Retired Fisherman Norm Hawler comments on Fisheries Act Reform
Winter is upon us down in the Bay. Not too demanding for the time being – just some hard frosts and a pervasive dampness anywhere that is shaded by beach houses or vegetation. I have the wood fire spluttering around the clock, so I stay dry and warm in my little cottage. Outside and across the beach the sea has been wild – persistent swells from the southern quarters and the early season rock lobster vessels have been untangling and panel beating gear almost weekly.
I like the coast during the Autumn to Winter transition – the air is clear and crisp, the sea goes to a steel grey – and the whales put on a show as they cruise past. This year the kahawai have been putting on a show too – best one for ages.
Kahawai – allegedly ‘the people’s fish’ as a consequence of a very well-run publicity campaign back in the day. And we saw another one this year – the campaign to scrap the proposed Fisheries Reforms which in my view were so poorly promoted and clumsily justified by the Minister, Shane Jones.
LegaSea/Option 4 and kindred groups are killing fishing industry ambitions and innovations in the inshore fisheries space. They have politicised fisheries issues to the point where social media scores and selective public opinion surveys have trumped good science as a foundation for Ministerial and agency decision-making.
Jones was not much help to the cause – several times I wondered if he had even read and understood the reforms that he was championing. The very persistent critics of reform might have read the papers but clearly did not understand the context or the strategic intent. For my money it all came down to opportunity lost. Opponents may well gloat on social media but in reality they have torpedoed changes that would be to the benefit of stock abundance, more timely management interventions and greater accountability for catches taken.
It’s no secret that I have a commercial fishing background or that even in retirement I maintain a steady interest in fisheries management so I am confident that I don’t express uninformed or ill-informed opinions. There is a massive challenge and a critical responsibility for politicians to accept that the public policy issues in the inshore fisheries spaces need to be urgently addressed because the long term cost to New Zealand – economic, social including cultural; and reputational – will be significant if the QMS is left to drift as it has been for a decade or more.
The anti-Reform lobby effectively ‘bullied’ their way to recent success. From them only exaggeration and criticism – no concessions to fisheries management, no negotiated outcomes, no voluntary harvest constraints – all of which have been hallmarks of commercial and customary user groups for decades. I did not see any reference to the wider use of property rights to resolve contemporary competing interests in relation to spatial separation/ commercial exclusion and/or method preferences.
It seems to me that the ‘tools’ for adjusting access and utilisation opportunities in the sea fisheries are there to be used in a process of negotiation and agreed settlement. The use of ITQs as the currency of the Treaty settlement established the precedent. Unfortunately there remains a strong belief (and still amongst some officials within Government agencies) that the ‘QMS’ only applies to commercial fishing.
The SNA 1 (Auckland/Northland snapper stock) catch history now being created by the recreational fishing industry (and it clearly is an industry as evidenced by the sponsorships in support of the Reform protests) has come from the stock abundance that was intended to accumulate as a consequence of a sequence of TAC/TACC decisions and adjustments to input controls. In my view all of the catch in excess of the specified allowances within the overall TAC rightfully belonged to the fish stock; all extractive users would have accrued benefits of greater stock abundance by way of improved CPUE. But so what? When confronted by evidence of mis-management (or more properly, failure to manage) the Minister will again be sensitive to political pressures from a ‘virtual’ and unaccountable recreational lobby and (again) use his/her discretion to adjust the recreational allowance to new heights based on ‘best available information’.
Only a Government with big balls is going to deal with those issues. So it seems to me that the challenge for the commercial sector is to make it worthwhile for a Government to do so by demonstrating what is lost if they do not. Not the potential loss, but the actual cost to the nation.
Finally for now and whilst I am in a cantankerous mood – I will not use the term ‘fisher’ or the plural in anything that comes from my desk. In its apparent gender ‘neutrality’ it actually de-personalises the industry and its participants. Which makes it easier to dismiss the social and economic losses being inflicted upon them by poor decision-making. I was a fisherman – they are fishermen or fisher women.
Call us by our names.
Yours faithfully,
Spiny Norman.
