High Court showdown over who pays for fisheries surveillance
Monday, 15 June 2026
The Government faces a four-day High Court challenge this week over cuts to fishing industry levies and a steep decline in fisheries observer coverage, with conservation advocates alleging marine science is being left underfunded.
The Environmental Law Initiative says successive governments have failed to properly recover the costs of fisheries management, effectively creating a multimillion-dollar subsidy for the commercial fishing industry.
At the centre of the case are decisions by Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones, who reduced the total industry levy from $41.2 million to $36.3m for the 2024/25 fishing year.
The levy is intended to recover the costs of fisheries management, including stock assessments, environmental impact research and the placement of observers on commercial vessels. It reflects the fact that commercial fishers receive exclusive access to a publicly owned resource.
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Adding fuel to the dispute, newly released Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) documents reveal the Government has just opened public consultation to lock in a similarly capped levy of $35.6m for the upcoming 2026/27 year, a move that effectively holds the line on the discounted rates ELI is challenging in court.
MPI officials noted the proposed budget is $5.7m lower than the 2023/24 levies “which were the highest in recent times”.
ELI says that while the seafood sector generates more than $2 billion in annual export revenue, levy contributions have declined in real terms and now amount to less than 2% of export earnings.
Matt Hall, ELI’s director of research and legal, said critical marine science is underfunded because the industry is not being charged the full cost of its impacts on public resources.
He said commercial fishers pay no resource rentals or royalties, meaning the levy is the only direct cost for their use of the marine environment.
ELI also alleges the Crown has absorbed millions of dollars in research costs that should have been recovered from industry under statutory cost-recovery rules, including $5.8m for large-scale trawl surveys since 2019, as well as projects such as a $480,502 study on mussel spat survival and a $67,682 trial of a surface longline baitsetter.
The High Court in Wellington will also hear about a decline in fisheries monitoring, with human observer coverage in inshore fisheries falling from 1953 days in 2020/21 to just 277 in 2024/25.
“These services are the backbone of sustainable fishing. They need to be properly resourced so that the Government can monitor and protect vulnerable marine species like dolphins, seabirds, and turtles from the impacts of fishing,” Hall said.
Fisheries New Zealand has pointed to the rollout of onboard cameras as an alternative, but Department of Conservation advice filed in court warned the system would not meet conservation monitoring requirements and recommended maintaining human observer coverage.
Those warnings were rejected, citing observer capacity constraints and industry cost concerns.
The first cameras on inshore vessels went live in July 2023, but don’t apply across the whole fleet. Observers are still used on deep water vessels.
Jones declined to comment while the matter is before the courts.
Seafood NZ said in a statement on Sunday that the industry paid $36.3m a year in cost recovery to the Crown, on top of the work the industry undertook on research and management.
New Zealand had the largest commercial fisheries camera programme in the world, Seafood NZ said.
“This scale of monitoring is something only a few countries have even attempted. There is no doubt that cameras have improved monitoring and reporting, and the resulting transparency is something the industry welcomes.
“Seafood New Zealand is looking forward to getting clarity from the court on important issues of cost recovery.”