In December, the Minister of Oceans and Fisheries, David Parker, announced that the Kaikoura pāua fishery would be reopened for a second season— despite last season turning into a debacle that saw recreational, with a gold rush mentality, exceed their intended allowance by eight times!
On a positive note, the minister has taken into account public and Iwi input, advice from ministry officials, while being cognisant that the, earthquake affected, recovering fishery is still vulnerable and that a full environmental reset hasn’t settled yet. However, this announcement is only partial and doesn’t address the devil that should be in the detail. The minister is working on recreational rules, with an announcement expected in February on daily bag limits, size limits, use of an authorised free harvest tool, and other suggestions from public and Iwi.
All that has been announced is that we now have a season 2, with a three month, off-peak, recreational season commencing April 15, reflecting public submissions to avoid Easter. The commercial season starts 5 January and ends in October. While, on the face of it, this may seem iniquitous, commercial are governed by far more constraints than recreational.
Recreational have a government set ‘allowance’ but no actual catch limit, whereas commercial catch is completely constrained by TACC—a set quota. The intention of commercial is to catch this as quickly as possible so they are out of the water by the time the rec season opens. Since commercial catch is completely capped, there is no point controlling the time available to catch it. Should commercial exceed their quota, they get pinged ‘deemed value’, i.e. they pay a penalty of two time the value of the fish landed, so there is no incentive to exceed their limit.
The only tool to control recreational catch is, at this stage, daily bag limit, but it’s flawed. Take the ‘gold rush’ mentality of last season— when excessive numbers of rec fishers take to the water, the daily bag limit becomes a joke: for example, 50 fishers a day taking 5 pāua each has moderate impact but 1000 fishers a day taking 5 pāua each becomes a slaughter. Compound this with the fragile biology of pāua and you get the picture.
So does commercial get an advantage? Not really. Commercial abide by a catch spreading regime which requires them to spread their catch across all of the available coast to avoid localised pressure. A longer season has been allowed is so they can properly apply the catch spread if the weather doesn’t play ball. They have also undertaken to avoid high value accessible sites where recreational prefer, diving further offshore and deeper.
