Woolerton R Doug: Fisheries Amendment Bill (No 2) — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Woolerton R Doug: Fisheries Amendment Bill (No 2) — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:616;Page:11689] 
R DOUG WOOLERTON (NZ First) 
: 
 I want to say at the outset that New Zealand First will not be supporting the amendment proposed by the National Party through Phil Heatley because the bill’s whole purpose concerns a negotiated settlement. What more can be said than to say that this bill is about redressing a situation that needs to be fixed. That says it all. We do not need an amendment that humbles somebody or takes somebody down to make that point. That is what this bill is about. It is about fixing up the unders and overs. 
This industry is still in the reasonably early years of a quota management regime. One must remember going back just a few years that the industry was fighting against paying anybody any levies for anything—industry-good or not. It was an industry that believed. I am not blaming it for that; I am saying that it was an industry where people could get larger and larger vessels go out find a fishery and virtually capture it and do their business. There was no limit on what they caught apart from their own good judgment. There were no levies to be paid except income taxation in the normal course of events. 
From the previous speaker’s comments one would assume that Government departments just went out there and did precisely as they wanted. Those departments had Ministers at their head from both the National Party and the Labour Party as they took their turns to be Government so it is not as though those departments did not have an overview from the very people who are criticising them in this debate. The ministry put in place a regime that was to collect levies for the greater good of the fishery and to ensure that a quota management system was implemented in the correct way. 
No one is saying they did not take too much. This bill is designed to cure the over and unders situation and to put matters right—to pay back to those in the industry from whom too much was taken. That is what the bill is about. We agree with that and we support the bill unlike some others because we want to see that matter put right. However to go off on some tangent and say this should not be happening or to say there were some nefarious means or terrible actions taken is simply to deny the fact of the basis on which those levies were made in the early days. I can assure the Committee that fisher people of the day—and again I do not blame them—were not going out there saying: “Look I will tell you how many fish I caught so that you can have an accurate levy.” or “I will tell you how much I took from the sea last year so you can have an accurate levy.” That could not be established. We had to have some guesswork—and when I say “we” I am talking about the Government of the day of which I was not part— 
Hon David Carter 
: The royal “we”. 
R DOUG WOOLERTON 
: —the royal “we”—so the levy was too high. 
This bill addresses that matter. New Zealand First agrees with this bill. I am somewhat amazed at some of the flim-flam coming from my colleagues who did mention this issue in the select committee it is true but it did not make it into the commentary because it is a nonsense.