Overhaul of fisheries rules sparks alarm and gratitude

Thursday, 7 August 2025

Changes to fisheries rules allowing greater catch limits when fish are abundant, and stopping on-board camera footage being made public, received a mixed reaction when they were unveiled to sector representatives in Nelson.

Industry spokespeople said the changes were overdue, but environmentalists feared Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones would make unlawful decisions, with the minister saying he wanted to constrain litigation and allow companies to get on with making money.

Announcing the changes to the Fisheries Act at the annual Seafood New Zealand Conference on Wednesday, Jones said an “almost promiscuous” amount of costly litigation was directed at the industry and government when decisions were made each year about how much of each stock could be caught.

He would take a provision “borrowed” from the fast track legislation to Parliament, to constrict the capacity of the litigators, and ensure any litigation was “tightly defined as to what fisheries decisions actually represent”.

“They are not the sole reason why the hoiho penguin has got problems.”

Catch limits for a specific species would no longer be constrained to 12 months, with the minister able to make decisions for up to five years, based on changes in fish abundance.

Excluding footage from cameras on boats from the Official Information Act meant fishers wouldn’t have to worry about private or commercially sensitive footage being publicly released and “deliberately or unintentionally misconstrued”, Jones said.

Seafood New Zealand chief executive Lisa Futschek said the catch limit changes were common sense, allowing the industry to “properly address” the limit for more stocks - with decisions currently made on about 20-30 of over 600.

It brought the legislation up to speed with data-collection tools - with fishers gathering more information on the water electronically - and would mean the industry was “doing the right thing by the stock”, whether that was increasing the catch limit or reducing it, she said.

Factors including climate change and increased sedimentation were impacting marine eco-sytems, and sustainability was critical for the industry, Futschek said.

“Climate change does change where our fish are, where they breed, where they’re abundant and where they are not.

“We can be more responsive to those signals that we’re getting, because we do have at our disposal now real time data.”

But Labour's oceans and fisheries spokesperson, Nelson MP Rachel Boyack, said making a quota transferable from one year to the next wouldn’t guarantee a more sustainable fishery.

“It could lead to those who hold quota building up a large amount of quota and then absolutely decimating that particular fisheries stock in one year.

“It’s important that we can make decisions year on year, because unfortunately the data we have on what is available isn’t always good enough to be able to make the decisions.”

Earth Sciences New Zealand chief scientist fisheries, Richard O'Driscoll, said electronic reporting and real-time position of fishing vessels had improved fisheries data.

But it was primarily about how many fish were being caught, and higher catch didn’t always mean more fish, he said.

“If you have a species that … come together to spawn for example, you can continue to catch fish even as populations decline.”

Allowing the minister more flexibility to make decisions where there was low information risked removing the impetus to collect pertinent information, he said.

Environmental Defence Society policy director, Raewyn Peart, said the minister's comments about constraining the ability to undertake judicial review werealarming.

Several review proceedings on catch decisions had been successful, and the change risked the minister making decisions that were unlawful and couldn’t be challenged.

“It really depends … what wording is being proposed, so we'll be looking at that carefully.”

Regional member of the group Māui and Hector's Dolphins, James Moran, said it was appalling the Government wanted to hide the on-board camera footage from the public.

Dolphins were still “being caught in numbers” in fishing nets around New Zealand, he said

“We’re getting some information now about numbers that are caught because we can see them.”

It was hard to “misconstrue” a dolphin being pulled up in a net, he said.

“Without the cameras we don’t have any evidence.”