Sage Eugenie: Subantarctic Islands Marine Reserves Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Subantarctic Islands Marine Reserves Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 11 February 2014. Volume:696;Page:15826. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. I am pleased to be speaking at the third reading of the Subantarctic Islands Marine Reserves Bill but I think we need a bit of a lesson in history here. One of the earlier National speakers the Hon Phil Heatley a former Minister of Fisheries was almost claiming that National was responsible for marine conservation in New Zealand because it had passed the initial legislation in 1971. But the honesty around the history is the fact that that member and other National speakers need to acknowledge that the substantive work to establish these marine reserves was actually done under the previous Labour Government. It was in 2006 that the Department of Conservation produced this background resource document. It described the immense conservation and scientific values of the land and sea communities of the Subantarctic Islands. It was this document that recognised the strong international interest in better protecting the marine environment in the Subantarctic Islands. It was also an initiative of the previous Labour Government—not the National Government—that established the Subantarctic Islands Marine Protection Planning Forum in 2008 to actually go and investigate and consult on the options formarine protection around the islands. So National is reaping the reward of this work but it cannot claim all of the credit for it.In relation to the work of the subantarctic forum the bill is very much a missed opportunity because it implements the option for protection that was recommended by commercial fishers not the option that was recommended by Ngāi Tahu by environmental organisations like the Environment and Conservation Organisations of New Zealand and Forest and Bird by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research representative and by the scientific representatives on the forum. They were recommending that there be full protection of the territorial sea around the Bounty Islands and around Campbell Island. It would have been world leading if National had done that in developing the bill and if it had listened to the submitters to the Local Government and Environment Committee who supported that full extent of the territorial sea being protected. So what we have is a much-truncated couple of reserves coming through this bill. Nearly a third of the territorial sea around the Bounty Islands will be outside the marine reserve and that is so a longline fishery for ling can continue—a fishery that results in about half a million dollars a year of revenue so it is hardly a valuable fishery.The bill should have included the full extent of the territorial sea because the Bounty Islands have got hundreds of thousands of seabirds using the land mass and using the seas around the islands. We have got the biggest breeding colony in the world of New Zealand fur seals. If we had had a decent reserve there it would have gone right out to the extent of the territorial sea. That is critical because on the Bounty Islands you have got very little vegetation and very little soil and the seabirds and the other species depend absolutely on the oceans. Yet we have failed to recognise the full extent of that interdependence by failing to protect the full extent of the territorial sea.It is also a missed opportunity because around Campbell Island 61 percent of the territorial sea is going to be open to fishing subject to a prohibition on Danish seining and it is not going to be part of the marine reserve. One of the good things that the select committee did was to ensure that there was a review of that and of the potential for a deep-water crab fishery within 3 years of the bill going into law rather than 5 years as was proposed in the bill as introduced. But the far greater worth of an intact ecosystem would have been much better recognised if we had had a proper full marine reserve there.The Greens obviously would support that 100 percent protection but we do support this bill because something is always better than nothing. The United Nations Environment Programme described the islands as the most diverse and extensive of all the subantarctic archipelago so this bill with some protection is definitely better than nothing. But the fact that we are establishing the marine reserves under special legislation and that Parliament’s time is being taken to pass it shows again the fact that National has failed to introduce the marine reserves bill that it has long promised. Thank you.