Carter David: Aquaculture Reform Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Carter David: Aquaculture Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 14 December 2004. Volume:622;Page:17751. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon DAVID CARTER (National) 
: 
 I want to deal with the misinformation that was given to the Committee earlier by the Minister of Fisheries in his rabid outburst when he suggested that when Doug Kidd negotiated the 1992 settlement he deliberately took aquaculture off the agenda. That is absolutely untrue. I shall clarify for that Minister if in fact he is mistaken—but I doubt it—that what Doug Kidd forbade further discussion on was a Treasury report that was around at the time that investigated whether aquaculture should come into the quota management system. Doug Kidd said that that notion was off the agenda and was not to be discussed. David Benson-Pope suggested to the Committee today that Doug Kidd’s statement could be taken as his saying that aquaculture was not to be part of the discussion. What Doug Kidd said was that aquaculture coming into quota management was not a discussion topic on the agenda of the Government of the day. 
I shall deal with whether aquaculture was part of the discussions associated with the deed of settlement. I refer to Gardiner and Parata’s report commissioned by Te Puni Kokiri in 2002. Gardiner and Parata quite specifically asked the people involved in the 1992 settlement whether aquaculture had been excluded from the deed of settlement. I previously mentioned Mr Phil Major a senior adviser to the Minister of Fisheries at the time; he said that he could not recall the matter being explicitly on the table during discussions between Ministers negotiators officials or advisers. Doug Kidd also has confirmed to me that at no time was aquaculture seriously on the discussion trail. Hauraki Greenland the manager of Te Puni Kokiri said that although he had joined the discussion late in the process of the deed of settlement he had no recollection of aquaculture being recorded. Belinda Clark the manager of Te Puni Kokiri at the time said quite specifically that Te Puni Kokiri had not been part of many of the meetings around the detail of the deed of settlement but to her knowledge from the meetings she had attended the matter of aquaculture had not been raised. George Habib an adviser to the negotiators gave a very lengthy interview but to summarise he quite specifically said that there had been no specific mention of aquaculture. 
So it is a mistruth for the Minister to suggest to the Committee that aquaculture was taken off the table. That was not the case at all. It was simply that nobody bothered to raise the issue because everybody involved in the process genuinely saw the deed of settlement as full and final settlement of commercial-fishing rights—inshore offshore and coastal. 
I want to deal with another matter that the select committee spent a lot of time on and that is what we got to call the patchwork quilt. That is the issue whereby the allocation of 20 percent of space to Maori—in the case of new space 40 percent—may result in Maori getting a whole lot of space that effectively is useless to them. Mr Benson-Pope said in the House yesterday that the select committee had solved that problem. I assure the Minister that the select committee did not solve the problem. We went a long way towards alleviating the problem but this legislation still has a mechanism whereby when a current aquaculturist successfully applies for a private plan change to extend space in order to create a new aquaculture management area adjacent to an area where he is operating aquaculture at the moment Maori get 20 percent of it. That is wrong. It is wrong to ask the industry to go through all the costs associated with the creation of new areas then to gift 20 percent of them to Maori. It is absolutely unprincipled. But what will happen is Maori will end up with 20 percent of perhaps 1 hectare of extension and that will be of no use to them at all. If David Benson-Pope is so out of touch with his own portfolio that he thinks the select committee managed to solve that situation he is absolutely wrong. 
This legislation will cause bitterness and grievance.