Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): E te Māngai o te Whare tēnā koe. Thank you. I'm pleased to take a call on the Fisheries Amendment Bill. It was a very interesting bill to join the Primary Production Committee on. Can I start by thanking all the submitters. We had nearly 500 submissions and 56 submitters presented in person. They particularly the individual fishers gave the committee a much-better appreciation of some of the practical issues around fishing their concerns about rising fuel costs and around rising maintenance costs for older boats. I came away with a very strong impression that those who don't own quota or don't own annual catch entitlement and have to lease it but who are doing the hard work at sea are really being squeezed. Really I think it's incumbent on Government to look long term about what sort of support is needed and how we enable people to transition out of the industry. The answer is not as National is suggesting to roll back the regulation but to look at the future here and there may well be an opportunity for some people to transition out and for Government to help them do that. Can I also thank the recreational fishers and environmental groups for their really thoughtful submissions and for quite a number of submissions from industry. There are a lot of people who care about our oceans who care about fish and who care about fishing. But we need some fundamental changes to the Fisheries Act 1996 to achieve sustainable fisheries management in the interests of healthy oceans not just tweaking it. It is disappointing that Labour this term without the handbrake of New Zealand First—which of course got big donations from fishing companies—is not using its strong majority to make substantial changes to the Fisheries Act.There are elements of the bill which the Green Party supports but we do have this fundamental concern that as the Environmental Defence Society noted the bill entrenches the existing single-stock utilisation - centric approaches to fisheries management under the quota management system (QMS). It doesn't progress or resolve issues with the implementation of the sustainability principles in the Fisheries Act.The provisions that we do support are the new rules around landing and discards. They're intended to help discourage dumping discourage high-grading and ensure that all fish that are caught are reported accounted for and brought back to port. They are intended to ensure that fishers are more selective—they actually catch the fish that they want to sell. Of course in the QMS we've had a requirement in the Fisheries Act that all QM species are supposed to be landed but we've had very complex very permissive and very broad exceptions. We saw the huge scale of dumping misreporting and under-reporting when Dr Glenn Simmons from Auckland University did a 2016 report and he showed that since the 1950s fishers have caught more than double what they reported and what New Zealand reported to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Then we had the Heron review after Operations Hippocamp and Achilles when the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) didn't prosecute. That Heron report showed that there was widespread dumping of unwanted fish and MPI's decisions had been flawed.So now we do have the requirement in the bill that fish be brought back to port. I'm sure fishers were listening closely to the Minister last night when he highlighted that the current exceptions to landing requirements which are listed in Schedule 6 of the Act will continue to apply for up to another four years. Officials advised us that some of those exceptions will continue indefinitely.Also the bill provides in clause 14 in new section 72A a significant discretion to the Minister to be able to provide exceptions to the landing rules and to allow fish to continue to be returned to the sea. The committee's recommendations here removed the very subjective criteria negative economic value" which was problematic. But there is a big exception if there is an acceptable likelihood of survival of the stock or the species and the Minister can have regard to social cultural and economic factors that the Minister considers relevant when deciding on that exception. So we think that provides too much flexibility and we have got a Supplementary Order Paper there.Another of the concerns which is one that we shared with fishers is that because fish have to come back to port there may not be markets for some fish and there is a potential that they end up going to landfill. So we want MPI to look at this really closely once the bill's passed and ensure that we don't have fish being caught and then ending up in landfill because that would be the very worst outcome one almost as bad as fish being caught and going to be processed to fishmeal a very low-value use. So we really want MPI to have a very close look at what happens to fish that are being brought back to port that don't currently have a market.So while the industry had concerns about the landing and discards rules—and I really thank organisations like Fisheries Inshore which very helpfully produced a graphic illustration of some of their concerns and talk about a shared vision for fisheries—I think everybody's got a shared vision of sustainable fisheries. It's how we get there where there's a lot of conflict. So there are concerns from the industry about the landing rules but major concerns around the pre-set decision rules from environmental and recreation fishing organisations. The industry did support the pre-set decision rules. As Barry Torkington who's a former commercial fisher said—and I quote—"In return for cameras on boats this bill quietly lays the foundation for changes that have been widely unpopular in the past yet highly desirable to commercial interests." These changes because they allow the Minister quite wide scope when applying the rule to make changes to the total allowable catch or the total allowable commercial catch there is a big concern from environmental NGOs recreational fishers that this will allow changes that benefit the industry without allowing public submission. They pointed to a number of examples—the fishing down of rock lobster in the Hauraki Gulf; tarakihi though the Minister's recently made decisions on that; scallops and the fact that throughout Aotearoa there is really destructive scallop dredging overfishing has occurred and really collapsed our scallop stocks. Changes have only occurred there because of widespread public concern and the Minister being flooded with submissions. So the concern of a lot of organisations is that because MPI at the moment only has the ability to adjust catch limits for between 20 and 30 stocks—and it's saying that it needs these pre-set decision rules to allow it to be more agile more flexible—there is the risk that too much can happen behind closed doors with too much influence from commercial industry and without that ability for the public to really have their say. Certainly when pre-set decision rules are first developed or when they are amended there is public consultation but there is no ability to consult when the rules are actually applied. So if the original rule has too wide a range for adjustments to the total allowable commercial catch for example there is the potential for decisions which might drive the stock down. So there is a fair amount of scepticism amongst those who think MPI is far too closely aligned with commercial industry and is captured by it around how these pre-set decision rules will actually work.But the lost opportunity—what's missing from the bill? There's no change to the purpose of the principal Act. We've still got that 19th century mentality that there are no limits to the exploitation of nature. I take issue with the statements from the previous National speaker that this is about fishing to feed the word; that sort of an ethos is how we really deplete stocks how we deplete our fisheries how we don't recognise the current crisis and the need for fundamental change. There's been no updating and strengthening of the precautionary principle in section 10 of the principal Act. That's been unchanged since 1996 despite 25 years of progress and developments in international law about how we better define "precautionary fisheries management" and despite the United Nations General Assembly and the Food and Agriculture Organisation developing guidance and calling on States to better define "precautionary fisheries management" and apply it.So there are elements of the bill particularly around the landing and discards rule that we support but it is a lost opportunity to go much further and recognise the oceans crisis recognise the huge depletion of a number of our fish stocks and the impact that that has had on ecosystems. It is a lost opportunity to move to really good ecosystem-based management."