Sage Eugenie: Kaikōura (Te Tai o Marokura) Marine Management Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Kaikōura (Te Tai o Marokura) Marine Management Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19784. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Chair. I am pleased to take a call on the Kaikōura (Te Tai o Marokura) Marine Management Bill. It is unusual to have such a short Committee stage and no debate on the third reading. The Green Party has agreed to this so that the bill can be passed by this Parliament and the marine protected areas that it establishes can go into law before the House rises later today for the election campaign.As the Minister of Conservation and others have noted the Kaikōura coast is unique because that very deep Kaikōura Canyon lies so close to shore. It is the canyon with its rich marine life that attracts the whales particularly the sperm whales and they are of course the basis of the $30 million marine tourism industry which is the basis of the whole economy for the township of Kaikōura. This bill and the fact that it establishes the Hikurangi Marine Reserve a whale sanctuary and a sanctuary for the fur seals should help protect the base of that marine tourism industry. As well the bill establishes two taiāpure areas and three mātaitai reserves and they will certainly help to safeguard customary fishing and allow for the restoration of Ngāti Kuri’s traditional rights in those areas. As well the bill makes some changes to the recreational fishing regulations which should also benefit marine life in the area by reducing bag limits both for some species of shellfish and for fin fish.The protected areas that the bill establishes are very welcome but they are only the proverbial drop in the marine protection bucket because the area of territorial sea and the economic exclusion zone that we have protected in New Zealand is still 0.41 percent. The Hikurangi Marine Reserve as Kelvin Davis noted is indeed a very odd-shaped drop in the bucket with the “F” on this map lying on its side. That is because as we understand it the boundaries were drawn to have the least impact on crayfishers and others and they avoided two quite important sea mounts. It has been really disappointing that it has got these odd-shaped 12-sided boundaries because as the Department of Conservation officials recognised that would make it much more difficult to enforce the prohibition on fishing within the marine reserve. As submitters like the Marine Sciences Society and Forest and Bird noted because you have got these odd 12-sided boundaries it means that the edge effects from fishing outside the reserve will have an impact much further in the reserve than would otherwise occur.The other thing that is disappointing is the lost opportunity. When we have got the State highway along the coast and it is very easy for people to access the coast we have got less than 2 kilometres of the really dramatic Kaikōura coastline protected as part of the marine reserve. Again we understand that that was to protect the crayfishers but visitors want to get up close and personal with nature in an unfished state and given the importance of marine tourism to Kaikōura it would have been a great opportunity to provide more chance for snorkelling and diving in areas where fishing does not occur.We welcome the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper 481 which reduces the review period from 25 years to 10 years. That is a very good initiative because we hope that the Kaikōura community will recognise the major benefits of the marine reserve and will want to see more of the shoreline protected when it goes through that review. But the marine protected areas in this bill do not make up for the fact that National is encouraging high-impact exploitation and potential devastation of parts of our marine environment through its encouragement and promotion of deep-sea oil drilling and seabed mining. We have had 11 oil company executives wined and dined by the Government soliciting their oil rigs and their oil drills. They will put our coast at risk of a catastrophe like the Deepwater Horizon one. The Green Party wants clean beaches that are safe from oil spills and no deep-sea oil drilling but National with its encouragement of deep-sea oil drilling risks our beaches being smothered with a thick and deadly blanket of oil if we have a catastrophe like Deepwater Horizon.Although we are establishing in this bill a fur seal sanctuary on the one hand on the other hand the Government has failed to outlaw the deadly fishing methods like set-netting on the west coast of the North Island to protect the threatened Māui’s dolphin. As others have noted we have more MPs now than we have Māui’s dolphins. The Green Party announced yesterday its plan to protect Māui’s dolphin and to make that sanctuary a real safe haven by outlawing set-netting and trawl-netting and providing assistance to fishers to move to dolphin-safe methods. So although this Minister is certainly an enthusiast for marine reserves of course it was a previous Minister who rejected the Akaroa marine reserve. Even with this marine reserve of over 1000 hectares it is still very small compared with the area that National has opened up to oil exploration.I have been on the Local Government and Environment Committee since 2011. On first coming to that committee we had marine reserves legislation that had been languishing in front of the select committee and this Parliament for more than a decade. We have had repeated promises by National that we would have new marine reserve legislation introduced to this Parliament. I expect the Minister will do it again at the Environmental Defence Society conference next week and tantalise the environmental sector with the prospect of better legislation for marine protection. We need that legislation to avoid ad hoc bills like this one.The other comment I would like to make is that the bill provides for the establishment of an advisory committee the Kaikōura Coastal Marine Guardians to advise the Minister of Conservation and the Minister for Primary Industries. We hope that given the international significance of the Kaikōura Canyon and the Hikurangi Marine Reserve in protecting a small portion of the area the Ministers will recognise that it is not just the Kaikōura community that should be represented on the advisory committee but the national and international interests in marine protection.We have got the University of Canterbury which has had a longstanding teaching and research laboratory in Kaikōura. It would be very useful to ensure that there is strong science representation on the Kaikōura Coastal Marine Guardians because this would help provide good objective baseline research to help inform the review of the marine protected areas in 10 years’ time and it would help we think with the work that will be done by Ngāti Kuri and others in restoring the taiāpure and the mātaitai areas and the fisheries in those. Good science is the basis of good management.As Gareth Hughes noted we would have liked to see the whale sanctuary established under the Marine Mammals Protection Act so that it could have protected other species like the dusky dolphins. But we do acknowledge the work of the Minister in getting this bill through and the work of officials both here in Wellington and in Kaikōura when the select committee travelled there. We would also really like to acknowledge the huge amount of effort that the members of Te Korowai put into this—the numerous meetings and discussions and the better understanding of the different points of view around the table. That collaborative process is an improvement in terms of the opposition we have seen in the past to the establishment of marine reserves. But as we have said before it does need to be done in the context of the marine protected areas policy and the guidelines in that.We applaud the work that everyone has done in getting the bill to this stage and we look forward to it being passed. Thank you.