King Colin: Aquaculture Legislation Amendment Bill — First Reading 
King Colin: Aquaculture Legislation Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:649;Page:17730] 
COLIN KING (National—Kaikoura) 
: 
 At the outset I say National will support the referral to the select committee of the Aquaculture Legislation Amendment Bill. The failure by this Government to see its way forward in realising the potential of the aquaculture industry has been well canvassed. 
I will come back to the bill. This bill amends four particular Acts and I make the comment that the legislation is complex. That is of course borne out in the very court case that has been referred to between SMW Consortium Ltd and the Tasman District Council. 
If we stop to think about the complexities of the law and to talk about them in real terms we should go into the judgment. It is very interesting when looking at the judgment of that court case to see that under the heading “Tasman District Council” it states: “Unfortunately the TDC did not take this opportunity to argue which version of s19 applies and whether the prohibited rule in the Transition Plan is still operative. The TDC spent most of its submission instead trying to reopen the discussion about whether s12A creates a prohibited activity. The TDC considers that the two preconditions in s12A(1)(a) are at the heart of the matters left for determination by this Court. It submitted that the matter for ultimate determination is whether the TDC is required to accept an application for coastal permits for mussel farming when occupation is a prohibited activity”. 
When we start to understand the complexities of the law from the point of view of the people who are trying to administer it and who get it wrong we can understand why this bill is in front of the House. As the general policy statement in the explanatory note of the bill states: “The effect of the court decision is that applications can be made outside of AMAs in operative regional coastal plan.” So effectively the amendment in front of us at the moment freezes those decisions—the decisions from 1 January 2005—and they will proceed only if the areas concerned are in fact registered as aquaculture management areas. 
It should be of interest to members on the other side of the House that the Marlborough Sounds has half a million hectares of intrinsically sheltered waterways. Those waterways were an area identified early on as a primary place to establish a new industry known as the aquaculture industry. Most of the aquaculture industry grew out of hobby farming or hobby part-time operations. It was a way in which pastoral farmers in that region supplemented their incomes or in which people who had a quota of wet fish also grew their incomes. From 1971 the marine farms were under the auspices of the Marine Farming Act 1971. In 1991 when the Resource Management Act came into effect that then came to take control of the way in which the aquaculture industry was treated. In fact that Act enabled councils or the local authorities to assess the effects of aquaculture. Those effects are something that cannot ever be dismissed. There is a saturation point because the area in which aquaculture is established is a public area and on that basis many many people use it. That was the second leg from 1991 onwards when the Fisheries Amendment Act came into play. As aquaculture was established under the Resource Management Act it displaced people who had quota to fish in those particular areas. That meant that before anybody could set up aquaculture and be approved to do so that person had to receive a permit from the Ministry of Fisheries. 
However those dual purposes were replaced in 2005 by the four Acts that we are facing today. From that point on a multitude of things had to be met by people who wanted to commence farming mussels or whatever form of aquaculture they wanted to undertake. Therein lies one of our major challenges. Although our local governments control areas like the Marlborough Sounds under the Resource Management Act it is always going to be very hard for a council to justify spending money on setting up aquaculture management areas when using ratepayers’ money. That has been one of the choke points in the whole system so that in actual fact nothing has occurred. It is quite serious that we are in that dilemma because we have not only the complexities around competing interests be it people wanting to compete for scallops cod or whatever else but also the issue that people want to farm mussels. 
Today in the Marlborough Sounds we have 3023 hectares of aquaculture distributed between 616 separate marine farms. It is very interesting to see the range of aquaculture—it is something that has not been talked about very much tonight. There is salmon there is paua there is seaweed there are sponges there are scallops and there is oyster farming. When we look at aquaculture in Marlborough we see the region has 65 percent by area of the mussel farms in New Zealand and 95 percent of the finfish farming in New Zealand. We all talk about the sea but there is also to a varying degree of success aquaculture on the land. We have salmon being farmed up the Wairau River. Also in Kaikoura we have crayfish or what would be more affectionately known over in Australia as yabbies. 
As members can see there is a fair amount of history to the aquaculture industry. A wonderful book has been written on the industry; it is called  
Lines in the water 
. But we can be as sure as eggs that if we measure what has been achieved by this Government we find it has been well articulated by the National Party spokesperson Phil Heatley as being absolutely nothing. 
The member from the Maori Party articulated that a $100 million - plus bill is sitting at the end of the process to ensure that Maori get 20 percent of the previously allocated space. It has to be underscored too that they are entitled to 20 percent of the future space that will be allocated. How did all that come about? That is quite interesting because at the very heart of it all was the Ngati Apa issue. Once Ngati Apa got the allocation of 20 percent there were so many people in front of them that there would never have been an opportunity for them to get up to or near the front. So in fact the debate came out of the Ngati Apa claim to the foreshore and seabed and of course it took off from there. It is with great comfort that I see in relation to the Kurahaupo settlement that Richard Bradley and others are talking about including that sort of solution in their final settlement. I believe that we have to move forward on that. I have absolute confidence and faith in the process and in the Kurahaupo people. I see Dr Cullen acknowledging that that would be a good outcome. 
But I say the sad thing about the aquaculture industry is that under this Government’s watch our best and finest people have left this country and invested in places like Port Lincoln in South Australia or over in Chile—people who have really worked hard and grown this industry from infancy and who have had nothing but roadblocks and obstacles from this tired Labour Government.