Sage EugenieEUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. I think the Minister for Primary Industries had a bit of a Freudian slip there when he started talking about his review of fisheries management being about restoring public confidence in the fishing industry and then he remembered that that actually is not his job. It is interesting that this review which the Minister has previously talked about as being a high-level review" and which the ministry's own website says is only a "pulse check" has now been expanded slightly. But I do not think we can have any confidence in this review actually being independent or robust because of the very sorry tale that we have seen in the Heron report about the way the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) actually operates. That report shows that senior managers in the ministry actually made the decision to block prosecution when there was good video footage of this major problem of fish dumping in the investigation report for Operation Achilles. That could have gone to court it could have been robust but what did MPI do? It blocked that prosecution. I think we are seeing a Minister in denial about the issue of fish dumping. His responses in question time today to my questions just showed that he does not appreciate that it is a major problem. What the Minister and the Government are saying in relation to the Simmons report—which was a comprehensive investigation involving interviews with several hundred people in the industry and amongst fishers showing that fish dumping is a problem that the commercial industry is responsible for a major gap in the information that is reported to the ministry and what is actually caught and that the industry is actually catching more than double what it is reporting to the ministry. Why is this whole issue of fish dumping important? It is a problem not just because it results in fish being killed and wasted—fish that could stay in the sea and be available to recreational and customary fishers—but because it goes to the heart of fisheries management because the catch information is critical to understanding what fish stocks are and then setting the catch limits. So if there is inaccurate information if fishers are catching more than double what they are reporting it means that the very information that fisheries management is based on is wrong and therefore we will not be getting sustainable management. It leads to very poor decisions in estimating fish stocks and then setting those catch limits. As Dr Glenn Simmons said in his comprehensive report: "Reliable catch data is a basic and essential requirement for the effective management of New Zealand's fisheries. It is fundamental to the assessment of fisheries stocks and for setting of [total allowable catches]. … Without reliable data scientists practitioners and policy advisors cannot properly interpret fisheries trends the effects of technology or accurately evaluate the social and economic impact of actual or projected fisheries management measures. This inevitably leads to flawed decisions …". So we have had what the Director of Fisheries Management just last year called a systemic problem that has been at the heart of the quota management system since day one in 1986 yet the ministry and the Minister have failed to get on top of it. We have had a discards working party going for 4 years—that has failed to get on top of it—yet we have the ministry keeping this quiet. It would not have come into the public domain if the Operation Achilles report had not been leaked and we had not had the Minister and ministry being pressured into establishing the Heron review. At the same time in October 2014 when the Director of Fisheries Management was highlighting this systemic problem of dumping we had the briefing report to the incoming Minister. Yet that briefing report fails to even bring to the Minister's attention the issue of fish dumping. We have had a ministry that is progressively reducing the attention it pays to fisheries management. The ministry was created in 2011—the stand-alone Ministry of Fisheries was absorbed into that big superministry. In the latest strategic intentions document fisheries does not even get a separate stand-alone section in this document about what the strategic intentions of the ministry and the Minister are. Under this Government the whole key fundamentals of fisheries management are being disguised. The Government is not being transparent despite the Minister claiming that transparency is a priority of his. In the strategic intentions document fisheries barely gets a mention. We have not had the ministry bringing the issue of dumping to public attention; it has only been brought to public attention by the three universities—the University of British Columbia Oxford University and the University of Auckland—in the Simmons report highlighting the scale of the problem. The Minister and the ministry are in denial. A third of New Zealanders say that they love to go fishing. They love to drop a line off a wharf; they love to drop a line off a boat. People want to ensure that we have healthy oceans and that we have enough fish in the sea. Yet this Minister seems to think that there will always be more fish in the sea without taking any action to stamp out fish dumping and ensure that every fish that is caught is used and used well. What we have is extensive wastage and yet the Ministry for Primary Industries and this Minister are doing nothing to stamp that out. This review that he has set in place is only a high-level review. If the Minister is saying that video cameras and surveillance are the answer why is he allowing Trident Systems a company that is owned by 14 fishing companies to run that video camera monitoring? The public cannot have confidence in a system that has the fox in charge of the henhouse. That is what is happening with Trident Systems being responsible for video monitoring. We have had an independent company Archipelago Marine Research that has been shut out. It was Archipelago Marine Research's work in Operation Achilles that provided the evidence that MPI could have used to prosecute but did not. Everyone is interested in healthy oceans and healthy fisheries but there has been a huge undermining of public confidence when we have the major agency that is supposed to regulate fisheries management and is supposed to be promoting sustainable fisheries failing to prosecute those who break the law by doing extensive fish dumping. That has been a pattern in this ministry. We saw it last year with swamp kauri where again the ministry failed to enforce the law and require that only manufactured and finished timber products were exported. This Minister is allowing his ministry to get alongside industry and fail to be independent. He is allowing his ministry to be captured by the industry by the way it pays for a lot of the administrative functions and not do its job in enforcing the law. Sustainable management is supposed to be the purpose of the Fisheries Act yet when we have massive fish dumping which not only wastes fish but also ensures that the information that is used to set catch limits is inaccurate the industry is getting away with it and all the Minister can say is that it should pull its socks up. When you have got an industry that stands to make major profits by dumping fish that are too small to get a good price in the market they will continue to dump fish. It will not be stopped until the ministry takes action and under this Minister it is failing to do that. We need the public to be confident that we have an independent regulator not one that is captured by industry. That is why we need a full commission of inquiry an independent and robust review into the quota management system not just the Minister's pulse check which is the equivalent of a slap over the hand with a wet bus ticket. People want healthy oceans they want healthy fisheries but under this Government which is prepared to allow the industry to continue to dump fish in large quantities we are not going to get that. We need a change of Government."