Marine Reserves (Consultation with Stakeholders) Amendment Bill

Hon Dr NICK SMITH (National—Nelson) Link to this

It is with real pleasure that I stand today to support the very effective member of Parliament for Invercargill, Eric Roy, on his Marine Reserves (Consultation with Stakeholders) Amendment Bill. This Labour Government is making an absolute hash of marine reserve creation all over New Zealand. Whether in Kaka Point in Southland or Great Barrier Island in Auckland, it is hard to find an area of New Zealand that the Government has not made a complete mess of in terms of consultation with its communities. Yet what we find with this Government is that for all Labour’s promises in 1999 about marine reserves, it has made little progress.

If members think back to 1999, they might remember that Labour said 10 percent of New Zealand’s marine environment would be set aside for protection. Yet 7 years later that has been achieved in less than 1 percent of New Zealand’s marine environment. I also draw to the House’s attention the abysmal progress that has been made in respect of the Marine Reserves Bill. Eric Roy is doing the hard yards for the Minister of Conservation, Chris Carter. The Marine Reserves Bill was introduced and referred to the Local Government and Environment Committee in October 2002. That is more than 3½ years ago. Labour has a bill, on which submissions were heard over 3 or 4 years ago, that has still not been reported back by the select committee. What sort of mickey mouse Government do we have?

Earlier this year, last year, and the year before that, National attempted to move motions in the select committee in order to achieve some progress. It was Labour and—can members believe it—the Green Party that opposed our getting on with the business and reforming the Marine Reserves Act of 1971. There is consensus in this Parliament that that 1971 Act is out of date and needs to be updated substantially. Under the 1971 Act, the sole purpose of a marine reserve is scientific. I think most of us today would say that marine reserves have a wider purpose than that. We want to have marine reserves so that people can simply enjoy the marine environment in its wild and natural state. We also want to have marine reserves because it is true that they strengthen the recreational fishing in adjacent waters. Yet again, we are disappointed that Labour has made absolutely no progress on that legislation. Labour needs to be held to account for that.

My colleague Eric Roy proposes that at the front end of the process for establishing marine reserves we inject consultation with the actual community. Has anyone ever heard of such a radical idea? Fancy having to talk to the local people! I know that for the Department of Conservation under Chris Carter, talking with the minions, the lowlife, the people in communities, is not something that Labour is used to.

STEVE CHADWICK (Labour—Rotorua) Link to this

Madam Speaker—

Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) Link to this

I want to make the point that New Zealand First has long believed that the opportunity to throw out a fishing line and catch a fish is part of every New Zealander’s birthright and must be protected for future generations. It is something that makes this country absolutely unique and special to live in and for young people to grow up in. But I have to say that recreational fishers—and I am one myself—are not silly. They recognise the benefits of reserves. They also recognise the benefits of the spillover, and how it actually improves their own take. But the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society has an agenda to turn 20 percent of our coastal waters into reserves, and the Government has obviously indicated that it wants to turn 10 percent. Naturally, people are anxious and worried about that. Therefore, we believe that New Zealanders should be consulted about plans for reserves at an early stage of the process. So we will be voting for the bill to go to the select committee.

We congratulate the member who introduced the bill, Eric Roy, because one can see his obvious experience from many years in select committees reflected in the way it was drawn up. We will await the select committee’s scrutiny before we give a guarantee of continued support, however.

I want to hark back to 1997 when I was a Minister and Dr Nick Smith was the Minister of Conservation. He invited me to a dinner in Ngunguru to meet with Dr Wade Doak and a number of other marine scientists to talk over the issue of the Poor Knights Islands, which were a partial reserve at that time but not a full reserve. We discussed the matter and then he consulted with me. He asked me whether I believed they should be turned into a full reserve. I admit that the arguments were compelling and I said yes, I did believe they should become a full reserve. There was opposition, particularly from recreational fishers but also from charter boat companies and other groups.

I went to see the Poor Knights Islands for the first time a couple of months ago when there were celebrations for 25 years of the initial reserve having been set up. I had never been there before. The reserve is an absolute gem. If people have not visited the Poor Knights Islands they have not seen New Zealand. They have the biggest marine cave in the world. Evidently, a German submarine was put in there—the one that lay the mines that blew up the Niagara during the war. But below the surface is just amazing. I have never seen snapper as big as that. I did not know they existed.

JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) Link to this

Thirty percent of New Zealand land is in national parks. It is outrageous that one cannot shoot birds, log trees, or mine on that 30 percent of New Zealand land! But I do not hear a huge outcry among the New Zealand public to reduce that figure to 1 percent. Less than 1 percent of our coastal waters is in marine reserves, yet there is a huge outcry every time there is a proposal to protect a tiny area of marine ecosystem so that it can regenerate to something like its original state. We have vast areas where there is no restriction on fishing. We have a few very small areas where we say nature has to have its place, too, and there has to be a place where all New Zealanders can see the marine ecosystem as it originally was. In places such as Leigh, where the marine ecosystem can be seen as it originally was, it is just astonishing to see how biodiversity has regenerated since fishing and other extractive abuses stopped.

The Green Party is strongly in favour of consultation and of communities being involved in the location of marine reserves, but better provisions for this are in the Government’s new Marine Reserves Bill, which has been languishing in front of this Parliament—in fact, in front of the select committee I used to chair—for years now. I can understand Eric Roy’s frustration that that bill does not seem to be going anywhere, despite the select committee having heard all the submissions on it, given it a lot of consideration, and formed some pretty strong views across the House about changes we could make. Those changes would improve consultation, improve the role of iwi and hapū, and prevent the current perception that the Department of Conservation is playing the role of judge, jury, and executioner on the whole issue. But the Government simply will not progress the bill. It was a huge disappointment to me, when I was chairing the Local Government and Environment Committee, that Government members were not prepared to advance the bill, and it seems they are still not prepared to do so.

So I can understand Eric Roy’s frustration, and his wanting to bring in a bill that deals with only the consultation side of the issue. But that is not the right way to do it. We need to review the whole marine reserves situation. The 1971 legislation is anachronistic, it is out of date, and it does not deal with the modern world. It does not, for example, provide a proper role for iwi and hapū in the decision making and management of marine reserves. The new bill can do that—it already does so, to some extent, and there are ways in which it can be amended to further do so. I do not believe we should put an amendment bill through the House that deals with only the question of consulting people who want to fish. We have a substantial bill sitting on the Order Paper that will deal with that question and many other things, as well. That bill will give us the opportunity to protect biodiversity, at the same time as providing plenty of areas where people can go fishing.

The Marine Reserves (Consultation with Stakeholders) Amendment Bill is not the way to take the issue forward. I challenge the Government to let the Marine Reserves Bill be debated at the Local Government and Environment Committee, and to let some of the work that that select committee did last year and the year before reach fruition. The Greens will not support this interim bill.

TARIANA TURIA (Co-Leader—Māori Party) Link to this

Tēnā koe, tēnā koutou te Whare. The Māori Party will support this bill, in line with our principle that we believe in the right of people to have a say. In its purpose and intention, the commitment to amend the Marine Reserves Act to ensure early consultation in the preparation of any application for the declaration of a marine reserve is positive. We encourage any opportunity for people to participate, and for voices to be heard.

Consultation is a key concept in honouring the Treaty relationship. I want to be clear that when we talk of consultation, we do not mean the types of consultation exercises that may occur with interest groups, such as fisher people, surfers, skiers, tourism operators, and so on. I want to say in this House that mana whenua are not an interest group. They are the Treaty partner and, therefore, consultation on the preparation of a marine reserve application must always be inclusive of any group that represents mana whenua interests. Te Tiriti o Waitangi provides for the exercise of kāwanatanga, while actively protecting the tino rangatiratanga of mana whenua in respect of their natural, physical, and spiritual resources. In order to exercise governance and protect and preserve the full authority of mana whenua, consultation must be respected and an honourable process must be followed.

A considerable body of case law has developed on the principles of consultation. The leading case is the Court of Appeal case Wellington International Airport v , and there is also the more recent v decision. That case specifically discusses the principles of tangata whenua consultation. Although I am sure all members know those two foundation court decisions intimately, I ask them to let me recap. In its essence, consultation demands that the parties involved act reasonably and in good faith. In practice, that means entering into the process without having first made up one’s mind about every aspect of one’s position. It means having respect for the issues and the people with whom one is consulting, and not just doing the numbers.

From the Māori Party’s point of view, any proposal that stops politicians from running roughshod through communities has to be a good thing. This bill will put a process in place by which—through consultation—the applicant must explore ways in which the application may avoid or mitigate adverse effects on existing uses of the area of the proposed marine reserve. That may rectify or avoid such disasters as have occurred for mana whenua in the past, such as in June 2005, when the Minister of Conservation, Chris Carter, announced the establishment of a marine reserve off Great Barrier Island in the Hauraki Gulf, with scant regard for the interests of the mana whenua.

The taking of Kaikoura Island and the Ngāti Wai islands represented the very worst of processes possible in the setting up of marine reserves without consultation. Ngāti Wai and Ngāti Rehua exercise mana whenua over the north-east coastal area, and Ngāti Maru also has an interest in the north-east coast and marine areas. Those iwi were not uninterested parties. They were groups that had offered an alternative strategy that provided a partnership approach for marine protection. Ngāti Wai was committed to working with the Government in the interests of marine protection, and had also suggested a co-management approach. Instead, the rug was literally pulled out from under its feet and it was forced, subsequently, to take action in the High Court to challenge the decisions from on high about offshore islands and marine reserves.

We must not cut across mana whenua rights. We must hear the voices of those people, and we must stop the relentless theft of property rights. If this bill can provide a stop to that process in time to really address Treaty-based rights, we will all be doing well. The Māori Party will support this bill going to the select committee in order to ensure appropriate representation of and input from mana whenua in decision making, and that their rohe is provided for.

GORDON COPELAND (United Future) Link to this

I begin by congratulating the member Eric Roy on having the Marine Reserves (Consultation with Stakeholders) Amendment Bill drawn from the ballot. United Future is very delighted that this bill has been drawn from the ballot, because it is extremely topical and—as Tariana Turia has also mentioned—very controversial, from a number of points of view. United Future members will be supporting this bill going through its first reading and on to the select committee.

I should say at the outset that the principal reason for that is that the bill fits in exactly with United Future’s political philosophy. Our political philosophy can be summed up in the principle of subsidiarity. Some people in this House may be very familiar with that term; other people may never have heard of it. It simply means that political power should be devolved to the most appropriate level at which a decision should be taken. In other words, it means that decisions proper to a family should be taken by the family. I guess we can go even lower and say that decisions proper to an individual should be taken by that individual. So we have the family, the local community, the local town, the city and—only then, and finally—the nation.

It is appropriate that in the situation considered in the bill, we give much more regard to consultation with the people affected. When a decision is made about a marine reserve, a group of people in that location will be primarily affected; therefore, they must have a say. It is interesting, too, from the point of view of the remarks made by the Hon Tariana Turia, that the first time I ever came across the word “subsidiarity” was when a group of Māori came to talk to me and used the word. I had to ask them what it meant, and they pointed me back to a social encyclical given by a Catholic Pope about a hundred years ago. That principle has therefore been a cornerstone of Catholic social teaching to this day—for more than a hundred years.

When that group of Catholic Māori discovered the principle in a papal document, they were tremendously encouraged. They said to me that precisely the whole problem about the implementation of the Treaty was that the principle of subsidiarity had not been followed. It must mean of course, as the previous speaker has mentioned, that we bring iwi and hapū, and those with mana whenua, into the process—not just as some window dressing exercise, and not just so that a Minister can stand up here and say that people have been spoken to or even consulted, but so that those people have been involved in the decision-making process.

The process is the one that Eric Roy is bringing before the House in this bill. He is saying that those decisions must be taken, effectively, with the support of local communities, and that that process takes consultation to its logical conclusion. When members think about that position, they will realise that it is obviously the right position to be in. It is much better for decisions about marine reserves to be taken with the support of local and affected people—all of those we have mentioned: fishers, tourists, recreational users, sailors, tourism operators, and so on. All those people need to be involved in the process and, ideally, they should feel that the outcome is one they have had a part in.

This philosophy is much to be preferred to the nanny State philosophy that I must confess I see exhibited constantly in this House by the Green Party. That philosophy pretends that some people in our society, who claim to have a much greater reverence for the environment than others, for example, somehow have a superior wisdom, and that their view should prevail against other people’s views. I do not believe that that is where wisdom lies; I believe that it lies at local community level. I believe that it lies with the people affected by the decisions, and that they, therefore, should be consulted and be part of the process. So United Future has great pleasure in signalling its support for this bill on its first reading, and we will vote accordingly.

SHANE JONES (Labour) Link to this

I rise to endorse many of the sentiments in this Marine Reserves (Consultation with Stakeholders) Amendment Bill that was introduced by a fellow colleague from the deep south. While I am on my feet, I will say that I hope he takes our aroha and our mihi back to the whānau of Rakiura and the deep south area, given the tragedy that has befallen key families in that community.

As someone who has had some experience in maritime and marine affairs, what I like about this bill—which I, along with my colleagues, endorse going to the select committee—is that it enables interested individuals, stakeholders, and tangata whenua to contribute and participate. Marine reserves are a controversial development. Obviously, we want to see an improvement in ecosystem outcomes and in people participating in, using, and recreating in their local areas. But at the same time, none of us actually want to see the potential of the marine environment completely locked up or dedicated to a single purpose. It is inevitable that marine reserves are controversial, but unless there is participation and exchange of ideas, that aggravation and controversy leads to people digging a ditch and not finding a way out of it. Obviously, there are some overlap areas with our marine protected areas policy that was released earlier in the year. Marine reserves provide microcosms that enable people to see the variety of sea life and our young people to learn. More important, they can be a focal point so that we can reacquaint ourselves as to how important it is not only to understand but to participate in the development of marine resources, and to take more responsibility in our localities for the health of the marine environment in those areas.

Those of us in the fishing industry have developed, over the years, some rather dim views about how marine reserves have been pushed willy-nilly by the more strident advocates from the environmental movement. Naturally, we share some concerns with them, but at the end of the day, the Māori view is not a preservationist view. If there is a Māori view, it is a conservationist and sustainable use view, because if everything is locked up and preserved, then one does not live. If there is one thing that can be learnt about the history of Māori, it is that they are very adaptable people. They have altered their customs and attitudes to suit the vicissitudes of the circumstances they find themselves in.

The select committee, when it deals with this proposed legislation, should remain alive to the prospect that nothing stays the same and nothing is static.

CHRIS AUCHINVOLE (National) Link to this

I rise to speak in favour of the Marine Reserves (Consultation with Stakeholders) Amendment Bill. At present, anybody can apply to create a marine reserve, and once the process is struck the public becomes less and less involved in the process. This bill, through legislation, ensures not only the need to consult but also to do so thoroughly during the preparation of the application. The bill specifies that consultation must include groups that are actually representative of the community that lives by the sea, people who use the sea for recreation and for earning a living through commercial fishing and/or tourism, plus those who have an association culturally and through heritage, such as the tangata whenua, who, we heard earlier this evening, also claim the right through being a Treaty partner.

The key to the need for this bill is that the present Marine Reserves Bill was referred to a select committee on 15 October 2002, and I understand that it has largely been neglected by the Government. It has not been reported back to the House. We heard from one of the previous Labour speakers about a maritime protection consultation process that was prepared last year by the present Minister of Conservation and the Minister of Fisheries. One of these new groups, the West Coast Marine Protection Forum, has in fact been established and has been working since, I think, last September. I attended one of its inaugural meetings at Hokitika. It has since been holding a number of other meetings throughout the Coast, from Haast north. I spoke recently to the chairman of that group.

Why then, if that group is already in place, do we need the new bill? The forum has representation from fishermen, interest groups, the Department of Conservation, and the Ministry of Fisheries. I guess the reason we need this bill, though, is that it establishes a group through legislation. Based on the experience of the forum to date, this bill has two key elements that will give the public some confidence, for, sadly, the public seem to be losing trust in the present Government and its agencies in a wide range of activities that affect them. They do indeed. As stated in a report in the Greymouth Evening Star of 27 April, we are dealing with people on the Coast who do not deal with cosmetic change. They understand real change. The meeting was packed out with angry people. The sorts of comments called out did not indicate a great sense of trust in the present Government and its agencies, based on the past or even looking to the future.

ERIC ROY (National—Invercargill) Link to this

I am delighted that we have received a large degree of support for the Marine Reserves (Consultation with Stakeholders) Amendment Bill at its first reading. I thank members for the generosity of their comments, and I am looking forward to working on this bill in the select committee.

Someone once said—I am not sure who the original person was, because the comment has been plagiarised so frequently—that we do not inherit the environment, the land or the sea, from our forefathers; we borrow it from our children’s children. I think that is a sentiment that most of us have picked up on. I think that probably everybody here who has spoken today has concurred that marine reserves are important, that they are an integral part, as a tool, in the management of our marine environment, and that it is the degree to which we want to implement them that is the only difference.

Can I just comment on one or two of the points that have been made in the course of the discussion on this bill. To Shane Jones, who commented on the tragic loss in Foveaux Strait of those returning from the Titi Islands, I say that, yes, I certainly will send the condolences of this House. In fact, if it were not for this bill, I would have attended the first funeral, which was held this afternoon. The others are to be held this Saturday at 11 o’clock in Bluff, and I will take the love and condolences of this House, as Shane asked me to, when I attend on that occasion.

As far as the bill is concerned, the point has been made that the process of marine reserves has largely stalled except for one stunning exception, which is the Guardians of Fiordland’s Fisheries and Marine Environment and the establishment of eight marine reserves in Fiordland. That was done simply by a process of consultation. It is largely on that model, as I said in my introductory remarks, that I have based this bill.

The Greens have chosen not to support this bill, which I am a little bit disappointed about. Can I make a couple of comments with regard to that. Yes, there is another bill at the select committee, but it has been sitting there for some time, and one of my intentions is to shake that with the passing of this resolution, so I look forward to their support in progressing that. In terms of consultation, this bill is somewhat more broad and requires a wider degree of consultation than does the 2002 bill, as I read it. I think that is important.

The other significant difference is that the bill I have introduced requires some elements of mitigation, and I think, certainly after speaking with members privately, that there is a degree of discomfort with that among the Greens. Can I say that it is simply common sense, and that if we take that out of the formula in setting marine reserves, they stall, and that is what has happened. Let me give members some examples. The Hon Brian Donnelly spoke of the establishment of a marine reserve at the Poor Knights Islands. The charter vessels did not want to buy into it, but, once it was established, the mitigation was that they changed their modus operandi from catching fish to diving and looking, and they did not miss out.

Probably a more significant example is in Fiordland where, in this very hostile part of New Zealand, anchorages are a key safety element. I began this part of the debate by talking about a tragedy in the Southern Ocean. What was required, for those people who were opposing the marine reserves, was anchorages. Every time an anchor is dropped down in some of these areas, black and red corals that could be 1,000 years old are being pulled up. In order to overcome that, the mitigation was to create some permanent anchors. What a simple, common-sense answer that is to the element of mitigation that this consultation actually requires.

This is a common-sense bill. It requires consultation. With consultation comes success, with consultation comes ownership, and ownership will give the protection we need. I commend the House to vote for this legislation.