Sage Eugenie: Kaikōura (Te Tai-o-Marokura) Marine Management Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Kaikōura (Te Tai-o-Marokura) Marine Management Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 20 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16932. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):I am pleased to take a call on the Kaikōura (Te Tai-o-Marokura) Marine Management Bill. As with the Government’s subantarctic marine protection legislation the Green Party is supporting the bill because this is a step forward for marine protection but it is not going far enough. We are also supporting it to of course keep faith with the community representatives in the Kaikōura Coastal Marine Guardians which worked very hard for more than 7 years to develop the proposals.It is to the Kaikōura Coastal Marine Guardians that we pay tribute because it was its initiative to develop some protection for the Kaikōura coastline. It was not a Government initiative that has led us to this bill. Its work was in response to an early proposal for marine protection by Forest and Bird around the Kaikōura Peninsula in the late 1980s and early 1990s. So it has been a long time coming in getting some protection for this dramatic stretch of coast.Rino Tirikatene talked about fishing as a child. It has been the community’s concern too—the reduction in shellfish and the decline in the recreational fishery that has led people to propose some fishing regulations that are specific to the area that the bill includes and also the three mātaitai reserves and two taiāpure to recognise Ngāti Kurī’s strong customary interests in the area and their desire to protect those cultural values.But we have had National members including the Minister of Conservation suggest that the oceans are the new frontier for conservation and that National is somehow the saviour of the marine environment with this legislation. Nothing could be further from the truth because as my colleague Gareth Hughes spoke about it is this National Government that is opening up our oceans to major resource exploitation to very risky oil drilling encouraging seabed mining and that is directly at odds with our marine protection.So this bill is not that ambitious because although it is protecting an area in the Hikurangi Marine Reserve—sizable though it is; 10000 hectares—there is not a great deal of fishing pressure in that area. In fact if you look at the regulatory impact statement there is an estimate that the annual impact of displaced fishing activity will be only $1.1 million. So it is not a significant area for commercial fishing. Yet Kaikōura is a really important area for marine tourism. As others have said it generates $134 million annually locally and it is part of a much bigger marine tourism industry.Fifty percent of the international visitors to New Zealand take part in marine tourism. They spend $1.6 billion while they are here. If National was genuinely interested in having an economy that recognised its dependence on a healthy environment it would be doing much more in this bill to protect our marine environment on which that marine tourism depends and on which amenity values of New Zealanders depend because so many Kiwis love going to the coast particularly the Kaikōura coast. But National is not interested in genuine solid marine protection. The sanctuary that this bill establishes will still allow seismic surveying. To correct the member for Waitaki seismic surveying can have quite substantial impacts on marine mammals which is why there is a code of practice. But the fact that seismic surveys even though they are not the worst sort can occur in the whale sanctuary shows that there are some quite considerable flaws in the bill.Another of the flaws is the very limited area of the rocky coast that the Hikurangi Marine Reserve covers—only 2 kilometres. Its very jagged boundaries will create quite significant enforcement difficulties. It will create edge effects. Those boundaries have been criticised by both Forest and Bird and the New Zealand Marine Sciences Society. Another of the flaws in the bill is that National in its stingy funding of conservation is not giving the Department of Conservation any more money to help with enforcement and compliance of the marine reserve boundaries and that is expected to cost about $100000 a year. We look forward to submissions and we hope through the select committee process to be able to improve the bill.