Sage Eugenie: Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 15 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:9671. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): E Te Māngai o Te Whare tēnā koe tuarua ki ngā mema o tō tātou Whare tēnā koutou katoa.[Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker. Secondly acknowledgments to you all members of our House.]The Green Party is very pleased to be supporting the Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary Bill establishing a new marine reserve in New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone around the Kermadec Islands. We have had a member’s bill in the ballot prepared by Gareth Hughes for some time to establish a marine protected area at the Kermadecs. We congratulated the Government when it announced its intention to create this ocean sanctuary at the United Nations in the run-up to an international oceans conference last year. We are very pleased to support the bill.As with Scott Simpson I have never been to the Kermadecs but everything I have read about this island chain and the photographs I have seen show that it is an extraordinary place of enormous significance to all humankind not just Aotearoa because of its biodiversity and geological and cultural values. Its remoteness has protected it from the impacts of fishing and from mining so as others have said it remains one of the most pristine places on the planet. It is also important because of the complexity of the deep-sea marine habitats that are there. It includes a 12000 kilometre section of the longest volcanic arc in the world which extends from the Bay of Plenty up towards Tonga. You have got two tectonic plates colliding and that means we have got this arc of underwater volcanos active hydrothermal vents and dramatic features like the black smoker chimneys. Those hydrothermal vents produce quite extraordinary conditions where you have got quite strange organisms flourishing in those dark depths in super-heated water where there are quite high levels of quite toxic compounds. We have got in the Kermadecs the second-deepest ocean trench in the world extending up to 10 kilometres deep and it is really surprising to think that fish can live at that depth. Scientists have found fish living at 8 kilometres depth and they have got amazing adaptations to be able to live in darkness and at the extreme pressure that you get at those depths.Even though we have had quite a lot more scientific exploration in recent years the Kermadecs still remain one of the least-understood habitats on the planet. It is an important area for marine mammals with blue whales fin whales and humpback whales migrating through the region en route to and from their summer feeding grounds in the Antarctic. It is a really important place for seabirds with at least 14 seabird species breeding on the Kermadec Islands and another 28 species using the oceans around the Kermadecs to feed. Ornithologist Chris Gaskin described arriving at Macauley Island. He said there were hundreds of thousands of black-winged petrels milling about over the islands. That must have been an astonishing sight.As Forest and Bird one of the champions of the Kermadec sanctuary—along with the Pew Charitable Trusts and World Wide Fund for Nature New Zealand—has noted it is one of the only places in New Zealand where you get both tropical and subtropical and temperate species of birds whales turtles fish and corals and other marine invertebrates living together. This whole constellation of biological and geological values means that we would encourage Minister Smith when the bill is passed to consider nominating the Kermadecs for World Heritage status to recognise their importance for all humankind.This bill is significant because although we have the fourth-largest exclusive economic zone in the world—an exclusive economic zone that is 15 times the size of our land mass—at the moment we do not have any effective marine protected areas in it other than the benthic protected areas which of course do not protect the water column. In New Zealand waters in our marine environment less than 0.5 percent of our territorial sea and exclusive economic zone combined is protected. As the Minister has noted this bill will increase that to 15 percent and that is why it is important—particularly with the prohibition on fishing and mining and the Department of Conservation managing the reserve and the Environmental Protection Authority managing any applications for research for scientific purposes.There was one concern: the departmental disclosure statement did note that because of the secrecy around the project there was not engagement with Māori interests prior to it being announced. That was disappointing but we note that there has been extensive consultation with Ngāti Kurī and Te Aupōuri subsequently. Te Ohu Kaimoana has raised a concern about the potential impact on fishing rights allocated to iwi under the fisheries settlement but I would note that there has been no fishing undertaken in the Kermadec region using the settlement quota in the past 10 years. So Te Ohu Kaimoana seems concerned about the potential fishing rights rather than the actual ones and the biodiversity values far outweigh the fishing values.Other countries in the Pacific have also recognised the importance of having large fully protected marine areas to preserve biodiversity to provide a safe haven for species and to do what Scott Simpson suggested which was to ensure that there are large areas that remain in their natural state for future generations. We have seen Australia protect nearly a million square kilometres in the Coral Sea and New Caledonia protect 1.3 million square kilometres in the Coral Sea. So the major concern we have—not with this proposal but with the accompanying proposals of the Government to reform the Marine Reserves Act—is that the Kermadecs seems to be it. Yes the bill certainly raises the extent of marine protected areas from 0.4 percent to 15 percent but the Kermadecs is largely subtropical and tropical. The Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary will not protect representative examples of our subantarctic marine habitats and the species that inhabit those.We need to see in our new marine protected areas legislation the ability to create more marine protected areas in our exclusive economic zone and not just have that done by special legislation such as this bill. The Minister for the Environment has referred to 10 percent of the marine environment being the target but scientists internationally have referred to the desirability of having 30 percent of our marine environment protected in order to ensure that we have healthy seas that we conserve our fish stocks and that we protect important habitats for seabirds marine mammals fish and marine invertebrates.So 30 percent is a much more appropriate target and the marine protected areas reform will not provide a simple process to have further marine protected areas created in the exclusive economic zone. We understand that that has been because of the opposition from the oil-drilling and gas industries but the value of our deep oceans is in conserving species that we have only just begun to understand. Scientists are still finding and describing new species in areas like the Kermadecs. We understand probably more about areas of outer space than we do about our deep deep oceans at the bottom of the trench. So we need to not just protect the Kermadecs but to have a process to establish other deep-sea marine protected areas. That is why there have been several thousand submissions on the Government’s consultation document seeking that there be such a process.So this bill is a very good one which the Green Party is pleased to support but we need a clear process that will provide for not just the subtropics to be protected but also representative examples of all of our deep-ocean habitats given that we have got such a large exclusive economic zone and we have got a responsibility to the world to protect that and not just leave much of it open for fishing mining drilling and exploitation. Thank you.