Browning Steffan: Fisheries (Foreign Charter Vessels and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBrowning Steffan: Fisheries (Foreign Charter Vessels and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 15 April 2014. Volume:698;Page:17288. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STEFFAN BROWNING (Green): I rise to speak to the Fisheries (Foreign Charter Vessels and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. It seems ironic that as I rise to speak to this bill tonight in Nelson the annual Roger Award is being announced. Many of the people here will know what the Roger Award is about. It is about the worst transnational corporation operating in Aotearoa New Zealand in any particular year. It is always looking at the year back. The reason why it is so ironic is that last year the winner of the 2012 Roger Award wasTaejin Fisheries Co. Ltd the foreign chartered vessels operated through United Fisheries. That was incredibly well scrutinised. It was up against all sorts of multinationals that have done all sorts of atrocious things—wages conditions pressure on the Government and a range of things. We had RioTintoAlcan and we had King Salmon from the Marlborough Sounds but the winner in this wasTaejin Fisheries.The analysis went right down through the history and we have seen a lot of the history come through the submissions to the Primary Production Committee as well. As successive Governments over a very long time had been turning their eyes and turning their backs on these people and on the abuses at the same time we were devaluing New Zealand’s worth. We were devaluing our brand for sure and that is what has been the turning point I think in this whole debacle. We were devaluing the actual value of our resource—the fisheries stock. Every time we sell that cheap and every time we cut corners to get it at a cheap price we are lowering the price. We are going down to the worst commodity price possible. We started in the 1990s with this and it carried on for some time.We have had deteriorating fish stocks ever since we got foreign chartered vessels in to help plunder the total allowable catch. We have had problems with the estimate of biomass but we are still going out there and using dirt cheap labour putting New Zealanders out of work and New Zealand fishing companies out of work. All the time successive Governments were looking the other way. So we are very pleased that the Government has done a backtrack and recanted on its giving exemptions to either its friends or to anyone to allow this sort of practice to carry on.We fought against it. I think of the Green Party minority report on the bill which talked specifically about the tuna exemption because we were not able to do much about the other main exemption because it was dropped on the select committee at the very last moment. We are very pleased that the Minister for Primary Industries has seen his way through to remove these exemptions. I am disappointed that we do not actually have the Supplementary Order Paper in front of us so that we can actually see that in print. We are talking about something we are waiting to see but we can do that with a lot of confidence I think. The Green Party will do another Supplementary Order Paper and that will be to reduce the time so that it is not 1 May 2016 when finally we put this dirty piece of fisheries history behind us. We will be looking for that to happen next year in 2015.David Cunliffe was I think Minister of Labour at the time and worked with industry to get a code of practice. He quoted it as mandatory and worked deeply with them acknowledging that there was an issue at the time but then it seems everybody ignored that and kept looking the other way until there were deaths and until overseas in our markets we got the turn-round which is when we actually started to squirm and change. That is so typical of things that go through this place that go through the ministries. Only when forced only when it is a trade issue when we may actually lose some sales do we start to honour human rights and the respect that we should be giving to everybody whether they come from Indonesia or New Zealand. We are disappointed that this has taken so long but we are still grateful.Where is the vision? I have got to ask where the vision is for New Zealand. Where is the vision for fisheries in New Zealand? The vision we think should be that all parts of all caught fish are used and all ships and boats are crewed by New Zealanders. We still have significant unemployment and it is disappointing that some people who sought exemptions have great unemployment within their own ranks. So it will be good that these exemptions are removed and the tension moves back towards some improvement in New Zealand staffing.It was very interesting to see the level of submissions that came in. It was good to see academics from the University of Auckland. They were mentioned before. Christina Stringer Glenn Simmons and others have put forward their papers about the forcedlabour in the New Zealand fishing industry. They reported on the sinking of theOyang 70on 18 August 2010 with the loss of six lives. They went and delved dug and looked into and talked to and interviewed Indonesian Burmese Chinese Korean and other key informants around the world. They put that effort in. They put in more effort than the fishing companies represented still unfortunately in this House which chose not to. They chose to leave it over to different people who would employ these people and force them and cajole them into contracts they did not even understand and then get out in the seas and get abused in all sorts of ways and then even have their money so restricted that they could not pay back the fees that they had paid just to get the job that they were promised would be so good.The University of Auckland and the various agencies that are concerned with the welfare of people in New Zealand that joined in and helped bring this to this position we need to acknowledge and be very grateful for. We will be speaking more on this. Thank you.