Davis KelvinKELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): I have to say that this issue really brasses me off. To go online download the video and see a half-hour-long video of fishermen hauling in fish and throwing hundreds if not thousands of fish over the side into the water dead just absolutely makes my blood boil.You see I am a keen recreational fisherman. It is an intergenerational attribute. My grandfather was a keen fisherman as is my mother. My father-in-law on my wife's side was a keen fisherman. My brothers and brothers-in-law are all keen fishermen as I am and now even my son is a keen fisherman. But here is the thing: we play by the rules. When we go fishing up North—I have got a boat and we go out fishing on the boat. I have got a net. We can go out to Ninety Mile Beach and we can net for mullet. We have got flounder spears. We go out at night with the lights and spear flounder. We have got a longline. I have got a kite—you set it out you put on your 25 hooks and let it blow out to sea. When it comes back in hopefully you have got a catch for the day. My son and I go right up to the end of Ninety Mile Beach and we camp overnight and we fish together. It is something that we love to do.So it just makes my blood boil that people like myself and all the other thousands of recreational fishermen and fisherwomen who play by the rules will get penalised and potentially prosecuted if we get a 29-centimetre snapper instead of a 30-centimetre snapper. If we get eight snapper instead of seven snapper we have the potential of having the law thrown at us and most probably will. We just need to watch that documentary Coastwatch where the honorary fisheries officers are going around the coastline and pulling up people for having 200 pipis in their bucket instead of 150 pipis in their bucket. All us little people will get the book thrown at us but we can go online and we can see commercial fishermen throwing thousands and thousands and thousands of fish—tonnes of fish—overboard. And what happens to them? Absolutely nothing. I thought this Government was the one that was tough on crime. Well let me tell you it is a crime to throw fish overboard. What happens to the fishermen? Nothing. Why is that? Because those commercial fishermen are the mates of this Government.Just imagine how many people all that fish could feed. I was brought up to not waste a single skerrick of fish. You eat the heads you eat the eyeballs and you save the backbones and you fry them up the next day. I have not gone so far I have to admit as to do what my uncle does. When he catches a snapper he just cuts it open takes the liver out and eats it raw on the spot. I have not actually graduated to that level yet. But the fact of the matter is that if you could make the scales palatable we would probably be eating those as well. We do not waste anything and yet we look at the amount of wastage that we are seeing in these videos and see that these people have been able to do it. Six companies were investigated and what happened to them? Five of them were seen to be throwing fish overboard and nothing whatsoever happened to them.What evidence do we need that something is wrong? We just need to look at the video footage the video evidence and make a decision based on that. But instead we have had a report that has come out and says: The Ministry for Primary Industries accepts it made flawed decisions in deciding not to prosecute fishing boat skippers". I say it was not flawed; I say it was downright dumb absolutely stupid. What happens if somebody gets away with doing this sort of thing and they are not held to account? It is just an incentive to do it again. The Minister stood here and said that he has told the industry to pull up its socks. That is an intimidating threat is it not? I was a school principal and a schoolteacher for 20 years. When I told kids to pull up their socks that was an invitation to them to just keep their socks down. That is what the fishing industry is doing.It is very interesting to see that Martyn Dunne Director-General of the Ministry for Primary Industries dumped the report on a Friday and that very same day said that it was time to move on. Well time for who to move on? Just sweep it under the carpet and pretend that this did not happen? That is wrong. These people need to be held to account. They need to know that it is unacceptable to just dump fish overboard.Actually I remember the day when three mates and I jumped in our boat. We went fishing out on the East Coast in Doubtless Bay from Mangonui. We got out a couple of kilometres threw the anchor in and were sitting there enjoying the sun enjoying the fishing with our four lines over the side. Then my mate goes: "Oh there's a dead fish." We looked over. "Oh so there is. There's a little snapper belly up just drifting past us." Then we go: "Oh there's another one there's another one." We looked around and drifting past us was probably a couple of acres of dead snapper just drifting by floating past us. We thought: "Hmm OK." It was actually the time when all those algal blooms were going on and we thought that maybe these fish had died because of the bloom. But it was interesting that there were only small snapper. No other species were floating by us.I wonder now whether some fishing boat fishing off the East Coast of the North Island off Northland had realised it had all these basically goldfish and so it just dumped them and let them float hoping that they might float out to sea. Unfortunately the wind and the tides worked against the fish and they floated back towards land where we saw them. Thousands and thousands of fish were being wasted. We were sitting there not getting a bite—not a skerrick of a bite—and we wondered why. It was because some fishing vessel had probably been past and whipped up all the fish and there was nothing left for the recreational fishers.While I am on it here is an issue that absolutely drives us mad up North particularly around the time of the Snapper Classic in March up on Ninety Mile Beach when a thousand recreational fishermen come by. You can always guarantee that a week to the day before that fishing competition happens there will be these commercial fishermen coming in at night. People on the beach can actually hear the crews talking while they go past and dredge up all the fish. Basically if you actually catch a snapper in the Snapper Classic in March you are pretty lucky because the commercial fishermen have been coming in to within a kilometre of the coastline catching up all the fish before the recreational fishermen have an opportunity to have a crack at it.It is the recreational fishermen and fisherwomen who are actually having to pay for the fact that commercial fishermen are able to go out rape and pillage the resource and dump the fish they do not want overboard. We are threatened. I read something within just the last couple of weeks where there is talk that perhaps we do have to drop the recreational fishing catch down again. In 1986 it was 30 fish—well 30 is a bit excessive. You do not need 30 fish to feed your family. It is now seven fish up North and they are talking about maybe having to look at a catch of two. My son and his three friends went out as you do up North a couple of weekends ago at night with the longline. Four 17-year-old teenagers put out the torpedo—25 hooks. They pulled it in and they had 12 fish. That is three per person. What you do up North of course is you take the fish home and what you do not eat you give to the neighbours aunties and uncles or friends so it never ever goes to waste. What would have happened if the catch was reduced to two is those four teenagers would have actually broken the law by catching 12 fish because if the catch had been reduced to two—as has been contemplated in the article I read—they would have overcaught by four fish.Our way of life up North and our way of life around the country—your right to go out and catch a feed for your family—is jeopardised not because we are overfishing as recreational fishers but because these commercial guys are able to go out fill up their nets chuck away what they do not want and keep the other ones. I saw on that video that the commercial fishermen were catching dogfish. Dogfish is absolutely beautiful to eat. My son and I when we have been up the beach have pulled in a dogfish filleted it on the spot cooked it for breakfast in butter—it is absolutely beautiful. I saw these dogfish just being chucked over the side. What an absolute waste. The commercial fishermen are the people who need to be held to account. They should have been prosecuted. Thank you."