van de Molen TimTIM van de MOLEN (Chairperson of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee): I so move. The scourge of illegal unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing is a priority issue for Pacific States and New Zealand has a strong leadership role to play in this area. I'm very pleased that the House has set aside time today for a special debate on the report from the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee into its inquiry on this issue of IUU. I'd particularly like to thank the former chair of this committee under the last Parliament the Hon Jenny Salesa for her guidance of this report through a sustained period of time as that committee considered a range of issues that were relevant to the scale of its inquiry and indeed sought feedback from a broad number of partners and indeed travelled actually into the Pacific to better understand some of those challenges. So I do want to acknowledge her work in that as well.Now the report highlighted 11 different recommendations and I won't delve into all of those. I'm sure they'll be traversed more broadly from subsequent speakers. But ultimately the first recommendations were about obtaining a better understanding of how this issue of illegal unregulated and unreported fishing is permeating through our Pacific context. And unfortunately like a lot of illegal activity we simply don't know how bad it is because of course the action of those undertaking that activity is typically designed to avoid detection and therefore makes it very hard to report or to know the scale of that. There are mechanisms we can utilise to try and improve that of course. A lot of that revolves around increasing the level of communication and coordination and that was one of the recommendations that also came out of this report highlighting the need to have a more cohesive and coordinated response across the Pacific to information sharing to the use of technology to the training of personnel in terms of understanding identifying reporting and monitoring of these sorts of issues.And so on that focus it made sense to identify the key issue of actually trying to obtain that better understanding first and foremost. That coordination then the opportunity to work together more broadly will of course play a critical role in underpinning how we can improve our response across the Pacific region for this. And some of the recommendations talk to those aspects. There are others that also talk to the need or the opportunity to explore further use of technologies that are evolving that can add some value in this space alongside upskilling local Pacific communities or their officers working in the fisheries monitoring and reporting space to help ensure that they are best able to contribute to the broader effort as well. And then indeed looking at hardware in terms of actual capabilities assets that can be deployed. For example New Zealand Defence vessels that can do direct monitoring in exclusive economic zones around the Pacific to help deter or indeed to confront any vessels that are carrying out illegal unregulated or unreported fishing in any of those exclusive economic zones that they may choose to operate in.And then the final recommendations were effectively around the need to continually evolve our response over time. This is an issue again like a lot of illegal activity that is never solved outright. There are always ongoing challenges and ongoing need to remain nimble to the potential nefarious evolution of that activity as it may be carried out by those perpetrators as again new technologies come on board that can potentially make it easier to flout the rules put in place. So it should be that we must continually review how we can adapt and try and close those loopholes or reduce the likelihood of this activity continuing in our Pacific region. And then finally it was about looking at actually in the New Zealand context what we can be doing better here to ensure that we are delivering the right outcomes.And so the Government response that was tabled just in March highlighted their approach. Seven recommendations were agreed with. For another four the intent was agreed with and then we saw the fisheries amendment bill that has flowed through and had its first reading right at the end of March as well. So I think there's been a really good response from the Government to the work of the committee and I'm sure members will traverse that more broadly. But I appreciate the opportunity to highlight this very important issue in the House today. Thank you.