Cameron MarkMARK CAMERON (ACT): Thank you Madam Chair and thank you Minister Parker for the opportunity to discuss this piece of legislation. Clauses 13 and 14 amending section 72 and inserting new section 72A on the dumping of prohibited fish and landings and discard rules as asserted in the legislation speak to 50 fewer or more fish sir?Hon David Parker: Yeah.MARK CAMERON: I'm trying to reconcile that. I've been fishing as a recreational fisherman for 25 years and worked alongside those that are commercial fishermen with set nets. They're telling me this as proposed is nonsensical. Now just to clarify why I've made that statement: mid-water fish. If you want to take the example of yellow-eye mullet and/or kahawai they both sit in the same pressure zones in the ocean. Quite often yellow-eye mullet are fished for bait fish by commercial fisherman. Inadvertently they also catch a lot of kahawai. How can you differentiate between species in mid-water fishing as an example? This is just one example and we've got several. When the fisheries industry has gone from a six-inch mesh to a five—sorry a four to a five to a six changed from a diamond to a square. They have spent decades fine-tuning lead lines weight lines cork lines so that these nets are falling into a certain pressure zone in the water setting at certain tide heights to alleviate this.Now your officials have said—and I have a lot of respect for the officials; they've worked very very hard and are very collegial. But they couldn't answer this. When they said that they were putting the squeeze on the industry to innovate they couldn't tell us what innovation looked like. Now that's one example Minister that I've given you where thus far there is no technology outside of recording what these people are catching. And this is the question I have for you: how do you reconcile that with a coastal fisherman who is catching multiple coastal reef fish which is very very different from oceanic blue water fleets with limited technology at their disposal? How do you reconcile that when they're going to be met with a prosecutorial reality that treats 50 anchovies—gracious me sprats—like 50 kingfish?Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for Oceans and Fisheries): Well if they are sprats they probably won't be caught in a net. In respect of the underlying ethos of this legislation we want people to land what they catch because generally what is thrown back is dead. Where fishing techniques enable the bycatch to be released alive there will be regulations promulgated to allow the release of that bycatch in those situations. And there are new mid-water haul techniques that are bringing up fish in a live state in a vessel of water which is expected to have a better chance of the survival of the fish that are released and so you can see that exceptions are likely to be made for that. But where the fish is dead the intention is that they be landed and that's for the reasons that I've previously outlined.Now there is as the member Mark Cameron rightly observes an unavoidable small level of bycatch that we are not so concerned about. Where you set that level is always going to be somewhat arbitrary and the advice from officials was to set that at 50 fish. Obviously the member is correct that if it was krill or some other tiny species like that relative to a tuna it is less significant. We did have discussion about whether we should have different limits for different fish species but we thought that that would be too confusing for people and hard for them to comply with the law because they wouldn't necessarily be able to remember the different rules.In respect of where people do inadvertently breach something in a very minor way of course the authorities always have a discretion as to whether they choose to enforce the law through the prosecutorial discretion that the Fisheries New Zealand prosecutorial arm has just as the Police or other agencies have a discretion as to whether they strictly enforce the law.