Mackey Moana: Kaikōura (Te Tai-o-Marokura) Marine Management Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMackey Moana: Kaikōura (Te Tai-o-Marokura) Marine Management Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 22 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19364. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MOANA MACKEY (Labour):I would like to put on record my disappointment at that speech from Maggie Barry because the Kaikōura (Te Tai-o-Marokura) Marine Management Bill is actually a very positive piece of legislation. My colleague Ruth Dyson whom she chose to attack was actually saying really good things about the process. I also want to put on record my thanks to the Minister of Conservation for the collaborative way in which he has worked with parties for this piece of legislation. I do not think we needed that level of negativity in that speech on a bill that we support overwhelmingly.I am disappointed by that but I also want to thank Maggie Barry for the work she did as chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee. It is a committee that works extremely well together. It is a committee that is very very busy dealing with a lot of environmental legislation. We had the privilege of travelling to Kaikōura to hear submissions on the bill and I must say what a beautiful part of the country it is. I actually had never been there before. Ruth Dyson and I arrived at the airport and drove down the Kaikōura Coast and it was just incredible to be able to drive down and see the seals right there on the side of the road. We could see the families out enjoying seeing such amazing wildlife so close up and it really makes you think how lucky we are to live in such a beautiful country. I was really privileged to be able to visit Kaikōura and to get a sense of what we were protecting. To the local member of Parliament Colin King who is retiring I say that I am sure he will enjoy spending a lot more time in a very beautiful part of the country and I wish him well.As my colleague Ruth Dyson said this process was started by Chris Carter and it is good to see it coming to a conclusion here. We have a marine reserve up just north of Gisborne where I live. That marine reserve was contentious. There is a view sometimes that marine reserves are locking up the ocean—which I always find odd; the idea is that somehow fish are not going to move in and out of a marine reserve—and there was concern about the impact on local fishing industries because whenever we do this kind of legislation we are dealing with a lot of existing rights. A lot of people already use and often make their livelihood out of that part of the ocean and there is a fear that this would somehow limit their ability to do that.Well I remember visiting the marine reserve just north of Gisborne with Chris Carter when he was the Minister of Conservation 4 years after it had been implemented. There was a young woman there who was doing her PhD. She was going out and putting craypots down outside the marine reserve and inside the marine reserve and then comparing the amount of stock. Only 4 years after the implementation of that particular marine reserve in a part of the country where our crayfish stock is severely depleted and it is a real issue outside the marine reserve she was getting less than 1 kilogram of legal-sized cray but inside the marine reserve she was getting more than 30 kilograms of legal-sized cray. So the regeneration that had occurred in the crayfish population in a very short period of time was incredible. Not only that but we started to see the fish stocks coming back to the East Coast that we had not seen in a long time because we had created a new environment for them. So it is a success story.I have personally seen the value of marine reserves up my way at home and I would like to see more of them. I want to mention just one area in particular and that is the Kermadec Islands. I think that this is an absolute no-brainer that would have support right across the House. The Kermadecs are an absolute treasure for this country and I honestly expected that this would be—and maybe it is still to come—an announcement from the National Government that it was going to put the Kermadecs into a marine reserve. To me that just makes so much sense. I cannot imagine why you would want to do anything around the Kermadecs that would be limited by having a marine reserve—for example mining or anything else. I do not know why we are not also passing legislation to put the Kermadecs into a marine reserve. I certainly know that the Labour Party would strongly support that move and I hope that the National Government does not have any plans for activities that would be contrary to the protection that a marine reserve would provide around that particularly important taonga for New Zealand.As I said we had some concerns going into this legislation and the chair of the select committee who has just taken her seat mentioned Wellington Forest and Bird. I do not think it was being doctrinaire at all in raising concerns about the size of the marine reserve the shape of the marine reserve and the science of it. It was not doctrinaire it was not being rigid and it was not sitting in Wellington and dictating. It was simply raising very very valid concerns which were backed up by science about why this marine reserve looks so different from other marine reserves. I want to thank Kevin Hackwell from Forest and Bird who gave that submission for being a very passionate and a very positive defender of our environment in New Zealand. He does incredible work and I would never ever say that just because he so passionately believes that we should have so much more of our marine environment in protection—and we agree with him—he needs to be well degraded really in a way that he cannot respond to.Then we went down to Kaikōura. I have to say—and Ruth Dyson and I were talking about it while we were travelling back from those select committee hearings—that we were very moved by the submission process. When we sat down and listened to all the various submitters—Mark Solomon in particular actually—all of whom had come together and heard their points of view and heard why the marine reserve had ended up being the way it was and why there was so little of the coastline actually in the marine reserve I gained a real respect for their position and also gained a far greater understanding of the huge amount of work that had gone into this collaborative process to come up with a solution that had the agreement of all stakeholders. I think Kaikōura is probably one of the parts of the country where there is an exceptionally large number of existing interests that operate in the marine environment so it was even more difficult to get everyone on board. We heard from crayfishermen pāua fishermen the Whale Watch Kaikōura people local iwi and local environmental groups. All of them came together and positively supported this legislation. As my colleague Ruth Dyson said I do not remember a marine reserve process that has ever been so positive and where all the stakeholders have come together and said that this is what they have agreed on this is what they want and they are really really passionate about this process the marine reserve and the protections they are putting in place.The very important message they gave us was that they will build on this marine reserve. Do not think that this is the end of a process and this is all that is going to happen in terms of marine protection in the Kaikōura area. They will build on this and because of the relationships they have developed through this process and because they have all listened and taken all the existing interests into account and respected people’s points of view and come up with a local solution that process will not end here. The process will continue and they will build on the protections that have been put in place. I have to say that I was really impressed by that and I really felt—as someone coming from the outside in—that we needed to respect the huge amount of work that had gone into that local process. Even though we would have loved to have seen more and even though we went in there with much greater concerns about how different this marine reserve was from the usual ones and about the different process that had been taken I was genuinely very impressed by what came out of that process and I genuinely respect the wishes of the local people.One of the issues of concern—and we never actually got an answer to it and I do not know whether the Minister has an answer to it—was that we found that in fact we had to make an amendment to the bill because it was actually 10 or 20 metres out. The marine reserve boundaries we had in the legislation were wrong by about 10 or 20 metres because apparently the Ministry for Primary Industries takes GPS coordinates to only two decimal places instead of three. We asked why the Ministry for Primary Industries takes coordinates to only two decimal places instead of three and we were just told that it is the Ministry for Primary Industries’ policy. For us it seemed very bizarre that if you could take coordinates to three decimal places and actually get the marine reserve right you would not do that. Why would you take them to only two decimal places and be 20 metres out?Hon Ruth Dyson: And what did they say? Because that’s how they’d always done it.MOANA MACKEY: They said that is how they had always done it. We thought “OK that is strange.” and we never really got a response. It is not the biggest issue in the world but it was one of those kinds of Gliding On moments I think where practicalities kind of went out the window a little bit.I want to acknowledge the officials and the very very hard work they did on this legislation. The other concern I will raise is around the policing because policing of marine reserves is also very important. The best fishing is on the boundaries of marine reserves so you need to make sure that marine reserves are being policed. I have concerns about the capacity of the Department of Conservation to do that given the cuts in funding and staff that it has had. You know a marine reserve and the boundaries are only worth anything if we know they can be policed and those boundaries are not going to be breached. The very department we rely on to do that is under enormous financial pressure and has lost a number of staff particularly in the regions. The policing of the marine reserve is one of my big concerns.But I congratulate the Minister on this bill. In fact I congratulate Parliament on this bill and I congratulate in particular the guardians who did all the work in getting us to this point.