Supplementary Submission to the Primary Production Committee on the Fisheries Amendment Bill
Here is Fish Mainland’s supplementary submission to the Primary Production Committee regarding the Fisheries Amendment Bill. This submission includes talking notes for Fish Mainland’s presentation to the Committee on 7 July, along with additional information the Committee requested at that time.
1 4 July 2022
Supplementary Submission to the Primary Production Committee on the Fisheries Amendment Bill
Email: select.committees@parliament.govt.nz
Introduction
Fish Mainland is an incorporated society with charitable status whose purpose is to coordinate and assist the South Island marine fishing community in restoring and sustaining fisheries resources for the benefit of all who fish in South Island waters. In so doing, Fish Mainland works collaboratively with government, tangata whenua and others to bring about the best public outcomes.
Submission
On 17 June 2022, Fish Mainland submitted its strong support of the Fisheries Amendment Bill amending the Fisheries (Amateur Fishing) Regulations 2013 by empowering the Minister of Oceans and Fisheries to specify recreational management controls, such as daily bag limits and minimum legal sizes, in an instrument (e.g., Gazette Notice).
The aim of this amendment is to improve responsiveness in management decision making. The use of such instruments would replace the regulatory process that too often creates unnecessary delays in implementing much-needed changes in management controls.
The submission by Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu provides an example of the need to improve responsiveness in management controls. Their example pertains to the East Otago Taipapure Management Committee recommending a regulation to reduce the paua recreational daily bag limit. More changes in management controls were needed at that time, but they were not put in place largely because of the protracted regulatory process, which led to a full closure of the paua fishery in 2019.
This type of scenario does happen regularly. Everyone is worse off when the state of a fishery declines to the point that closing it becomes the best option.
Similarly, the 2016 earthquake in the Kaikoura region provides another example of the need for improved responsiveness. At that time, the PAU3 TACC was immediately constrained by ACE shelving and then reduced by 50% within one year. In contrast, it took three years to reduce the recreational daily bag limit by regulation.
Worse yet, this example points to the need for management controls to be implemented urgently and within appropriate scope. The paua fishery was opened for the first time from 1 December 2021 to 28 February 2022.
The opening led to the recreational harvest overrunning the 5-tonne recreational allowance within the first week (PAU3A). By the end of the 3-month opening, the recreational harvest overrun was more than 8-fold; 5 tonnes versus an estimated 42 tonnes.
There was no legal control available to stem the tide of recreational harvesters, which decimated the large size and abundant paua in wading depth. Apparently, nothing could be done other than another emergency closure of the entire fishery, including commercial harvest. This shows the limitations of some existing management controls along with the lack of regulatory responsiveness to change them when needed.
In addition, we wish to draw attention to the need for recreational management controls to be applied to finer-scale areas, not just to Fisheries Management Areas (FMA). For example, South Island waters are divided into several blue cod areas with their own management controls, such as daily bag limits.
Fish Mainland has devised a recreational self-reporting system to address the lack of guidance on when to change the traffic light system, and therefore daily bag limits in each blue cod area. The self-reporting system’s app allows fishers to report catch and effort by area, and it would be counter-productive to collect such fine-scale data to have it apply at the larger FMA scale.
We can anticipate increasing need for finer-scale data collection and management controls, which emphasises the importance of a technical amendment (as outlined in para 80-82 of the joint PIC/NZRLIC submission).
It should be noted that while movement from regulation to legal instruments for the Minister will bring about more responsiveness in decision making, there are inherent obstacles and delays in the Ministerial decision-making process that are outside the amendments in the Bill.
Having worked in MFish/MAF/MPI for several years, I witnessed the gradual slowing down of the bureaucratic grind as the various branches of MPI competed for Ministerial time and attention, which often led to delays of several months or longer for an advice paper to simply get to the Minister. The inclusion of several Ministers across the MPI portfolio has helped, but the bureaucratic grind is well entrenched.
Fish Mainland also submitted its support for the Amendment Bill applying pre-set decision rules that would allow the Minister to set and adjust sustainability measures and catch settings for fish stocks, within set limits, as needed.
We supported this amendment on the condition that it would not hinder nor diminish in any way the public’s right to voice its views on the decision rules (including methodologies and inputs for determining proposed adjustments and catch settings) and Ministerial consideration of those views.
Regarding our conditional support, we wish to highlight what others have regarding the original policy intent of this provision was for harvest controls rules (HCR), which specify a pre-agreed set of responses to a change in the health of a stock.
A HCR does not, therefore, specify an ‘approved range or limits’ the Minister can make decisions within, as stated in the Bill, but instead describes an agreed methodology for adjusting management responses using pre-agreed information sources and analyses to achieve management targets that are also specified in the HCR.
The aim is for pre-agreed methodologies and inputs to help everyone to reach agreement about how a fishery will be managed and thus increase certainty by de-politicising and streamlining annual decisions made under the HCR.
Also, the pre-set decision rules should operate at a level of the TAC (not the TACC) and should include rules about how the TAC will be allocated among the fishing sectors.
We do not consider that a pre-set rule on TAC allocations would be inherently detrimental nor beneficial for the recreational fishing sector. The fact is that Ministerial decisions set TAC allocations, which are binding until changed (often several years later). Similarly, we support a pre-set allocation rule so long as consultation occurs in setting the rule, agreement is reached on the rule and consultation is a requirement before the Minister can change that rule.
Furthermore, the pre-set decision rules should reflect all relevant statutory requirements of the sections of the Act under which the rule will operate and cannot be revoked by the Minister unless consultation has occurred.
These amendments would bring about a much-desired increase in the number of stocks that could be reviewed annually. As it stands, the stocks that are reviewed regularly typically encounter several years in between reviews. In contrast, stocks in US fisheries are commonly reviewed every other year, with a 3-year interval between reviews often considered unresponsive to necessary adjustments and changes in catch settings.
Finally, we support the Bill amending the Fisheries Act 1996 to enable the use of cameras on-board commercial vessels. We advised the Committee to consider the following report, which sets out the complexity in implementing this amendment
Catalyzing_Growth_of_Electronic_Monitoring_in_Fisheries_9-10-2018.pdf (nature.org)
This report shows that in 2018 there were around 1,000 commercial vessels worldwide that were using cameras on board, with many on a trial basis. This level of use shows the challenges faced in implementing E-monitoring, including the building of capabilities for collecting, securely storing and analysing data, along with decisions about who pays the cost, based on the benefits.
In short, implementation of cameras on-board vessels should be phased in and expanded over time, as is done in other jurisdictions.
In contrast, in 2016 the then Minister of Fisheries and his officials did a grave disservice to the New Zealand public by asserting that ‘a camera will be place on every boat.’ This assertion was irresponsible in terms of building up unrealistic public expectations about what can be done with New Zealand’s fleet of 1,000 or so commercial vessels.
Thank you for the opportunity to provide input into these important amendments.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Randall Bess
On behalf of the Fish Mainland Board of Directors
Addendum
As requested during the 7 July 2022 Committee hearing, Fish Mainland provides some background information on the recreational fisher self-reporting system that Fish Mainland designed with MPI officials. The system is currently being developed by the Nelson-based Plink Software Ltd first for the South Island blue cod fishery and then expanded to include other species that are important to recreational fishers in shared fisheries.
The primary objective of the self-reporting system is to collect data that indicate increases or decreases in recreational catch and effort to better inform decision making in the management of blue cod stocks via the National Blue Cod Strategy’s traffic light system (e.g. colours change as available information suggests the state of the fishery is improving or declining).
The Blue Cod Strategy has not specified the information needed to legitimise colour changes across any of the zones. The veracity of these changes is critical to gaining recreational fisher buy-in for the traffic light system. An effective way to gain buy-in is through citizen science (e.g. self-reporting). Fisher buy-in of the traffic light system is the other objective of the system.
More specifically, the self-reporting system provides samples of reported data that provide broad signals, or indicator statistics, regarding trends in catch and effort for both targeted blue cod and bycatch within the different zones.
The self-reporting system is like the longstanding voluntary arrangements for collecting catch-per-unit-of-effort data for the commercial rock lobster fisheries. Over time, these voluntary arrangements have continued to improve so that the data provided have become integral to stock reviews.
A similar process of continually improved voluntary arrangements could be developed for the South Island blue cod fishery.
The self-reporting system design comprises a mobile application (app) to be used by recreational fishers to report their catch and effort. It is compatible with both iOS (Apple) and Android devices.
The system also includes a database to hold all the associated data and an Application Programming Interface (API) through which data can be created, retrieved, updated and deleted, if required. Also, the API provides reporting functionality of the data held in the database and with a security layer that controls who can access what data.
Below is an outline of the catch and effort data collected via the app. The data collection includes whether any species were caught and, therefore, able to take account of trips with ‘zero’ catch. If any are caught, the number of each kept and released is recorded, either legal-sized or under-sized.
The data collection also includes the blue cod zones fished, fishing platform and method, time fished and other measures of effort. It also includes self-reporting of any marine mammal observations during the fishing trip and entry of any comments.
The data collected can be used to calculate:
Monthly and annual effort in each zone;
Average catch rates in each zone;
Average number of fish caught and retained (relative to bag limits) per fisher trip in each zone;
Average number of fish released per fisher trip in each zone; and
Proportion of zero catch trips and limit bag trips in each zone.
The self-reporting system has been initially tested via the network of South Island fishing clubs, the Marine Guardians of Fiordland and Kaikoura and individual fishers. The system is ready to be launched for public use across the South Island blue cod fishery.
The expansion of the system broadly includes adding new species support, auto detecting fish size from a size mat image, which improves compliance with minimum legal size, technical upgrading of the system and increasing fisher uptake and use of the app. Plink Ltd is undertaking this work, in conjunction with MPI officials and Fish Mainland Inc.
A particular area of shared interest is the Kaikoura Marine Area and re-opening the paua fishery to recreational catch. The recent 3-month re-opening led to a significant increase in recreational catch far in excess of the 5-tonne recreational allowance (estimated 42-tonne recreational catch). The expansion of the self-reporting system could greatly aid the efforts of MPI’s Fisheries Management and Compliance groups in managing this iconic fishery.
The Fiordland Marine Guardians are particularly interested in expansion of the self-reporting system to encourage recreational fishers to demonstrate where they caught fish for compliance reasons and as a tool for fishers to fish in certain areas as rule changes unfold.
The expansion also includes the app having the option to display in English, Te Reo Māori or Te Reo Māori (Ngāi Tahu Dialect). Expansion in this way supports South Island Mandated Iwi Organisations to promote use of the app.
The system’s initial development and subsequent expansion has been funded by MPI’s Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures and the Myers Foundation Trust.
