5. Question No. 5—Oceans and FisheriesANAHILA KANONGATA'A-SUISUIKI (Labour) to the Minister for Oceans and FisheriesQuestion No. 5—Oceans and Fisheries5. ANAHILA KANONGATA'A-SUISUIKI (Labour) to the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries: What announcements has he made about improving the sustainability of the marine environment?Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for Oceans and Fisheries): This morning Dr Ayesha Verrall as Acting Minister of Conservation and I launched the Government's plan to revitalise the Hauraki Gulf. This delivers on an election promise. The Hauraki Gulf is our busiest marine environment. It includes the Auckland port and its beaches. It's popular for boating and fishing. It's home to an important inshore fishery and aquaculture as well as a vast array of biodiversity. Human activity both on land and at sea has placed pressure on the gulf and we need to take action to ensure it can be enjoyed by current and future generations. The strategy actions will work alongside the essential water programme in respect of sediment issues. Sustained action in the gulf is necessary to ensure that its environmental cultural and economic benefits can continue to be enjoyed by future generations.Anahila Kanongata'a-Suisuiki: What actions does the Government's plan to revitalise the Hauraki Gulf include?Hon DAVID PARKER: The package includes a fisheries plan with some 50 initiatives including a range of changes to commercial and recreational fishing practices and catch settings. Bottom trawling is being restricted to carefully selected corridors. Eighteen new marine-protected areas are to be created as part of the framework to support the active restoration of some of the most biodiverse regions in the gulf. The 18 new protected areas will increase marine protection in the gulf almost threefold. Better monitoring will improve our understanding of the marine environment and track progress over time. We are also working with mana whenua in local communities on local area coastal management in respect of local depletion issues. Promoting a prosperous sustainable aquaculture industry will also help clean up the water. We thank all of the many thousands of Aucklanders and people around the gulf for their efforts to bring forward the sea-change plans and the ministerial advisory committee that helped us get it to the shape in which we've landed.Anahila Kanongata'a-Suisuiki: What other changes has he made to oceans and fisheries management?Hon DAVID PARKER: The 2016 report on behalf of the prior National Government by Mike Heron QC into Operations Achilles and Hippocamp showed significant discarding and high grading of fish. We'll never know the exact quantity of what's been happening but it has been material. As a consequence last week we made two significant announcements to remedy the problem. The first is for 300 inshore commercial fishing vessels to be fitted with on-board cameras—this delivers on another of the Government's election commitments. On-board cameras will provide independent accurate information about commercial fishing activity; this will provide greater certainty and transparency and more evidence on which to base decisions about policy and regulation scientific research fisheries and protected species management. The roll-out will be staged to prioritise those vessels that pose the greatest risk to protected species such as Hector's dolphins black petrels and antipodean albatross. When complete cameras will record activity on vessels responsible for about 85 percent of the commercial inshore catch by volume.Anahila Kanongata'a-Suisuiki: What fisheries rules are the Government changing as a consequence of installing cameras on boats?Hon DAVID PARKER: This is part of a wider programme where we are clamping down on discards and high grading. In general from when these rules come into effect a fin fish if caught commercially will have to be landed. This will incentivise fishers to innovate and move to more selective fishing practices in order to catch only the fish they want and to find ways to avoid catching the smaller or economically lower-value fish if they don't want to catch them. The changes include simplifying the rules around which fish must be landed. Some of the rules are very complex for the commercial fishing sector to comply with currently. As a consequence of the greater transparency and more simplicity of rules we are able to move to a more graduated set of penalties that better reflect the scale of offending; sometimes those penalties are a bit over the top for minor offending at the moment. This is part of wider work that we are doing with industry leaders to improve the outcomes for everyone and I was gratified to see that there has been considerable support from not just environmentalists but also significant parts of the industry for the measures that we are taking.