Ewen-Street Ian: Aquaculture Reform Bill — Second Reading Instructions to Committee In Committee 
Ewen-Street Ian: Aquaculture Reform Bill — Second Reading Instructions to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:622;Page:17709] 
IAN EWEN-STREET (Green) 
: 
 I would like to start by making a small correction to what my colleague Phil Heatley said. He described incumbent farmers as having a right of first refusal to occupy the space again once their leases had run out. That is not strictly true. What they do have is the right to apply for a consent to the space they presently occupy. A right of first refusal in effect means a right of occupation in perpetuity and I do not think we want to give people the impression that that is what those farmers have. 
This bill is really about aquaculture management areas and how they are established. It was the intention of the ministry as I understand it to flag to regional councils some years ago that aquaculture management areas would have to be established in their areas. So those councils that had aquaculture management areas or big marine-farming areas like Marlborough Waikato and Northland have actually done quite a bit of work in establishing aquaculture management areas. I believe that they will simply take their existing farms and deem them to be aquaculture management areas. 
There was some concern that smaller councils or councils that had no real aquaculture activity had not been doing their job properly and had not been creating aquaculture management areas so it was interesting to hear from the smaller councils. I particularly remember that the Gisborne District Council I think it was said that it was the guardian of its ratepayers’ money that it had had no applications from anybody to do aquaculture in its area and that it felt it would be simply wasteful for it to use ratepayers’ money to create an aquaculture management area that maybe nobody would use so it would leave it to the private plan change to cater for anybody who wanted to create an aquaculture management area. 
Once those areas have been established if somebody wants to create a new aquaculture management area there are several routes that can be taken. The main one is a private plan change. An individual farmer or a number of farmers can band together and say they want to expand out of the aquaculture management area into another area. Normally that is an excluded zone so changing the plan is actually a much higher hurdle to leap over than gaining the original resource consent which process led to the boom-and-bust sort of scenario we have had under the present regime. We in the select committee were concerned that if those people were successful in creating a new plan change and had gone to the effort of doing that the council would then tender the space which is what the original legislation said and those people’s efforts would amount to nothing if someone else came along with deeper pockets. So we finally resolved that people instituting a private plan change will get 80 percent of the area they have applied for and been granted—the other 20 percent obviously will go to Maori. 
There was another little wrinkle in that scenario though: if the council initiated a plan change all the water space with the exception of the allocation to Maori would be tendered. There was a possibility that people would apply to have a private plan change that it would then be taken over by the council and that the council in effect would make it a council-initiated plan change. We were concerned that people who applied for the private plan change would again be left empty-handed so there is a statement in the legislation that private initiators will get 80 percent of the space they apply and get approval for—though that does not take away the ability of the council to have more space than that. 
In terms of incumbents present farms are deemed to be aquaculture management areas and they will get resource consents or permits for 20 years. At the expiry of that time the leases expire and the farmers have the opportunity to reapply for coastal occupation permits. They will have to fulfil a couple of obligations. First of all the council must not be going to change the plan and stop that area from being an aquaculture area in the future. Second and probably more important is the fact that we are requiring or encouraging marine farmers to play fair—to do the right thing by both their community and the environment—so that they do fulfil the terms of their resource consents. There have to be fairly severe breaches of the resource consents as Mr Heatley said for them not to be granted. People have to have been convicted of some major breach rather than their just being served an abatement notice by the local council. There could be somebody on the council who had a bit of a grudge against the incumbent.