fish+monkey

Latest among the many terrible actions and omissions that the current New Zealand government is responsible for is the Fisheries Amendment Bill, aka the Ocean Destruction Bill.

It is a rotten piece of legislation dictated by the fishing industry into the ear of thei toadie minister. While the law was being written, the only ones with a voice and a say were the industrial fishing industry, that minister Jones is so partial to.

About a year ago, the draft was introduced and it was almost universally rejected. From the perspective of environmentalists the bill has many flaws, chief amongst them:

• A blanket exclusion of footage from the Cameras on Boats programme from any and all OIA requests. This citing concerns about fisher’s privacy, a problem that has never happened and for which many better solutions exist.
• A $50000 dollar fine for anyone leaking or otherwise making any of this footage public. Kind of ironic to punish potential whistleblowers or journalists with a fine that more than doubles the penalty for harming protected species (the kind of behaviour that would be revealed by said footage).
• Limiting the period for legal challenges of ministerial decisions to 20 working days. This makes it unrealistic for anyone to build a case. This is clearly to counter the many recent and successful challenges brought on by environmental legal experts such as the team at ELI. The minister himself has mentioned them and expressed his irritation at their work.
• Setting catch limits for 5 years at a time, at the same time consultation with stakeholders is limited. This removes the capacity to respond to changing situations in fish stock or their ecosystems.
• Removing the legal requirement for the minister to take into account environmental factors when setting the allowable catch for diffferent fish species.
• Weakening standards for fish stocks considered “low-information”. Meaning that when little information is available on the state of a species, less protection applies. You’s think the precautionary principle and basic logic would mean MORE protection is needed. But we are operating under the interests of the industry, not the environment.
• Legalising discard of unwanted fish. A practice that depletes the ocean by encouraging high-grading, where fishers dump the fish that is less commercially viable and catch even more.
• Incentivising bottom trawling by lowering the deemed value rates for large trawlers with freezers on them

And so much more.

The entire bill should be rejected. The good news is that the National Party have signalled some openness to public pressure on this. So it is important that all of us make a submission.
If enough noise is made, and politicians feel that votes hang on these harmful decisions, they might have a good reason to tell NZ First and Shane Jones that this level of naked regulatory capture is unacceptable.

Tell them you love the ocean and that this bill must be thrown out in its entirety.

The deadline is Wednesday, 6th of May (extended from April 29th originally.)