Shane Jones has ignited a storm at sea. The Minister for Oceans and Fisheries has proposed the most sweeping changes to fisheries legislation in the past 40 years. Kiwis aren’t happy, and rightly so.
Despite more than 25,000 people rejecting proposed changes to the Fisheries Act last April, the Minister has released the Fisheries Amendment Bill. It ignores previous submissions and introduces new proposals. The Minister wants the Bill enacted before the election. We don’t.
Subsidising commercial operators and fast-tracking commercial fish harvest at the expense of the marine environment, the fish, and our future is not a winning strategy.
This is our final chance to oppose the Fisheries Amendment Bill before it becomes law. Speak up before Wednesday 29 April.
Anyone who has spent decades out on the water knows there aren’t enough fish. The problem is, the Amendment Bill will not resolve the depletion issue. Instead, the Bill attempts to normalise depletion.
It weakens environmental safeguards, limits public input into decision-making, and removes commercial minimum size limits for species such as snapper, trevally and tarakihi.
The public have been quick to understand the risks and vocalise their concerns online. Less than a week after the Bill’s release, Prime Minister, Christopher Luxton succumbed to public pressure, announcing he would drop the Amendment to allow commercial fishers to keep and sell baby fish.
But the job is far from done. Buried in 70 pages of legal jargon are changes to the Fisheries Act that seek to hide the intent of the Bill – to take fish from the public and hand more control to commercial interests. Another windfall for commercial quota owners. Another hit for us, our kids and the marine environment.
The Bill opens the door to more waste, legalising more dumping of unwanted dead fish overboard. Valuable fish that could’ve been left swimming in our waters will instead be wasted, in an attempt to reduce “unnecessary costs” for commercial fishers.
Legalising dumping and discarding undermines any incentive for fishers to transition to more selective fishing methods. This means more trawling along our coastline, not less.
The Minister wants to also shut us out from having a say in changes to commercial catch limits for up to five years. This means less oversight and less accountability. Decision making can happen behind closed doors, without any public input.
The marine environment is dynamic and lots can change in five years. Depletion creeps up on you. You don’t realise things have changed until they are much worse and there’s not even enough fish to feed the family after a day’s fishing.
Even now we can’t gather crayfish from Northland, the scallop fishery is closed, and where have our john dory gone?
We don’t want families waiting up to a decade for corrective management changes to be applied. By then the kids have grown up and lost their fascination with fishing and spending time with us on or near the water.
The Bill expects Kiwis to accept the leftovers of a degraded marine environment and a broken quota management system. We say Kill the whole Bill. Now.
