Jones ShaneHon SHANE JONES (Minister for Oceans and Fisheries): It's a pleasure to stand and help shepherd this overdue piece of legislation through the House. Of course this piece of legislation points out that at a deeper level we actually need an aquaculture bill. Sadly I was unable to achieve everything I wanted in this bill and I will now turn to the questions posed by the former Attorney-General.Now this is unashamedly a piece of legislation designed to generate more confidence and certainty in industry to create jobs and to boost economic earnings and export revenue. Yes it will require the council to meet the costs on the rare occasion that they may find that there is a strong need to review the conditions of farms that had existed for decades and the next 25 years will give the confidence to the owners of these farms and their permits that they can dedicate their scarce resources to actually achieving economic outcomes rather than playing a type of roller derby with the local councils. The council can conduct a review of the conditions but no council is going to be allowed any longer to pursue their aberrant ways or indeed act on nimbyism which has driven sadly an enormous amount of cost structure into this industry. It's a very good discipline that where the conditions must be reviewed it has to be of such a threshold with such an egregious case that the councillors and the staff believe it's worthwhile on behalf of the community to dedicate community resources to address these particular conditions and not be driven by the growing number of people who want to protect their property values and advocate for amenity values which go straight into the capital and strengthen the capital value of the small number of New Zealanders that own properties at the beach who don't want to see aquaculture. Aquaculture is an industry equally as important as the landscape and amenity values enjoyed by the small number of Marlborough bach owners who have had a very long and successful career at driving aquaculture out of the Marlborough Sounds and I don't like that council because they actually created the seabed and foreshore debacle. So whilst the law does enable it to happen it ensures that they have to be genuinely serious concerns. Now there have been some remarks made that scientists and ecologists are concerned. Ecologists must not be allowed to interfere any longer in any indiscriminate unreasonable way with the march of economic growth to get some jobs in the regions. In relation to why we are settling for a year of 2050 now it is quite a long time: 25 years. Given that on 3 September 2024 I'm going to be 65 it's highly unlikely that I'll see the full fruition—Hon Tama Potaka: You don't look like it.Hon SHANE JONES: Who knows who knows who knows; young at heart young at heart—though it's highly likely that this will remain a contested area. But these are long-term capital investments and resource management in so far as industry exists within the marine environment is about trade-offs. We can't allow a minority range of concerns to overwhelm the need for regions to boost and create and enlarge the economic footprint in their own neighbourhood to keep people employed and to keep the confidence in the community so that we don't see this onward drift of people away to Australia or indeed the urban drift. So that should provide a necessary understanding as to why the period of time to 2050 is very important.Now the Hon David Parker raises a very good point: what is the return to the Crown or to the public for the occupation of what you might say is the commons—i.e. private enterprises occupying either oceanic space in the future or seabed and foreshore for the purposes of mussels and oysters? Sadly that particular issue has been confused by the mission creep that we're seeing in the seabed and foreshore legislation. Hopefully we will have time to address that oversight in the near future.