Carter David: Fisheries Amendment Bill (No 4) — In Committee 
Carter David: Fisheries Amendment Bill (No 4) — In Committee 
[Volume:619;Page:14572] 
Hon DAVID CARTER (National) 
: 
 The Committee put a lot of time into the rationale for changing the boundaries because we were concerned about any effect it may have on further allocations to the fishers who qualified. Conversely we were concerned about the effect it would then have on the National Party’s solution to try to address some of the unfairness. I shall go back to that issue first because it was not covered well in the earlier debate. 
The committee and those who have followed this issue all accept that unfairness occurred. I do not think that there is any doubt about that in anybody’s mind. The issue is then how we move to address that. The National Party feels that it has advanced a very sensible solution whereby where headroom is available then the identified aggrieved people have a preferential right of tender at the market price. Fiscally it will cost the Government absolutely nothing but it will move to satisfy many of the concerns. 
The issue then regarding the movement of boundaries becomes extremely important if the headroom available changes negatively for the Crown. That is where I have trouble with the information that was then provided to the select committee. We asked for a schedule which was given to the select committee about what effect would occur for the individual fishers. The first information they came back with showed that the largest fisher in the area—Simunovich Fisheries—would receive an additional 129 tonnes of allocation by changing the boundary areas and the Crown conversely would receive 47 tonnes less of headroom available. The select committee then proceeded to deliberate on the legislation only to find at the very eleventh hour—and the eleventh hour was perhaps 10 or 15 minutes later—that a further piece of paper was presented to the select committee that stated lo and behold that the Crown would also be a winner. 
It is certainly fully explicable that the select committee had trouble understanding the effect of the change of boundaries when the officials themselves were not able to state categorically who were the benefactors and who were the losers. Our colleague Phil Heatley has now spent additional time with the Minister and ministry officials and is convinced that by the moving of the boundaries the issue of available headroom actually increases substantially. 
The reasoning for the select committee being advised by the officials that the boundaries needed to be changed was one of sustainability. If that is an issue then that should have been known to us quite some time earlier. The issue of sustainability still remains a question in my mind whereby the suggestion is that the Committee will agree to the change of boundaries tonight yet we are doing that change because we are worried about sustainability but the result will be that it allows an increased amount of fish to be caught. There may be a logical explanation that the Minister can help us with but it is certainly something of a puzzle to me at this stage that the rationale for saying we need to urgently change these boundaries is that the sustainability issues exist—and we are then told that it will allow additional fish to be caught and I look forward to the Minister’s comments. 
The boundary changes certainly allow additional quota to be allocated to those who have been lucky enough to be within the system and lucky enough to have obtained catch history over those vital years that we discussed in regard to the previous clause. 
Ian Ewen-Street 
: It wasn’t luck. 
Hon DAVID CARTER 
: No I guess that is true and those people were actually out there fishing and doing the job at the time but the issue around the fairness is that there were a large number of other people who also wanted to be out there doing the fishing at the time and for reasons that are now familiar to many people in this Committee they were not given the opportunity to do so. 
Having said that I still think that the National Party’s suggestion which the Government was not prepared to accept at the select committee stage should be given further consideration by the Government. The aggrieved fishers do not simply want a monetary contribution as a means of settling their grievance. They want the opportunity to fish. Many of them had proven track records as fishers but they were certainly not given the opportunity. Somebody mentioned United Fisheries earlier. United Fisheries applied and applied and the ministry kept saying that that company had not applied.