Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker thank you. I'd also like to talk about resilience and about health. It's about the resilience of nature and the health of our oceans because our oceans are the lifeblood of our planet. They've been responsible for absorbing over a third of the excess carbon dioxide that's been associated with human-induced climate change. They've absorbed over 90 percent of the excess heat from that climate change. They are home to taonga species from dolphins whales fish—30 percent at least of Aotearoa New Zealand's biodiversity is in the sea. But even though they provide us with so much food and they are essential to our economy we have not been looking after them well enough and we need to invest in better care of Tangaroa to provide us with thriving oceans and to help them become more resilient. We've got continued sediment pollution from earthworks in areas like Auckland we've got plastic pollution going into rivers and into the sea and we've got overfishing and that's an area we really need to address.In Aotearoa New Zealand the Green Party wants us to have thriving oceans and our commitment to that was such that one of our six big policies that we championed during the election campaign was our policy for thriving oceans. One of the key commitments in that is to end bottom trawling and to end set-netting. Ending bottom trawling will end an industrial fishing method which involves dragging heavy nets weighted heavily across the seabed like ploughing the seafloor—bulldozing the seafloor. Each pass of one of those heavy bottom trawling nets on things like seamounts destroys coral destroys sponges. Those corals can be over a hundred years old. If they're destroyed they don't just bounce back and that's why we need much stronger action particularly now that we no longer have New Zealand First in this Parliament as a handbrake on action to move towards sustainable fisheries management. We need to stop bottom trawling. There was a petition that was presented last December—50000 New Zealanders want an end to this really destructive method of fishing. The Minister who was answering for the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries today indicated that something might be done but we need urgent action because other countries have acted. Chile has acted in 2017 to ban bottom trawling throughout 98 percent of its exclusive economic zone (EEZ). New Zealand's EEZ is one of the largest in the world; it's 15 times the size of our land area and yet we still allow bottom trawling.The New Zealand delegation in the recent meeting of the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation resisted efforts by the European Union to strengthen some controls that exist around bottom trawling. The New Zealand delegation the Ministry for Primary Industries resisted increasing the distance which vessels have to move to after they have had an accident and pulled up vulnerable marine ecosystem species like corals. New Zealand resisted increasing that distance from one nautical mile to five nautical miles. What that means is that if a fishing vessel encounters deep sea corals pulls them up then it only has to move one nautical mile away and it may still be damaging the same seamount.We know that these seamounts are biodiversity hot spots. We've got people like Dr Malcolm Clark in the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research highlighting that it will take them centuries to recover from bottom trawling. They are fished by the orange roughy fishery and that is one of the reasons with the industry pressuring that we've seen I think such slowness by New Zealand to protect seamounts. Who would want to eat orange roughy? These fish can live for over 200 years—Mr Seymour says he would like to. They live for over 200 years. They don't become sexually mature until they're about 20 years old. That means they are very slow to breed and their numbers are very slow to recover from overfishing. We need to move to ecosystem-based management we need to stop bottom trawling on seamounts if we want to have thriving oceans and that's one of the key commitments that the Green Party wants to see progress on in this Parliament as well as action on marine protected areas because again there we lag well behind the rest of the world. The Marine Reserves Act dates from the 1970s. We need to catch up with our Pacific neighbours reform that legislation and adopt the target of 30 percent of our seas being protected by 2030. Thank you.