Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe te Māngai o te Whare. Thank you. I'm pleased to take a call on the Fisheries Amendment Bill. The Greens will be supporting the bill to select committee in order to hear public views.This bill wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for the work of Dr Glenn Simmons and the Auckland University business school and their exposure of the scale of dumping and high-grading in New Zealand fisheries. Their work released in May 2016 really brought to public attention the fact that fish of low economic value were routinely being dumped overboard by fishers as they sought to target species of a higher value higher grade or avoid having to pay the deemed value penalty for catching quota fish species which they didn't have annual catch entitlement—or ACE—for. Dr Simmons showed that there was really gross under-reporting of what fishers were catching over many decades. Some 25 million tonnes of fish between 1950 and 2016 hadn't been reported by New Zealand to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.So it has been a fundamental rule of the Fisheries Act for a very long time—since 1986—that when commercial fishers catch quota species of a legal size they must land and report those catches. It's always been illegal to dump fish but the system had relied on honest reporting. What the Simmons report and Operation Hippocamp and Operation Achilles showed—which enforcement staff in the Ministry of Fisheries undertook because of the ministry's recognition of this ongoing problem of under-reporting and misreporting—was that there was a lot of dishonesty in the industry. The problem with Operation Hippocamp and Operation Achilles was you had very effective enforcement staff but senior management and the Ministry for Primary Industries made a decision not to follow through on their enforcement work and not to prosecute and as the Heron Report concluded that process and decision making was flawed. So there's a whole issue of a lack of public confidence and trust in the fishing industry and I think that while farmers throughout Aotearoa have recognised that they need to change their management practice and their farming techniques to earn that public trust and confidence and to maintain their social licence the same thing hasn't happened in the fishing industry. So we've got this bill which is requiring that all fish be landed if they're in the quota system and just in terms of terms quota is a right to take fish from a stock. That generates an annual catch entitlement at the start of each fishing year—in October—which is the annual catching right and of course that can be traded. Commercial fishers purchase an ACE to match the fish that they aim to catch.So it's really disappointing that it's taken over eight years for the Ministry of Fisheries and Fisheries New Zealand to actually develop this legislation but it is good that it is here because this requirement that all quota species which are caught have to be brought back and landed should—the hope is—encourage more innovation and should encourage better utilisation of fish that are caught. Here we really need to learn from international best practice from countries like Iceland: 80 percent of the fish that are caught in Iceland are used whether it's taking calcium out of the fish frames to make calcium supplements or whether it's using fish skins of cod to make high-end handbags. But in Aotearoa and elsewhere a lot of the fish once the fillets have been taken are discarded ground up into fishmeal or worse still go to landfill. This requirement to land and to report and the graduated system of penalties should help improve enforcement in this space so we are supporting that.But there are some criteria which provide some exceptions to the rule of landing all fish and one of those is that retaining it would have a negative economic value. Now the Minister referred to species which let off—some of the shark species—a high level of ammonia and taint the rest of the catch but we have some concern around this criterion and potentially efforts of the industry seeking to widen that definition of negative economic value" and what exceptions can be provided to enable them to discard more fish at sea. So we'll be particularly interested in the submissions on that point.We'd like to take up a point that Todd Muller raised in terms of the division within the sector. It was something that the Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor commented on as well: the very high level of distrust amongst stakeholders of the data that's used to set the total allowable catch and within the sector generally. I really encourage all of those making submissions to think about the sustainability of fisheries the collapse of a number of fish stocks that we're seeing and the impact of climate change on our oceans and to think of the bigger picture and the outcome for environmental management and good fisheries management rather than just the interests of the commercial fishing sector because we need to move beyond that division and we need to have a much more sensible and focused fisheries management system.That's where the Green Party is disappointed in this bill—that it's not moving to ecosystem-based fisheries management. It's not even seeking to give priority to the sustainability principles in the Fisheries Act. It's not using input controls. They were considered and then rejected—input controls like closing more areas having more controls and restrictions on the type of gear that can be used. We have a big problem with bycatch: the thousands of seabirds that are caught the dozens of dolphins the hundreds of fur seals that are caught each year in fisheries like the hoki fishery and the squid fishery. That bycatch issue isn't being adequately addressed by the industry and the bill doesn't really deal with it. Certainly there is a defence to release marine mammal species if they are caught. That is good but there needs to be a stronger regulatory regime and much greater emphasis on sustainability not only to ensure an ongoing fishery but to recognise as others have noted that consumers are increasingly looking for real proof that wild fish are caught sustainably and in Aotearoa New Zealand we cannot establish that for all of the species particularly because of the very limited data. When you only have $22 million being spent on average in the years between 2017 and 2020 on fisheries research that's a puny amount and that contributes to the lack of data. Again the Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor highlighted that that leads to decisions based on uncertain data and information and it has left big gaps in fisheries management. In Budget 2022 we need to see a much-greater investment in fisheries science and research in order to underpin a much more sustainable regime.Certainly there are provisions in the bill to ensure that cameras can be used to observe the processing and any discarding that happens on board once fish are landed but again there needs to be a much more rapid roll-out of cameras on boats. It's not good enough just to prioritise the Māui dolphin fishery because of the concerns about the impact of trawling on Māui; they need to be used and rolled out much more quickly.So we too in the Greens are concerned about the truncated select committee report-back period. We recognise that the Minister wants the bill in place for this fishing season but then there's a four-year transition allowed so it seems a bit at odds with doing it quickly and then allowing four years' transition. It would be better to ensure that the legislation is right because there will be quite a lot of contested submissions on the bill. But we do encourage the Government to really focus on some of the more fundamentals and to move away from the ethos that we've got at the moment which focuses on maximum exploitation of fisheries—fishing stocks down to the level at which it's assumed that they will maintain themselves. That is not the basis of ecosystem-based management or sustainable fishing.So the bill makes some small improvements. We'll be particularly interested in submissions but at this stage we're only supporting it to select committee."