Brooking RachelHon RACHEL BROOKING (Labour—Dunedin): Thank you Madam Speaker for the opportunity to speak on a Thursday evening on this topic. Firstly congratulations to my colleagues Ingrid Leary and Jenny Salesa for getting this off the ground and doing all the work. I have to say I'm a little bit jealous that this is not a committee that I've ever sat on because it looks like you—the members of the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee—did some very interesting travel—Dr Hamish Campbell: Environment's better.Hon RACHEL BROOKING: —and had some very good conversations in the Pacific that have come through in this report. Yes I have colleagues on the Environment Committee over there and I don't think we'll get such travel.Anyway I was wanting to talk about the problem definition. We heard a little bit about it from both Ingrid Leary and also from Jenny Marcroft. That is that this illegal unregulated and unreported fishing particularly in the high seas and the international waters causes all sorts of problems. If we don't know how much fish is being taken and if there's a whole lot more fish being taken than what is expected then how do you do good fish stock calculations to work out how much legal fish should be taken? There are environmental effects. If you've got an area where you don't want bottom trawling to happen because of high biodiversity—say a whole lot of corals—and someone goes through and takes it out that's a problem. There's problems with bycatch. If you don't know that sea birds are being caught if they're just being dumped at sea—we don't know about that.We've also heard from Jenny Marcroft the point about food security and from Ingrid Leary and the Hon Jenny Salesa about the role of those Pacific Islands the people there the skills that they want to have in the islands—to be able to go and do the fishing themselves and to process that fishing themselves for their economy and food security. So it's a really important issue.Congratulations to the select committee for doing this report. Now of course this report dropped in August 2023 and I want to talk about a few things that happened in August 2023. One of them was—and we've had this mentioned before—that the bill on illegal and unregulated and unreported fishing was introduced to the House. I was very lucky to have that bill introduced in my name. I want to note that that bill had its first reading just recently so submissions are still open there until 15 May. It's the Primary Production Committee that will be looking at that bill. As the Hon Jenny Salesa said I really encourage the Hon Shane Jones and also the Rt Hon Winston Peters to keep up that good work and in focusing on the Pacific and focusing on this illegal fishing.I also want to talk about two other things that happened in August 2023. One of them was an enormous operation. I do not have my glasses on—and I think this is something that happens with ageing—so I cannot see everybody who is in the gallery but I suspect that some of them are wonderful public servants who I had the privilege of working with and who've been involved in the work on international agreements and with the regional fishing organisations but also on the surveillance. There was a big exercise that took place in August 2023 and that was Operation Island Chief. It was a 12-day operation covering—I think this is important to get the scale of the areas that we're talking about—18.2 million square kilometres. The operation involved nearly 350 personnel. The Poseidons—I appreciate that there are members in the House who know a lot more about these aircraft than I do but they had just over 44 hours of flying covering around 1.8 million square kilometres of ocean. Also that crew reported the activities and positions of 68 vessels. So the point here is that it's a big operation. They detected nearly 40 alleged breaches of high-seas rules. There's a quote here from Steve Ham who is Fisheries New Zealand Director of Fisheries Compliance. He noted that Our international team boarded and inspected more than 20 vessels at sea along with monitoring the movements of 120 other vessels during our air surveillance work. We found 38 alleged breaches—many of these were about non-compliant seabird mitigation gear being deployed." So that goes on. So some very impressive work there.In August 2023 there was a case as well from 2018 that was successfully prosecuted."