Heatley Phil: Fisheries Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
Heatley Phil: Fisheries Amendment Bill (No 2) — Second Reading 
[Volume:615;Page:11611] 
PHIL HEATLEY (National—Whangarei) 
: 
 The National Party will support this bill and it is a great pleasure for me to inform the new Minister of Fisheries what this bill is about. This bill ensures full and final settlement of historic under-recovery and over-recovery of levies that were underspent by the Ministry of Fisheries and the Department of Conservation over a number of years. Fishers have given money to the Department of Conservation and the department has made out it has done lots of work shifting paper and running around the countryside pretending to shoot possums. The department has also involved itself it says in fisheries issues but actually it has never done the work. That has been discovered the Government has admitted it and it is quite happy to pay back $24.1 million. We support that. We think there is justness in that. 
I remind the new Minister of Fisheries who clearly does not know a lot about this bill that the cost-recovery regime was first introduced into fisheries legislation in 1994. That regime allows the Crown to recover the costs of fisheries services and conservation services associated with commercial fishing. Those are research services to do with commercial fishing and monitoring services—such as how many seabirds if any are killed how many marine mammals are killed by fishing industry craft and that type of thing—and they were able to charge levies to pay for that work. The Minister of Fisheries in each year has to have regard for how much levy was collected in a previous year how much work was actually done and whether less work was done and the money was not spent as in that case in the following year the levy charged has to be less. If in a particular year more work was done and more money was spent then in a following year less has to be charged. That is what is in the legislation. Unfortunately during those particular years—most of them I might add just quietly under a Labour Government—too much levy was collected and never spent but the levy was not reduced in following years. [ 
Interruption 
] That is basically the Labour Party’s approach to tax: tax too much bank it do not spend it on the taxpayer and certainly do not pay it back. 
There was recent recognition of a failure to consider historic under-recovery and over-recovery of levies in previous years. We have acknowledged that. Unfortunately because it had already happened Parliament had to traipse back in 2002 and pass the Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Act which confirmed that the collection of those levies was legal and the deal done behind the scenes with the fishing industry was: “We’ll pay you back the $24 million as long as you can say you agree that we can say it’s legal.” We were happy with that. National supports the bill. It fulfils an agreement coming out of that Act and it has wide industry support. Certainly arguments put forward by the Seafood Industry Council on behalf of the industry were very sound and we support the bill for that reason. 
Opposition to this bill has come from those who believe that the distribution of the levies—the redistribution in future years of the $24 million—should go back to those who paid the levies in the first place. In other words a whole lot of fishers paid the levies in past years and we are paying the money back so we should go back to those individuals and give them the money back individually. On the face of it that sounds fair enough. However the argument for that ignores a whole lot of things. It ignores that the settlement we are making is consistent with the cost recovery regime whereby levies are collected in a present year and paid back to levy payers in a future year. In other words if a fisher is no longer a levy payer that fisher does not get the refund—but also does not get the charges. So if the fisher has got out of the industry in the meantime even though he or she has paid those levies the fisher does not get the money back but also that fisher does not have to pay back any debt. We get that situation all the time. Members will recall situations when local electricity trusts have paid out capital funds to those drawing electricity from the grid. We know that those people consuming electricity on a particular day received a cheque. It might have been a $500 cheque from their electricity trust. It was not the person who owned the house 2 weeks previously 2 years previously or 20 years previously who received the cheque; it was the person who was drawing electricity on the day and who paid the accounts. That is the way things are done in New Zealand. That is the first issue—with the cost recovery regime under-recovery is to be debited or credited to a future period. Everyone in the industry understands that. 
Further the Act takes a holistic view. It is concerned with the benefits that the conservation and fisheries services give to the whole industry. In other words levies are charged to benefit the whole industry so fisheries research is not made on an individual fisher but on the whole fishing industry—whether on snapper fishers oyster farmers deep sea fishers fishing for hoki or whatever. The point is that levies are collected to benefit the whole industry not an individual fisher. Consequently levies are drawn for the whole industry and are returned to the whole industry—not to an individual fisher. The services certainly were never for individual fishers and the cheque is not either. 
Also raised at the select committee—and I thought it raised a reasonably fair argument—was the matter of those who are still paying off fisheries-levies debts. In other words they were charged a levy they could not pay it at the time and they are still paying it off today. We have suddenly found out that those levies should never have been paid in the first place. Fishers were over-charged. Should they still be paying back that debt? We know that the debt was generated by a levy that was unfair. Yet we are making fishers today pay the debt back. That seemed like a fair argument. I asked the Minister of Fisheries to tell me the total owed by businesses or individuals who are paying cost recovery levies in arrears to the ministry due to levies incurred during that period when they should not have been charged. 
 The debt is about $37000. I asked what the highest debt was; it is about $9000. I asked what the lowest debt was; it is $11.20. Should they still be paying back those debts that were generated and incurred? Interestingly the Ministry of Fisheries has outstanding debts of $351000 currently and no interest at all is charged on that and $37000 of that is on these levies that were drawn during that time. Should we write off the debt? The select committee and the National Party agreed that we should not. Our reasoning was that there are a whole lot of people who did pay those levies. They might have borrowed from a bank to pay those levies. They might have sold their houses to pay those levies. Why would we forgive those who have bad debts and are paying them back now yet not forgive those who did actually pay those levies? 
We agree with the Fisheries Amendment Bill (No 2). National will certainly be supporting it. We believe that these levies were collected for the industry as a whole and should be paid to the industry as a whole. We believe that these levies were drawn in a past year and should be returned in a future year to current levy payers. We believe that those levy payers who have outstanding debts should still pay back those debts simply because others have paid theirs. Why should those who have not paid back the debt be forgiven when a lot of others have paid the debt? We support the bill.