Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. SPEAKER: The Hon Eugenie Sage—I apologise. Hon EUGENIE SAGE: Pardon? SPEAKER: I dropped the honorific—the Hon Eugenie Sage. We'll start again. Hon EUGENIE SAGE: Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. So in just over 45 minutes the first of the races between Luna Rossa and Team New Zealand's Te Rehutai starts. I'm not known in this House for following sports but these magnificent boats I do watch because these foiling monohulls they fly and also because of the commitment of the Team New Zealand team to an improvement in the health of Tīkapa Moana / Te Moananui-ā-Toi—the Hauraki Gulf: the leadership of Blair Tuke and Peter Burling in establishing the Live Ocean foundation to really champion an improvement in marine management oceans management not just around Aotearoa but internationally as well. As a very good programme by TVNZ's Sunday showed last weekend while the television screens when they're focusing on the boats show the magnificence of Rangitoto and the sparkling waters of the Waitematā Harbour underneath the waterline it's a very different story. If anyone hasn't watched Troubled Waters" I do encourage you to because the gulf does look stunning to those international audiences but now it supports less than 45 percent of the fish biomass that it did in 2025. Crayfish are functionally extinct. We have lost all of our big snapper. It means that there are expanses of kina barrens because the snapper that would have eaten the kina that were big enough to aren't there any more. As successive reports on the state of the gulf from the Hauraki Gulf Forum have shown there's been a continuing decline in fish. Trevally numbers are now 86 percent of their historical levels snapper are 83 percent and sharks which are a key top predator are 86 percent of their original biomass. We've got problems of sediment from subdivision but we've also got historically huge overfishing both by the commercial sector and the increasing pressure from an increasing population of recreational fishers being able with things like jet-skis to access parts of the gulf that they couldn't before. We've got all of this pressure on the gulf and yet 0.3 percent of this 1.2 million hectares in Tīkapa Moana is protected in no-take marine reserves. So I was very interested in the response that the Hon Kiritapu Allan gave to Chlöe Swarbrick's question when the Minister said that the release of the proposals and the Government response to Sea Change would include significant marine protection in the Hauraki Gulf. It needs to be significant. It needs to build on the efforts of community organisations. It needs to build on the efforts of iwi. The rāhui that Ngāti Pāoa are proposing around Waiheke Island going out to 1 nautical mile is closing that area to the takes of tipa or scallops; kūtai or mussels; kōura or crayfish; and pāua. Stocks of those shellfish and of crayfish have declined markedly and the rāhui by Ngāti Pāoa is an effort to restore the health of the gulf there. The Government response to Tai Timu Tai Pare the first marine spatial plan—Sea Change—that was launched in 2016 needs to be comprehensive. It needs to follow that objective of the Hauraki Gulf Forum to protect 30 percent of the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park. It needs to overhaul fisheries management so that we see stocks being allowed to restore. It needs to outlaw bottom-contact methods like bottom trawling and like dredging so that the seabed can recover. The Green Party strongly supports that goal of the Hauraki Gulf Forum and also its ambition to restore 100000 hectares of shellfish beds so that their filtering capacity can restore the clarity and the clean water in the gulf. There have been significant efforts by people like the Neureuter family the Noises Trust working alongside Ngāti Manuhiri the Auckland Museum Ngāti Pāoa Ngāti Whatua and others. The abundance that you see on Otata one of our first predator-free islands—wētāpunga; large numbers of skinks and geckos—and yet underwater you've got the kina barrens. The proposals that come out in response to Sea Change need to include a protected area around the Noises around Hauturu—a nature reserve at Little Barrier—to recognise that on land we've invested so much in restoration protection and the elimination of predators that biodiversity flourishes but we need to invest that same commitment in what happens in the marine space underwater. The Sea Change proposals were a start. I really look forward to the response."