Ocean reserve dead in water
OUR largest ocean sanctuary won’t go ahead, in a Winston Peters deal that has blindsided the Greens.
Sunday News understands the 620,000 sq km Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary Bill, announced by John Key to the United Nations, has run aground.
The bill ran into immediate opposition from the fishing industry and iwi bodies. And after lobbying from New Zealand’s fishing industry, its demise has turned into one of NZ First’s several coalition deal-breakers.
The sanctuary initially championed through Green MP Gareth Hugh’s private member bill would have created a no-take, fully protected zone preventing all fishing and mining.
NZ First MP Shane Jones refused to comment on killing the bill, stating he’d ‘‘have to taihoa’’ until the coalition’s eventual policy announcements. The Labour Party refused to comment on its coalition concession.
‘‘There will not be any announcement on final policy from the coalition negotiations until next week as have planned,’’ party senior press secretary Chris Harrington said.
Green minister-elect outside of Cabinet and the party’s environment spokeswoman Eugenie Sage rubbished the secret deal calling it ‘‘rumour and speculation’’.
‘‘We have yet to see the coalition agreement between Labour and New Zealand First, I’m not going to comment on speculation and rumour.’’
The Bill on its second reading is ‘‘still before Parliament, having confirmation from a source is very different from any formal announcement the bill will not proceed’’.
Kiwi fishing industry spokesman Charles Hufflett, a shareholder in family fishing company Solander, said the industry had lobbied NZ First, but not Labour on axing the sanctuary.
Creating the sanctuary was futile, Hufflett said, and he estimated the foreign fleet is taking up to 16,000 tons of tuna worth $70 million each year.
‘‘The fish are going to get caught anyway, we think they should be caught by New Zealand vessels rather than Chinese.’’
In 2015 Key told the UN that the sanctuary ‘‘will be one of the world’s largest and most significant fully-protected areas, preserving important habitats for seabirds, whales and dolphins, endangered marine turtles and thousands of species of fish and other marine life’’.
And Sage said New Zealand was duty-bound to safeguard our surrounding seas. ‘‘We’ve got the third largest exclusive economic zone in the world, we are bound by the international convention on the law of the sea, that gives us a responsibility to preserve and protect our marine environment, we have no deep sea marine reserves, the Kermadecs would be the first deep sea marine reserve.’’