Retired Fisherman Norm Hawler comments on the current Fisheries Act and Reform Bill
If you believed the loudest campaign lines, you’d think the Government was about to repeal sustainability and sell the ocean to the highest bidder.
The Fisheries Amendment Bill has been labeled a “scam”, “rotten to the core”, a “bonfire” of safeguards and a “fatal weakening” of the law. The picture painted is simple: big quota owners win, everyone else— fish, environment, recreational and small commercial operators—loses.
For people who actually depend on fisheries, that story is both unsatisfying and misleading.
The law hasn’t disappeared
Start with what isn’t changing.
The Fisheries Act 1996 still has the same core purpose: to provide for utilisation of fisheries resources while ensuring sustainability. “Ensuring sustainability” still means maintaining the resource for future generations and dealing with adverse effects of fishing on the aquatic environment.
The environmental principles— associated and dependent species, key habitats, biodiversity—are still there. The information principles— best available information, explicit treatment of uncertainty, precaution when information is weak—are still there.
In other words, the Act’s spine remains. The Bill does not rip out sections 8, 9 or 10. It doesn’t abolish the Minister’s duty to manage sustainably. It doesn’t remove powers to cut TAC and TACC when the science or common sense demands it.
So what does it do?
TACs as outputs, not politics by other means
A lot of the criticism treats TACs (Total Allowable Catches) as if they are simply political numbers dreamed up to please big companies. In reality, TAC and TACC are outputs of a process that has grown over decades: stock assessments, harvest strategy standards, application of purpose and principles, submissions and, at times, court scrutiny.
That process isn’t perfect. But pretending TAC is pure politics ignores the machinery many of us spent years working in and with.
Opponents of the Bill rarely acknowledge that machinery. That makes for strong slogans, but weak analysis.
What really shifts: tests, tools and leverage
In plain language, the Bill makes three big moves.
First, it changes how TAC decisions must be justified. The law will require Ministers to consider a checklist of “standard factors” when setting TAC, and to take environmental principles and adverse effects into account only “to the extent that they are relevant” to those factors.
That does not delete the environmental principles. It does make it easier for a Minister to say: “For this stock, the relevant issues are biomass, productivity and utilisation; broader ecosystem concerns will be addressed elsewhere.” It moves environmental considerations down a notch in TAC setting, from front row to supporting role.
Second, it introduces or formalises multi year TAC decisions and management procedures. A management procedure is essentially a harvest rule: if index X goes up or down, TAC moves according to a preset formula. Multi year TACs apply these rules over several years instead of relitigating everything annually.
Used well, these tools are sensible. They can:
- respond faster to data than sporadic full stock assessments
- reduce political tinkering with TACs
- provide more certainty for planning.
Critics who scream “five year set and forget” are wrong. Properly designed management procedures are updated with new data every year. But supporters who present them as neutral housekeeping are also overstating it.
The crucial questions are: what objectives are baked into the rules, and how easy is it to revisit them when reality diverges from the model? A rule tuned to maximise long term yield at relatively low biomass is very different from one tuned to rebuild quickly to high biomass and protect key habitats.
Third, it tightens process levers: shortening timeframes to challenge decisions in court; and gives stricter control over who can access and publish monitoring footage. Officially, this is about certainty, efficiency, privacy and commercial sensitivity.
In practice, it also makes life harder for the same community, Iwi, recreational and environmental groups that have used the Act’s principles—and the courts—to pull Ministers back toward sustainability. Anyone who remembers the battles over CRA 2, kina barrens, tarakihi, or closures in the inner Hauraki Gulf will understand the value of that leverage, even if they disagreed with a particular case.
CRA 2: where theory meets reef
One case study shows why the nuance matters more than the noise.
CRA 2 is often held up as proof that commercial fishing “functionally extincted” crayfish and caused kina barrens from Northland to East Cape. The reality is messier. Parts of the inner Hauraki Gulf have long been lightly fished commercially because recreational fleets, pot interference and boat traffic made it difficult to work. At the same time, there’s evidence that predator depletion is only one factor behind kina barrens in some locations, mixed up with sediment, storms and warming.
A TAC is a blunt instrument in that soup. Cutting TACC alone won’t magically regrow kelp where land based impacts dominate. Equally, pretending fishing has nothing to do with it is just as flimsy.
The Bill doesn’t suddenly make TAC a precise habitat management knob. It does, however, give a Minister more room to treat those ecosystem warnings as “not relevant” when deciding how much lobster can be taken overall, and to rely on other, less certain measures to sort out the reefs. That’s the subtle, but real, environmental risk.
A better critique than “scam”
None of this is an apology for the Bill. There is a legitimate debate to be had about:
- how strongly environmental principles should bite in TAC decisions
- how management procedures are designed and reviewed
- what kind of oversight and access the public should have to the information the system is built on.
The problem is that “scam” politics and “privatisation” rhetoric do almost nothing to help that debate. They flatten a complex set of changes into a morality play: industry villains, Minister as stooge, everyone else as victim.
For those who live with this law, that isn’t good enough.
You can recognise that the Fisheries Act already hard wires sustainability and precaution into its purpose. You can support modern tools like management procedures. You can still insist that Parliament:
- keeps environmental principles as more than a box ticking exercise
- embeds ecosystem and precautionary criteria into any long term TAC rules
- protects meaningful avenues for independent challenge when the sea tells a different story than the model.
That’s a harder sell than “kill the Bill”. It’s also a more honest one— and ultimately, more useful for anyone who wants both fish in the water and a fishing industry worth working in.
