Ewen-Street Ian: Fisheries Amendment Bill (No 2) — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Ewen-Street Ian: Fisheries Amendment Bill (No 2) — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:616;Page:11687] 
IAN EWEN-STREET (Green) 
: 
 One of the questions that we kept raising in the Primary Production Committee was why the levies were not spent. It is clear that the ministry collected the levies legitimately. The money that was supposed to be spent by the Department of Conservation was forwarded to it but the money was not spent on the purpose for which it was collected. Also a lot of money was required to be spent but was not spent on research by the Ministry of Fisheries itself and I have never had a satisfactory answer to the question of why that money was not spent on research. I think that is a very important question not just for the sake of money that has been collected and not spent but because when one thinks about the ecosystem and the need for research on the fisheries one realises the money was there for that research to be conducted but it was not done. 
It is sad to say that the fishing industry in New Zealand is one of the most rapacious and destructive industries in terms of its impact on natural resources in this country. They the fishers do not want the research to be done. What sort of message is the ministry sending to them if it says it will collect all that money so that research can be done to help the fishers to keep in balance with the ecosystem but then says that that was not even sufficiently important to warrant spending the money in the manner in which it was designed to be spent? 
The total risk the Ministry of Fisheries was subject to in relation to the collection of levies was a very considerable figure. I believe that it was in excess of $200 million. One company Barine Developments said all that money was being spent on levies and it was not getting any benefit from it. Rather than simply refusing to pay its levies and being prosecuted by the ministry Barine Developments paid its levies but not to the ministry. It paid the levies into a trust fund so that they were secure. The Barine Developments case did not go to court but it was going to go to court. It was only when the Ministry of Fisheries was advised I believe by Crown Law that it would lose the case against Barine Developments that it settled out of court with the company. The ministry then realised that having been open to that risk with Barine Developments it was open to a much bigger risk with regard to the rest of the fishing industry and this legislation was mooted so that that loophole or that possibility would be closed off. 
I think that the ministry really has some soul-searching to do on this issue. [ 
Interruption 
] It does need to do some soul-searching. Why did it collect that money but not spend it in the way in which it was supposed to have been spent? We do need more research. The ministry says that it will bring a particular species into the quota management system as if that were an end in itself. It is not an end in itself. The quota management system is certainly a step in the right direction but it is not the end of the journey. Just putting a species into the quota management system does not solve the problems. We have in the quota management system a process that in effect gives property rights to individuals. We are talking about very valuable assets that can be passed on to other people—bought and sold and traded. The quota management system vests ownership in a small number of people; rights to quota are valuable things to have. But the quota management system is not the solution to the problems of the industry and we do need research to be done on the species. I was amazed to learn a couple of years ago that at the time there were 32 species of fish in the quota management system and the ministry had confessed that it knew the life cycles in some detail of seven of those species. Yet the ministry believes that simply putting species into private ownership under the quota management system will in some way resolve all the problems of those species. That is not the way to go. 
In the next part of this debate I want to address the issue of the rebate of levies to small fishers but I will leave that until a later moment.