Heatley Phil: Fisheries Amendment Bill (No 4) — In Committee 
Heatley Phil: Fisheries Amendment Bill (No 4) — In Committee 
[Volume:619;Page:14577] 
PHIL HEATLEY (National—Whangarei) 
: 
 Members will recall that I indicated that the issue of scampi fishing area 3 just off the Canterbury Bight and the east coast of the South Island and the new fishing area scampi 4 around the Chatham Rise caused some anguish in the scampi fishing industry. Certainly it did in the Primary Production Committee and within the National Party because we saw those boundaries being changed. 
Clause 69 states: “The principal Act is amended by adding the Schedules 13 and 14 set out in Schedule 2 of this Act.” Schedule 13 of course is the one that shifts those very boundaries. I should be more specific: it does not affect the outside boundary of areas 3 and 4 but rather the internal dividing line which is moved eastward over some hundreds of kilometres. In other words it expands fishing area 3 well out east of the east coast of the South Island and more towards the Chatham Islands and the Chatham Rise. We wondered why shifting an internal boundary line given that the outside boundary did not change would suddenly make available more and more fish. The response we had is that fishers will be forced to fish specifically around the Chatham Rise as well as off the east coast of the South Island. They cannot move between the two fishing grounds without actually moving from fishing area 3 to fishing area 4 and back. That seems fair enough to me. 
We will support these schedules because we believe that the change in the areas is appropriate for sustainability and utilisation reasons. With the help of the maps and in probably under 1 minute I have been able to explain to a large number of my colleagues why we are doing this yet it has taken weeks and weeks to get answers from the ministry about why it is necessary. Once the ministry gave us the right answer everyone understood it clearly—just like that. It is of concern to us—certainly to those of us on the select committee—why we could not have had that simple answer in the first place. I guess it is a message to the Ministry of Fisheries and to the Minister that when explaining these things they should go back to first principles and not talk about too much detail just the practical aspects. When we see the practical aspects it is easy to understand them and easy to support them. So we support those schedules. 
I will be leaving it to my colleague David Carter to speak about schedule 14 specifically which of course is the scampi provisional catch history allocations to the various companies involved in the scampi fishery historically. We are still concerned that a number of fishers have been left out of the fishery. They are the aggrieved fishers as listed in the select committee scampi inquiry report. There were seven of them. A number of them I see in the schedules still get catch history for those areas where they caught scampi but they are aggrieved fishers because there are other areas where they could have caught scampi or there is more scampi they could have caught adding to their catch history if only they were able to obtain or execute the permits they were granted. 
There is one person in particular who I would like to mention Trevor Goodship—a man who wanted to go scampi fishing for himself build up his catch history and eventually pass on his business to his family. He has been locked out. He is aggrieved and I would like to hear some assurance from the Minister that negotiations with him are continuing. I know that his compensation package or ex gratia payment was capped at $800000 by Labour Party members on the select committee. We are not sure where they got that capping idea from but we do know that he is not listed in any of these schedules to receive an allocation. He genuinely wanted to go scampi fishing. Everyone agrees including the courts that he should have been able to go scampi fishing and we would like to see that result.