Hughes Gareth: Aquaculture Legislation Amendment Bill (No 3) — First Reading 
Hughes Gareth: Aquaculture Legislation Amendment Bill (No 3) — First Reading 
[Volume:668;Page:15316] 
GARETH HUGHES (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora Mr Deputy Speaker. Nga mihi nui ki a koutou. Kiwis love our oceans. Oceans cover 70 percent of our planet and represent 95 percent of the biosphere and in New Zealand our waters are particularly special. Members may not have noticed but a few weeks back the big biodiversity conference wrapped up in Nagoya Japan. The 10th meeting of the Conference on Biological Diversity received both brickbats and bouquets. Delegates heard that we are in the midst of a great extinction event with species disappearing at a rate between 100 and possibly 10000 times greater than the historical level. 
The biodiversity crisis is particularly important and it is global. It requires international solutions. We used to think when we looked at our oceans that they were unlimited and that it would be impossible for humans to fundamentally impact and change our oceans. However climate change ocean acidification oil and mineral exploitation whaling overfishing and pollution are all taking their toll on our marine environment. A major recommendation from scientists at the conference was that some areas just need to be off limits to humans. 
In Nagoya under the agreed protocol Governments committed to protecting 17 percent of the land and 10 percent of the world’s oceans by 2020. The 10 percent by 2020 protected area target sounds impressive but it is similar to something we have heard before in this Parliament which was: “New Zealand? Ten percent by 2020? Pah!’ said the New Zealand Government because we already had a 10 percent by 2010 target. If members had heard our delegates in Nagoya they would have heard them say that we are doing great and we are almost there and that 7 percent of our territorial sea is in marine reserve. What they forgot to mention of course is that it is not just the territorial sea that is counted but our marine area our exclusive economic zone. It is a total area of 4.15 million hectares which is less than close when we take into account the fact that only 0.3 percent is in marine reserves. Add in marine mammal sanctuaries and our marine protected area is a paltry 0.77 percent which is a long way off the 10 percent by 2010 target. With 3 months to go until the deadline how are we going? Do we have much chance of meeting that target? Not likely considering this Government has introduced a moratorium on marine reserves in the exclusive economic zone until 2013 last year it stopped the Department of Conservation from applying for marine reserves and in Akaroa it declined a marine reserve application because of recreational fishing impacts. 
I mention this in order to highlight the role of the Greens in this House which is to be a voice for the environment and to talk about the sustainability issues that are often ignored in the pursuit of profit. The Aquaculture Legislation Amendment Bill (No 3) on the whole ignores sustainability issues. This omnibus— 
Jacqui Dean 
: Silly man. 
GARETH HUGHES 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I take offence to being called a silly man by the member opposite. 
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: We are called many things in this House. This is a debating chamber. I am sure the member will over time hear other things. 
GARETH HUGHES 
: I may be a silly man but I am not talking about silly issues. This omnibus bill deals with removing barriers to commercial aquaculture which is just one aspect of how Kiwis interact with the ocean for pleasure profit and conservation. The message we are bringing into this House is that we cannot look at aquaculture in isolation. We need some joined-up thinking. New Zealand has some 5800 hectares occupied including freshwater farms in some 1200 marine farms. 
Aquaculture can be good with the right species in the right place; however it must be sustainable. We cannot be establishing an aquaculture system that will just crash and burn. We heard from the Minister of Fisheries and Aquaculture that by 2020 it is estimated that aquaculture will make up 58 percent of worldwide seafood production. What the Minister did not answer was why we would be doing that. What has happened to all the fish that are wild? What has happened to them? We have simply eaten them. 
Looking to the future of the aquaculture industry we are hearing talk of around $1 billion in earnings by 2025. Aquaculture New Zealand estimates that that will require some 17000 hectares of inshore mussel farms or approximately 10 times that amount for offshore farms. We support ecologically sustainable aquaculture and we support economic development. But the Greens will be voting against this bill because we believe it is the marine equivalent of the 1991 Building Act. It is establishing through lack of planning and lack of regulations huge problems downstream. 
The Minister quoted the Food and Agriculture Organization but forgot to point out also what that organisation says about the environmental impacts. The Food and Agriculture Organization points to pollution nitrification transmission of diseases and displacing other activities like marine protected areas that would come on account of this bill. Between 1985 and 1995—and I know we are not talking about shrimp fisheries; we are talking about finfish fisheries in this bill—36 million tonnes of wild-caught fish was used as feed to produce only 7.2 million tonnes of shrimp. This bill will make it easier to farm finfish in New Zealand which will have massive impacts. Around the world 31 million tonnes of wild-caught fish was fed to other fish. This will hugely impact on our “clean green” brand. Around the world our fisheries have been called into doubt by the  
Guardian 
 by  
The 
Economist 
 and by the  
New York Times 
; even the Queen will not eat orange roughy from New Zealand any more. We need to take account of the impact of sustainability issues.  
I will now quickly go through some of our concerns with this bill including the lost opportunities for spatial planning in relation to the aquaculture agency and the lack of local decision-making in the coastal plans. Firstly when looking at spatial planning we can see that there are many activities that occur in New Zealand’s marine area such as fishing boating water sports and enjoying conservation and aquaculture should not be seen in isolation. We need to take an integrated approach in this bill.  
Green Party policy supports integrated marine ecosystem planning. According to the Environmental Defence Society and other experts best practice involves heading towards integrated marine spatial planning. This bill does not create a comprehensive integrated mechanism to replace the regional aquaculture management areas. The Environmental Defence Society submitted to the initial technical advisory group report that integrated spatial planning—or a similar framework—should be in place before we remove the red tape for accelerated commercial development.  
When looking to the aquaculture agency we agree with the Environmental Defence Society’s concern that the representation of industry interests as well as responsibility for setting environmental standards the drafting of national policy and the management of the environmental impacts of aquaculture are too many functions to be vested in one agency. The greater role of central government in aquaculture development creates potential conflicts of interest whereby the regulator of the activity is also the advocate for the activity. This can lead to under-regulation and poor environmental outcomes. In a nutshell it is not good policy or practice for the industry’s promoter also to be the regulator.  
Lastly the bill follows poor legislative and democratic processes by directly amending the two regional coastal plans. That is a bit of a trend of this Government whereby it will sack entire regional councils in Canterbury change waterway plans such as the ones developed by the Greater Wellington Regional Council for Transmission Gully and call in giant motorway projects such as Waterview Connection in Auckland and allow the community very little time to consult on it. Or as in the case of Mana the community will have no ability to know where the motorway is as the route will not be announced before members of the community have their most powerful democratic function—their power to deliver a message with their vote in the ballot box. This Government will not even tell the voters of Mana where the motorway is going or whose houses will be bowled for this development.  
When it comes to questions of local democratic involvement this Government errs on the side of the corporate. It errs massively in its own interests in order to ram through—much like we will be doing under urgency again tonight—issues such as this. This bill also follows poor legislative and democratic process in that it changes the coastal plans to allow for the application for consents to develop finfish farming which has significantly different and more extensive environmental impacts than shellfish farming. It is not clear whether large-scale finfish farming could be ecologically or economically sustainable in the medium to long term. This should be studied and there should be local democratic input into these plan changes.  
In conclusion the select committee process will allow greater investigation and despite voting against this bill we look forward to engaging with it in the select committee. We hope this bill can be improved to better achieve its aims but we think the fundamental approach will make it difficult for the bill to be amended to the point where the Greens will support it. This bill is about making it easier and faster for corporate aquaculture to grow. We are not opposed to economic development and aquaculture in general but it must be planned it must be regulated and there must be sustainability. What we are doing here is like that other great folly in this House: we are replicating the 1991 Building Act. We will see huge problems in our marine environment down the line. Kia ora.