Ewen-Street Ian: Fisheries Amendment Bill (No 4) — Second Reading 
Ewen-Street Ian: Fisheries Amendment Bill (No 4) — Second Reading 
[Volume:618;Page:14485] 
IAN EWEN-STREET (Green) 
: 
 Parliament is the last resort for people who have suffered injustice in our community. This bill means that Parliament has failed those people. It has looked at the injustice it has acknowledged the injustice and then it has cynically perpetuated the injustice. This is mean-spirited legislation that is wrong. It should be abhorrent to all reasonable people. 
The story of scampi is a litany of arrogance and incompetence. I will start by quoting from an affidavit by Mr Vaughan Wilkinson in a 1993 court case involving Petromont Holdings Ltd. He said in clause 12: “In or about 1987 Simunovich formed the view that there was sufficient numbers of scampi within New Zealand fisheries waters to sustain commercial fishing.” In clause 13 he said: “This view was founded on extensive research I had undertaken.” Well Vaughan Wilkinson was still working for the ministry in 1987. He left in February 1988 to become a senior manager with Simunovich Fisheries. It is interesting to note that the information he passed on to Simunovich was not passed on to other fishers. Simunovich knew that at some stage scampi would be brought into the quota management system and that the allocation would be based on catch history. At the same time and specifically on 9 December 1991 other fisher people were explicitly told by the ministry that catch history would not be used for future allocation of quota. 
In 1993 Petromont was successful in judicially reviewing the ministry’s management of the scampi fishery. The courts described the ministry’s process of allocating temporary catch history as unfair unreasonable and unlawful. I will jump ahead for a moment to the Court of Appeal hearing in 2001 when Justice Thomas said: “Following the Petromont decision instead of reconsidering the legality and fairness of its prior decision the ministry ‘remade’ exactly the same allocations.” 
In 1997 when smaller fishers judicially reviewed the ministry because they were going to take those temporary allocations into permanent quota rights the ministry introduced new regulations to pre-empt the court case. The ministry came to the Regulations Review Committee and in front of that committee it undertook to start again with a clean slate for scampi allocation if the court found that its actions had been illegal. The court subsequently did find that but on the basis of that assurance the Regulations Review Committee upheld the regulations. 
I move further on. In 2000 the High Court upheld the small fishers’ complaint and I say again that the court found the ministry’s regulations to be unfair unreasonable and unlawful. The High Court did not have the jurisdiction to make a judgment on the regulations so it went to the Court of Appeal which also found that the regulations were unfair unreasonable and unlawful and struck them down. 
There seems to be a myth abroad in the ministry and amongst some of my colleagues that the judgment from the Court of Appeal was a minority one. That is not the case. It was in fact unanimous. I quote from clause 100 of the court’s decision: “All members of the court are in agreement that the appeals should succeed”—in other words the appeals against the ministry. At that point one would have thought the ministry would accept that what it was trying to do was unlawful and unreasonable and that it would change its policy—but it did not. It continued to do the same thing. Basically it was thumbing its nose at the courts and at the Regulations Review Committee. The ministry also reneged on its undertaking to the Regulations Review Committee to start with a clean slate. 
Then we come to the two inquiries that other members have discussed. First of all I mention the select committee inquiry which really in my opinion failed to identify the solution to the wrongs that had been done in terms of reallocation of quota—because clearly the allocation mechanism was deeply flawed. The State Services Commission inquiry found that there was an unprofessional relationship between Simunovich Fisheries and the ministry and found that favouritism had been exhibited. I would urge members to look at the  
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 
 and at the definition of corruption. The definition of corruption in that dictionary states that favouritism is corruption. I will leave members to draw their own conclusions. 
The two inquiries have been described as my colleague Phil Heatley said as the most scathing criticisms ever directed at a Government department in New Zealand. So we—certainly I—were utterly amazed to find that the chief executive officer had put out a press release claiming that the reports had completely vindicated his ministry. They had not. They had done anything but that. I would have thought that any press release the chief executive officer put out would have signalled his gallant falling on his sword. 
Even worse than that after the release of the two inquiry reports and while the Primary Production Committee was still considering the bill was the Ministry of Fisheries’ announcement that it was going to change the boundaries of the quota management areas. We asked the ministry to give us a breakdown of how that would impact on the actual quotas. Ministry officials arrived the following week with a chart and the chart had blank cells in it. That was the ministry telling the Primary Production Committee what the changes were going to be—with blank cells! When we said that that was not good enough they came back an hour later with the cells filled in. In that chart they said that Simunovich Fisheries would get an additional 129 tonnes which was greatly in excess of the total allocation for any other fisher. When we complained and said that that was still not good enough they went away and an hour later came back with a third sheet of paper. This time the increase for Simunovich was only 64 tonnes which was still greater than the total allocation for any other fisher—except Sanford Ltd. That is outrageous. Constitutionally it is unbelievable. 
I believe that the favourable treatment shown to Simunovich and the unfavourable treatment shown to other fishers in the scampi fishery should not be perpetuated by putting that allocation model into the quota management system based on the 1992 catch history years. Simunovich has already had more than a decade of preferential fishing as a result of the ministry’s incompetence—or dare we say “worse than incompetence”—and that injustice should not be made permanent. I have no real objection to scampi going into the quota management system but not on the basis of the injustices that have been shown up by two inquiries the High Court of New Zealand and the Court of Appeal. I say that the ministry has been grossly incompetent and that the people at the top of the ministry should be resigning. If they are not prepared to resign they should be made to resign. 
In addition and to compound that unfairness which the Government is now putting into perpetuity the Government is allocating this quota by legislation and in so doing it is taking away the usual rights of appeal that fishers have—that is an appeal to the Catch History Review Committee and the usual right of review by the judiciary. The Government has chosen to put its own shonky decision-making beyond the reach of the courts by forcing this allocation through by legislation. This bill is very bad legislation and the Greens will definitely not be supporting it.