Prosser RichardRICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): Here we are at the beginning of a process that should have been begun possibly years ago certainly months ago. I think it is a bit ironic—a bit on the nose—to hear the Greens suddenly start to jump up and down and call for a commission of inquiry when that is exactly what New Zealand First did 3½ months ago. In fact—going back through some notes over just this year alone—as long ago as April New Zealand First was calling for serious measures to be taken to prevent illegal fish dumping. What we were calling for then was increased surveillance on fishing boats—not simply on the decks of a few boats in a certain areas—but on all commercial boats that were bringing in catch and also in the holds of those boats. It is one thing recording what comes on board a boat; it is quite another to turn a blind eye or not have any kind of surveillance possible at all down below decks where there is still sorting there is still high grading and there is still dumping going on.Back in May we repeated that call for New Zealand to move to a land all catch" policy as is followed by some other jurisdictions notably Iceland which has turned around its entire fishing industry from a very low-value industry to a very high-value industry by using some very sensible methods. Back in June as I said we called for a commission of inquiry because the quota management system (QMS) is now 30 years old. When it was first brought in it was regarded as world leading and back then it quite possibly was. But the world has changed. We have moved on. We have developed. We have evolved certain fishing practices—certainly in the more civilised parts of the world where we like to count ourselves. The Minister does deserve some credit for the Fisheries (Foreign Charter Vessels and Other Matters) Amendment Act which went through a couple of years ago in which we moved to reflag foreign charter vessels from overseas flags to the New Zealand flag so that we could impose upon the owners of those boats decent wages decent living conditions and subject to New Zealand labour laws crews who were living in rat-like conditions and were effectively operating as slave labour. So they do deserve credit for that but there is a great deal more that they could have done and should have done and should really have started doing months ago when it was first suggested.The short answer is that the QMS—although it was meant to be a measure which addressed the issue of too many boats chasing too few fish and overfishing being rampant—is actually now a cause of some of the problems that this industry faces because of the way it has evolved over the last 30 years. High-grading—where fishers discard lesser-quality fish in order to bring in as much better-quality fish as they can within their quota allocation—happens because of the deemed-value provisions of the QMS. Any catch that is brought in over quota is deemed to be of a given value which value fishers must pay to the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI). It is most frequently more than what the fish can be sold for. So if a fisher brings in an extra tonne of snapper or an extra tonne of any variety that is over and above the quota that they hold and they cannot find somebody else who holds additional quota that they are willing to lease or sell them they need to pay that value to MPI. It is meant to discourage overfishing but in fact it is the cause of it. Fishers know that landing catch outside of their limits is going to cost them so they dump it instead.The problem with that is the waste that it causes because—and the Minister for Primary Industries mentioned the Precision Seafood Harvesting system which is effectively a high-tech form of trawl net. I acknowledge that it is a better system than that which has been used in the past but it has not had wide uptake yet. It is very much in a pioneering state and it will take a while and a lot of investment before the industry begins to use that kind of technology as a standard. In the meantime we still have people using traditional old methods to bring in enormous catches of fish. When you pull a fish out of the water in a net it is dead anyway. If you have careful handling of fish by people who know what they are doing they can return undamaged fish to the sea in such a state that they remain alive—but the practical upshot of commercial fishing is that there is neither time nor the methods available in order for that to happen so it just does not.There is an allowance within the total allowable commercial catch for what is called "discard". It is a given quantity of fish that is deemed acceptable for the industry to dump overboard for various reasons. The problem is exacerbated by the market side of the fishing industry where fish buyers specify what they want to fishers and to quota holders in terms of size and species and either they will not take or they will pay very little for anything that falls outside those parameters. Our solution is to adopt the Icelandic system of "land all catch" where all fish that are caught must be landed and must be processed whether they are undersized or over quota or non-target species or whatever. Any fish that the fisher does not have the appropriate licence or quota for in the Icelandic system is then sold at auction and the proceeds from those auctions go back into the industry. They go back into fisheries management they go back into fisheries research and they go back into fisheries policing. This incentivises fishers to target their desired quota species more accurately—the penalty for missing that target being that they do not make as much money as they could rather than actually losing it by having to pay MPI a deemed value for fish that are not worth what they are being charged.It also means that under that system the fish buyers do not get to dictate the market. One of the things about a consumer economy is that retailers wholesalers want to try to sell a particular product to a given target market that they believe has a desire for it. When we are dealing with a wild resource sometimes that is just simply not sustainable. With a "land all catch" policy the power to distort the state of the fishery itself is taken away from fish buyers. It results in a market that is much more honest that is much more traditional and that is much more sustainable. The issue that we have with the results of the investigation released this week is that although the ministry was using its cameras to look for unintended dolphin bycatch as a result of incorrect fishing practices what it also discovered was illegal dumping which it chose not to prosecute on the grounds that this would discourage future cooperation from fishers. As we have heard from the Minister for Primary Industries that may have been able to be partially justified in one case but it certainly was not at all justified in the other. We are not yet confident that heads have rolled in a sufficient number and in the right places. In actual fact it is something I think the Minister could do with taking a good hard look at himself over.We say that New Zealand as a society allows commercial fishers quota access to the fishery which is a common property—it belongs to all of us—at no cost but within rules and guidelines and that fishers have to remain within those rules and guidelines or get out of the fishery. We have created quota access to the fishery as a tradeable property right and gifted it to the industry. It might be that that was a mistake but that was 30 years ago and that was the decision that was taken then. The solution may be to renationalise the fishery and move to a licensing system as is operated in some other parts of the world or it may not. The potential fish-hook in that—no pun intended—is that commercial fishers do have a right to make an honest living and they do need some surety of access to the fishery in order to justify their continued investment and presence in it. So any licensing system that we brought in would have to be more than simply a lottery. These are the sorts of questions that need to be asked and answered by a commission of inquiry which is why we keep calling for one.It is all well and good for the Minister to say he is having another internal review. The time for internal reviews is over. We need a full commission of inquiry into the totality of fisheries management in New Zealand recreational and commercial starting at the top and working all the way through. Thirty years on from the beginning of the QMS it is time for this to be completely reinvestigated and I am glad that we have got this opportunity to debate it this afternoon. I am disappointed that we had the likes of the Greens jumping on the bandwagon. It is good that people are backing our call for a commission of inquiry but trying to claim credit for it themselves is a bit on the nose. If we do not move to a more sustainable system for managing our fishery we will have no fishery left in very short order. Thank you very much."