Muller ToddTODD MULLER (National—Bay of Plenty): Thank you Mr Speaker. Well if ever there was a legislative denouement to what has been quite a remarkable process around the Fisheries Amendment Bill then that 10 minutes would have to take the cake because we have just listened to a highly passionate Minister of Health handed the job to sell the Government's vision with respect to fisheries and he laboured through each word as if he was trying to haul up a whale from the bottom of the ocean. It didn't work but it was great to see the list MP who valiantly represented the great city of New Plymouth with all its burgeoning fishing industry. I'm sure they would have loved to see that sitting at home watching the Minister mangle an attempt to try and summarise the Government's approach with respect to fisheries.So let's just unwind this process and reflect on where we find ourselves here tonight on the third reading of the Fisheries Amendment Bill. The Minister is right when he tightly referenced on page 2 that this is a process which started many years ago. The genesis of its process was the fact that there was concern that the current Fisheries Act was not precise enough with respect to incentivising the right fishing behaviour—that when you land fish you should ensure that you discard only the fish that is appropriate with a relatively narrow sense of criteria and that you should return the remainder back to land.Now this has been a very fraught process because as the Government began this process of the last few years sitting with fisheries industry representatives it became clear that there was significant distrust significant concern across many of the players about the behaviour of the other player. As someone who is the oceans and fisheries spokesperson for the National Party when you actually sit and listen to the perspectives of those who are involved in this sector the level of distrust is quite extraordinary—Hon Member: Palpable.TODD MULLER: Palpable" is the word and actually it's a good word because you have the commercial fishers who say that this framework has been developed to unnecessarily constrain their business that they are simply trying to make a living and that they do not deliberately chuck over the side of their boat fish that they want to discard. The reality of when you are using a trawl net is that you will catch fish that you don't particularly want to catch and it is a difficult process to minimise that catch. On the other side of the equation you have the recreational fishers who hold the view—across many of them—that the commercial fishers themselves are the main driver of fish stock pressures in New Zealand. Then you have those who are involved in customary fishing who feel that their long-held right to fish for kai moana is being constrained by this Act and then you've got the non-governmental organisations that suggest that actually there should be no take in significant parts of New Zealand and New Zealand is at its best when we watch the oceans from afar as opposed to participating in it from a fishing perspective.All these strands of dissonance this Government has been trying to bring together into some coherence in terms of this Fisheries Amendment Bill and it got brought to this House as a first reading which we supported. It then got sent to the select committee and we listened to the various perspectives again of those highly dissonant groups who all saw the challenge of fisheries lying predominantly at the feet of other players. We navigated through the two key components of this bill: a new discards regime which would be tougher for the fishers of New Zealand; but the counter or the complementary measure if you like was the establishment of a pre-set decision framework where armed with evidence armed with data and after a significant consultation process with all stakeholders you could agree the parameters within which you could apply fishing rules and quantities with respect to quota management. We discussed it; we agreed it. It was very difficult because the participants in the select committee who submitted to us like I said had pretty divergent views. We debated it as the Primary Production Committee and we landed a recommendation notwithstanding a minority view on some elements by the Green Party and the same by the ACT Party and the same of course by us in the National Party. Overall we supported the intention of the bill. We had a second reading in which we talked to the detail of what sat under the Fisheries Amendment Bill the bringing together of those two components—the discards regime and the pre-set decision rules. On the second reading we had the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries talking about the challenge that the select committee had worked through in bringing those competing objectives together and endorsed the fact that we'd landed in a place that worked and four hours later in this House he stood up and said "I now withdraw the entire pre-set decision rules framework because we are not happy with where it has landed". So what has happened? How is it that after years of effort this Government decides that at the eleventh hour it is not going to hold true to the process but instead change its view and suggest that one of those stakeholders' perspectives should trounce all the others and now has the audacity to stand up in this House acknowledged read by the Minister of Health saying that actually they've landed something that they feel proud of as a Government. How can they possible say that they feel proud of this delivery when they have looked the commercial fishers in the face and said "We support this component; it's a critical part of the Fisheries Amendment Bill. We're going to see it through we're making amendments and we've listened to your concerns." You get right to the last hurdle and then you say "Actually this component we are taking off the table because some in the other parts of the fishery industry have decided that we shouldn't proceed with it." In particular I look across to somebody who I respect—Rino Tirikatene—and he's going to talk shortly no doubt in his position as an undersecretary in this context. I'd be interested for him to tell us what his Māori stakeholders and particularly those involved in Māori fishing thought of the fact that at the eleventh hour the pre-set decision rules got pulled because the night before it happened I was at the 30th anniversary of the Sealord deal and table after table were endorsing that bill. Table after table were saying it was heading in the right direction. So what about the iwi fishing interests who absolutely supported that balance of objectives between discards on the one hand and the pre-set decision rules on the other? We will get silence tonight. We will get told "Oh look on balance we decided that we couldn't proceed with that chunk of the bill". That is not good enough. It doesn't have the appropriate integrity that a process would demand and it has added to the distrust. Now we pass a bill here tonight that sets up a new framework for fisheries management and the entire commercial inshore and deep-sea fisheries participants look at this Government and where they have landed with this bill with scorn and—apart from that—with immense distrust because they were told to participate in a process that their views would be considered that they would be balanced with the recreational fishers that they would be balanced with the NGOs and that they would be balanced with the Māori custodial interests. But when push came to shove the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries for some reason at two minutes to midnight on this process said "Actually we don't provide that balance and the trust that you have invested in this process and in us as being a dispassionate evidence-based competent Government is smashed." Yes this bill will pass and the component of it in terms of discards makes sense. So of course because that component makes sense we will support it reluctantly but my goodness what a disgrace that the other component got removed and that disgrace sits on your side of the House."