Baldock Larry: General Debate 
Baldock Larry: General Debate 
[Volume:625;Page:20676] 
LARRY BALDOCK (United Future) 
: 
 United Future is calling for urgent action on the appalling situation revealed by the report on the employment conditions in the fishing industry and in this debate I will focus on that serious matter. If legislation is needed we have offered our support to the Government to take urgency at the first opportunity in order to address that shameful matter because we do consider it to be serious. Firstly the report covers the issue of foreign crews on New Zealand vessels and then secondly the more important and disturbing matter of foreign charter vessels. Two companies were investigated not because they were the only ones that may have been at fault but because they were the only two New Zealand companies that had approval in principle to employ foreign crew. 
The report’s summary states that the Amaltal Fishing Co. Ltd has some matters to be addressed. We understand from the Minister’s answers to questions yesterday that Amaltal Fishing has agreed to go to the Employment Relations Authority to review those issues. To be fair to the company the report made it clear in paragraph 13 that the foreign crew members on Amaltal Fishing boats were happy with their working conditions and crew members noted that the conditions were much better that those on boats they had worked on in their own countries’ fishing industries. That is how it should be: foreign workers coming to New Zealand should find better conditions here than they had at home. The report then stated that no problems were identified with the Sealord Group Ltd but went on to state that the full information required by the inspector was not available within the deadline for the report. In reality that means that the Sealord’s company has not been investigated at all. That may explain why Sealord’s is so willing to work with the department and the New Zealand Fishing Industry Guild to change its pay practice in order to ensure compliance with the law as explained by the Minister yesterday. I will say no more about Sealord’s at this stage. 
But then we come to the matter of foreign charter vessels which is the real reason that United Future called for this report. Foreign charter vessels are the real issue of concern in our fishing industry. Approximately 35 to 50 foreign-owned vessels with approximately 2500 foreign crew are fishing under charter to New Zealand companies in our exclusive economic zone. Point 35 on page 7 of the report states: “There is a strong possibility that conditions of employment on foreign-owned vessels fall short of the standard within New Zealand.” That they “fall short” is a bit of an understatement really when we look at it. We can look at quotes from page 15 of the report some of which were read out in the House yesterday and I will refer to just one more case that of a worker who suffered frostbite from working in the freezer that was bad enough to require hospital treatment in Timaru. When he returned to the vessel he was made to remove the dressings and get on with the work back in the freezer. 
Those sorts of conditions are appalling. On page 14 point 4 of the report makes it clear that those appalling stories do not originate from the vessel under charter to Amaltal Fishing as that company’s boat had Indonesian and Japanese crew and the offending vessel had a mix of Indonesian Filipino and Chinese crew with Korean officers. That is why it is important for the investigation to be completed. We must identify which New Zealand companies are turning a blind eye to the appalling treatment of foreign workers so they can be named and held accountable without a shadow being cast over all New Zealand companies and the good ones being tarred with same brush. 
This appalling report raises the question of why we use foreign charter vessels. The answer seems to be simply because that is how quota holders get the best price for leasing their quota and I say that that is wrong. It has developed as a practice that discriminates against New Zealand fishers who want to lease quota and catch our fishing resource themselves because the consequence of using foreign charter vessels is that there is no margin for a reasonable profit for New Zealand fishers and fishing companies that pay our taxes and our wage rates. They therefore struggle to compete with the charter vessels that use almost slave labour and pay no New Zealand taxes. Rather than seeing a level playing field that allows all New Zealand fishers a chance to benefit from our exclusive economic zone and its resources we are seeing the appalling exploitation of foreign workers cause a skewing of the price of quota which benefits not real fishers but paper fishers who never go to sea any more to earn an honest living. That must be stopped and we call on the Government either to fix it or ban it. 
United Future’s suggestion is to take the first step of requiring inspectors to be on every foreign vessel and requiring that the cost of that be passed on to the New Zealand companies that are chartering them. Without inspectors we will not be able to verify and expose if necessary the truth about what is going on. What is going on is horrifying to those New Zealanders who have learnt about it in the last few weeks.