Cameron Mark; Parker DavidMARK CAMERON (ACT): Thank you Madam Chair. Minister can I please bring your attention back to new section 72A(2)(c) in clause 14: require a stock or species to be returned to or abandoned in the sea or other waters from which it was taken if the Minister is satisfied that the return or abandonment is for a biological a fisheries management or an ecosystem purpose". Well if I may—going back to my previous remarks about unwanted bycatch with a very low monetised value—just very quickly we heard from submitters. They were talking about having potentially no licensed fish receivers and that landing unwanted bycatch of such a low monetised value was often as low as 30c in the kilogram and yet returns in terms of equalising their income were $1 per kilo. So they're going effectively backwards. Can you see that it is almost contradictory language when it's talking to essentially the health of the ecosystem and yet we've got bait fish that are potentially deck wash considered caught and by virtue have to be landed and—because there's no monetised value there's no market to be bought back—potentially end up in a landfill. Would the Minister consider giving some consideration to my Supplementary Order Paper 256 which speaks to having bait fish or very common fish removed or excluded in this list given that they have such a low monetised value and they're caught in numerous quantities quite often as unwanted bycatch. And you see this all the time.Do you want to speak to that ecological sustainability aspect in that piece please?Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for Oceans and Fisheries): I have only been overseas once in the last few years as a consequence of COVID but that one occasion was as fisheries Minister. I went to a conference in Portugal that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade recommended that we attend. At the end of it I popped up to Iceland because Iceland has a reputation that is lauded by some as being so far ahead of New Zealand in respect of fisheries management. I'm pleased I went there because I discovered that in some areas they do a bit better than us but in other areas they're pretty much identical to us. In the areas where they use technology a bit more efficiently than us they have some advantages of fewer fish species to deal with which therefore enables greater automation than is possible when you have as many species of fish as we catch. I was also pleased to learn that their technology providers are the same technology providers that our major fishing industry participants use to automate their processes. One of the other things I discovered though was that they have a very similar fisheries management system. They run a quota management system and they have the same challenges in respect of discards. In their case they didn't discover it through Operation Hippocamp or Achilles some years ago; they've just discovered it in the last year through the use of drones. I saw the drone footage there and they've got the same issue of illegal high grading and discards in the Icelandic system that we're trying to deal with in New Zealand. That is the greater ill here: that we have quite substantial quantities as evidenced by Hippocamp and Achilles having been discarded to the point that the prior Government and the current Government thought there was a need to address the issue. How do you address it? Well the advice from officials which the Government has accepted is you actually require all fish that are caught to be landed. When you start having too many exceptions to that rule you undermine the viability of what it is that you're trying to do.Now in respect of fish that the member refers to these rules don't come in overnight and we are expecting that there will be an industry response to maximise the value of that which is returned. Even if it's going into pet food or fishmeal for use in agriculture that is not a wasted use. We're expecting that the private sector response to these rules will be to innovate. They will innovate in a way that minimises the bycatch and they will develop markets for that which is unavoidable bycatch for which they will need to develop markets. We have provided for regulations to allow—if that wasn't viable and there was an area where it wasn't viable to move the bycatch to some of those uses—some of that to go to a landfill. We hope that is not an outcome. If that did prove to be a significant outcome then I'm sure that in the future we or another future Government would revisit the rule."