joining in harmony for support of this bill, so I commend all of them who are doing that.

CHAIRPERSON (Greg O’Connor): Nearly—nearly.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: I also do want to, though, note that some of our very small, precise questions were not answered in the committee stage, and that is a problem, as is running that committee stage into the third reading, all at the same time in urgency, where people were in the House until 12 midnight last night, were in the select committees at 8 o’clock this morning, and there might be mistakes made. I’m simply talking about good legislative processes, to those members opposite. I can say it is a lot more efficient, if this Government is interested in efficiency, to have a little bit of time to make sure that questions raised do not identify problems that could be easily fixed by going back into the committee stage rather than passing a bill, having it commence, and then having to come back to amend it, if that is indeed the case. Just a bit of good process helps with efficiency.

I’ll try and end on a more cheery note, and that is that it is very excellent that all parties are agreed about the importance of this international law, and the importance of regulating illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Just before I call the next speaker, I think it’s very good that members are looking after the ego and self-esteem of their Minister, which clearly needs to be looked after! So I commend them for that.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to be the lucky last speaker on this, the third reading of the Fisheries (International Fishing and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. Essentially, this bill, as we’ve heard traversed around the House today, is amending the principal Act, the Fisheries Act 1996, so that Aotearoa New Zealand can better meet its international fishing management obligations in a more efficient way. With that, since we’re so good here on this side of the House with efficiency, I commend this bill to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a third time.

That concludes the business of urgency. Congratulations to all involved. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. today.

The House adjourned at 12.22 p.m. (Thursday)