Hughes Gareth: Kaikōura (Te Tai-o-Marokura) Marine Management Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHughes Gareth: Kaikōura (Te Tai-o-Marokura) Marine Management Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 22 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19366. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GARETH HUGHES (Green):Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I rise to support the Kaikōura (Te Tai-o-Marokura) Marine Management Bill. The Green Party loves our oceans we love marine reserves and we love marine protected areas. We have a vision for New Zealand that every New Zealander can have their birthright and go swimming on oil-free beaches or in a lake or stream and to not get a one-in-20 chance of getting sick when they swim in some of our monitored rivers. It has a vision that Kiwis can go out and put craypots out with their dads keep fishing and—I am a bit of a hopeless surfer—that Kiwis are out there enjoying our surf and our treasured beaches. So I rise to support this bill which is a small step in the right direction toward protecting the waters coasts animals and species that we as New Zealanders love.This bill establishes a new marine reserve whale sanctuary and other provisions off the Kaikōura coast. The Green members will be voting in support of this bill. We have voted for it throughout. However in this speech after the Local Government and Environment Committee report-back I would like to note some of our concerns around the outcomes we see. First up we support this bill. We would like to thank the committee we would like to thank the new chair Maggie Barry we would like to thank the officials and we would like to thank all the submitters but most of all we would like to thank the local community and Te Korowai o Te Tai o Marokura which came together over 7 years to negotiate this. They used a gifts and gains approach to negotiate this and the member is correct that they have been contentious in our country’s past but this one has had a measure of community support which we welcome.It is great to see some marine protections on this coast given that New Zealand has only 0.41 percent—that is less than 1 percent—of our waters protected in marine reserves. What we know from all the evidence—from all the science—is that they are important they contribute to economic development in our regions they provide jobs for the local communities and importantly they actually work. They do protect the species and the ecosystems within them.We support it but let us touch on those three concerns I talked about. The first is that this process and this legislation soon to be passed do not even meet the Department of Conservation and the Ministry for Primary Industries’ Marine Protected Areas Policy and Marine Protected Areas: Classification Protection Standard and Implementation Guidelines. The Government officials and Ministers who signed it off have done an awful amount of work on these guidelines over the years to make sure we have good best-practice marine protected area policies like marine reserves but in this case we actually see it being absolutely disregarded. What I would have preferred to see is a more effective marine protected area being established than what we see here. The first concern is that the guidelines have not been met.Secondly when it comes to the Hikurangi Marine Reserve I think it is fantastic that we are using a marine reserve—the strongest protection measure—to protect this iconic feature of this coast the Hikurangi Trench. It is an amazing feeding ground for whales and an important part of the local economy. Kaikōura runs off the whale-watching operations which are responsible for numerous jobs in that community. It is great to be protecting it. However what we see with this marine reserve is that it must be one of the oddest marine reserves in the country. We are talking about a 12-sided—it is hard to describe—marine reserve covering only the bottom the benthos of the trench. The sides the important biological and ecological diverse areas where there are a lot of fish are not protected. We are protecting only the bottom. Only 1.97 kilometres of the coastline is protected. So what you see is this very odd complex multisided shape with very little area touching the coast. We have heard about the enforcement and detection fears with such a complex shape.We also heard from Dr Nick Shears senior lecturer at the University of Auckland who talked about the boundary effects. In any marine reserve no matter how big it is depending on the type of species that are resident in the marine reserve obviously they are going to move on the boundary be it a starfish moving slowly or a crab or a lobster moving maybe a little bit faster a crayfish or a fast-swimming finfish which can swim much faster. What the boundary effects show is that the actual effective size of the marine reserve is reduced by the boundary effects. When you have got such a complex 12-sided shape which is very narrow the boundary effects are magnified many times. What we heard on the select committee from this expert was that the marine reserve’s real impact on the marine environment and those protected species is limited because of those boundary effects.Lastly when you look at the new whale sanctuary it is fantastic that we are protecting the local whale species but the Green Party would not have stopped just there. We do not think that just a whale sanctuary is needed; what we need is a marine mammal sanctuary. There are other threatened and critically endangered species resident in the area such as the Hector’s dolphin. By setting up this stand-alone whale sanctuary there are no powers to protect those other species threatened by the Government’s deep-sea oil drilling agenda—from the gigantic underwater noise explosions of the seismic surveys through to the lethal fishing nets which still haunt the Hector’s and Māui’s dolphins—and these animals are not being protected because we are making only a whale sanctuary. The Green Party would have extended this and used the Marine Mammals Protection Act 1978 provisions to apply a more generous wider sanctuary encompassing more species.So in summary the Green Party supports this bill. We love our oceans. We want to protect them. We want to see New Zealand do a lot more than have just 0.41 percent of our waters—less than half of 1 percent—protected in marine reserves. We have got concerns around the process and the marine protected areas guidelines were not being used. The Hikurangi Trench is this odd 12-sided complex hard-to-enforce boundary-effects-magnified marine reserve. We think that we could have done better. We could have had a larger more uniform shape and that is what the experts have advised the committee. Lastly the whale sanctuary should have been extended to other animals. But we will be voting in favour of the bill. I urge any interested submitters to read our minority report which while supporting the bill points out these concerns in a bit more detail.On a final point the clock is ticking down. You also have to ask the rationale as to why this happening right now. It has taken 7 years and now the Government is trying to rush it through and the reason is that the Government is incredibly weak when it comes to the environment. New Zealanders tune into the TV and they see those dolphins that live in this area—the Hector’s dolphin and their cousin the Māui’s dolphin. They see a Government that is risking the future of the dolphins risking the extinction of the dolphins because of its actions. We see a Government that is happy to still allow lethal fishing nets in their sanctuary. We have a Minister who is happy to sign off on great underwater noise explosions that can deafen the Māui’s dolphins—the seismic surveys. We see a Government that in the last 5 years has covered one-third of the Māui’s dolphin sanctuary in marine mining permits—permits that the Department of Conservation itself says are troubling and likely to degrade the Māui’s dolphin environment. With 55 Māui’s dolphins left we should not be gambling with their future for the pollution economy.When it comes to our sea lions we are seeing them on a pathway to extinction because the actions needed to protect the critically endangered New Zealand sea lions is not happening. The Government embarrassingly backed to the hilt—including with public subsidies—Trans-Tasman Resources with Dame Jenny Shipley as a director. It is a company that even National’s Environmental Protection Authority could not grant the permit to mine the iron sands in the blue whale area—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order!GARETH HUGHES: Lastly when it comes to the marine reserves we have had a target for more than 14 years now to get to 10 percent. The size of this marine reserve is absolutely tiny. It moves only the decimal point when we come to the percentage of New Zealand’s waters being protected. The Green Party will get us to not just 0.41 percent; we will go further than this the step in the right direction. We will get us to 30 percent. It starts with the Kermadec Islands Marine Reserve and I have a bill in my name on that which overnight takes us from 0.41 percent to 15 percent.This election a lot of people get a choice on how we look after our oceans. We support this bill but I can commit to the people of New Zealand that we would look after the Māui’s dolphins and we would look after the whales the sea lions. We would do more to protect our oceans. Ultimately it is our birthright as New Zealanders to swim in oil-free seas to surf our beautiful beaches and to enjoy a coastline that has not been mined. I want my kids to grow up with a future with Māui’s dolphins not just hanging on but Māui’s dolphins thriving. That is the future. That is the smarter greener economy the Green Party is championing and that is what we will be doing this September. Kia ora.