Fishing changes threaten ocean and industry

The government’s proposed changes to the Fisheries Act threaten to wipe out decades of effort to restore marine biodiversity — and threaten commercial fishing interests too, writes Nicola Rata-MacDonald.

 

Earlier this year, I had the privilege of attending the United Nations Oceans Conference, a global gathering of communities and countries working to ensure that the world’s oceans are used sustainably.

I listened to speeches from leaders across the Pacific, sharing the urgent, evidence-based action those countries are taking to protect our oceans. Our neighbours were rightfully lauded as world leaders for their efforts.

I went to the conference to share more about our work as Ngāti Manuhiri — about how we’re using mātauranga Māori to exercise our role as kaitiaki, and how that’s helping to restore marine biodiversity and reverse the human impacts on our fragile moana.

What I took away from that conference, however, is how far we as a country have fallen from our “clean, green” reputation. For too long, we have rested on our laurels, without taking action to uphold that self-proclaimed brand.

Fifty years ago, New Zealand introduced the world’s first fully protected marine reserve at Te Hawere-a-Maki/Goat Island, through the establishment of the Cape Rodney/Okakari Point Marine Reserve. Previously overfished and severely degraded, by 1985 it had been restored to a rich ecological area, abundant in marine life and activity. We were once considered world leaders too.

So it was with trepidation that I read the government’s announcement of the final decisions it will rely on to rewrite the Fisheries Act. They include changes to landing and discard rules, removing public accountability of commercial fishers by weakening on-board camera provisions, setting catch limits without needing to consider the broader effects of fishing on the environment, and increasing the amount of fishing quota that can be carried forward if commercial fishers don’t catch their full entitlement in a given year.

All of these proposals have the very real potential to nullify decades of efforts to restore our fisheries for everyone’s benefit — including for the commercial fishing industry.

When the government first released its proposals — developed solely on the recommendations of the commercial fishing industry — for public consultation earlier this year, we were quick to make our position on those proposals clear: any changes made to the Fisheries Act must be underpinned by environmental principles rather than commercial ones.

That isn’t just our position. The environmental principles of maintaining species above a level that ensures their long-term viability, maintaining biological diversity of the aquatic environment, and protecting habitats of significance are the basis of the Fisheries Act.

After all, if there are no more fish, there’s no longer a fishing industry.

The question on my mind isn’t whether the fishing industry knows this. Of course it does. My concern is that, as a group of commercial entities, there will come a time when the need to turn an immediate profit trumps the need to maintain fish stocks into the future.

We’re being asked to trust that these companies will do the right thing, and if they don’t, to trust that successive governments will take action.

In contrast, at the Ngāti Manuhiri Settlement Trust, we have an entire programme of work, Te Au o Moana, which is dedicated solely to marine regeneration through the restoration of shellfish beds and kelp forests. It includes the removal of kina barrens (areas that have been depleted of all sealife except for kina) and invasive species like exotic caulerpa. Kaitiakitanga is not just an abstract concept to us — it is a living, breathing ethos that we act on every day.

Take, for example, our whakatō kūtai (mussel reef restoration) kaupapa, an ongoing partnership that is undertaking the world’s largest mussel bed restoration by deploying over 150 tonnes of mussels in the Hauraki Gulf to rebuild marine habitats and ecosystems.

Kūtai (mussels) are crucial to maintaining the health of our oceans, but our once-abundant mussel beds were commercially dredged to the point of collapse in the 1950s and 1960s. As natural ecosystem engineers, kūtai provide food, shelter and protection for diverse species to thrive. They also filter impurities from seawater, giving our wai a fighting chance to ensure it’s stable enough to support us now and into the future.

What’s clear to me through our work is that hyper-local partnerships between mana whenua and local communities are the bedrock of our national effort to protect and restore our natural environments.

Government processes can slow down effective action to address incursions like caulerpa. Mana whenua and community groups are often the first to respond to environmental disasters in our own backyard.

Yet, as hard as we work on the ground, the government plays an important role in powering up local responses by putting in place regulations that support our efforts. So there is certainly an argument to be made for streamlining decision-making to allow this support to be delivered more effectively. However, to do so while also making it easier to extract from the very environments that we are trying to restore makes the proposed reform of the Fisheries Act no better than our current regime.

Full closures of fisheries do more to support restorative practices than a half-hearted attempt to keep everyone happy through ineffective protections that are riddled with caveats.

For example, a three-year halt on commercial and recreational fishing of spiny rock lobster in the inner Hauraki Gulf has been put in place to help rebuild populations and reduce the presence of kina barrens.

Kina barrens are rampant across our rohe moana, turning once-abundant ocean ecosystems into vast expanses of bare rock. While kina are a taonga species, barrens have become an issue due to overfishing of predator species like the spiny rock lobster in pursuit of bolstering commercial profits.

Rebuilding the lobster populations will help to restore a delicate balance. As natural predators of kina, they will help to control the barrens to restore healthy, abundant marine ecosystems. In that regard, the closure is a move we wholeheartedly support.

Decisions like this were made under our current regime and show that somewhere within our vast bureaucracy, there is an inherent understanding of the delicate balance that needs to be struck if our marine ecosystems are to thrive for generations to come.

Even so, the present government’s move away from a coordinated, intentional, whole-of-system approach to the protection and restoration of our moana makes it nearly impossible to regain our once clean, green image.

Instead, we’re left with ad-hoc closures of fisheries, piecemeal changes to legislation, and an absence of any commitment to conservation, biosecurity and environmental protections.

We’re left to fend for our moana by ourselves, calling for reinforcements but being given scraps. We’re stuck up a creek but are only ever given one paddle at a time.

Now that the government has decided how it wants to reform the Fisheries Act, officials are working to draft a bill that will give effect to those changes. It will be the most comprehensive review of the Act we have seen in decades.

At the forefront of my mind is the potential for this review to result in a watering down of the protections we currently have in place, all in the name of productivity and economic growth — a relentless pursuit that will prove catastrophic to the health of our oceans.

Nicola Rata-MacDonald was named an environmental hero last year.

 

Nicola Rata-MacDonald MNZM is the chief executive of the Ngāti Manuhiri Settlement Trust, and also serves as co-chair of the Hauraki Gulf Forum. In 2024, she was named New Zealand Environmental Hero of the Year, and this year she was awarded a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the environment.