Ministry’s failure to protect fisheries is disgraceful

Andrea Vance’s revealing article on bottom trawling (News, February 9) does not surprise. The Ministry for Primary Industries has shown within the top of the South an appalling disregard for sustainable fishing practices. MPI’s mismanagement of blue cod with a ludicrous slot rule that forced recreational fishers to kill breeding females, its failure to control corporate company plundering of the TasmanGolden Bays scallop beds now threatening Marlborough Sounds beds, and over-fishing of tarakihi, kahawai and other species, are evidence of incompetence.

Worse still, in the Marlborough Sounds MPI fails to understand that habitat destruction by silt run-off from clear-cut forestry not forgetting sludge from over-allocated mussel farming and salmon farming, is smothering the ecosystem.

The Marlborough Recreational Fishers Association has written to Fisheries Minister Stuart Nash but gets only ‘‘yes minister’’ responses written by out-oftouch bureaucrats.

Pete Watson, President, Marlborough Recreational Fishers Association

Vance’s article exposing shameful bottom trawling sanctioned by government was excellent. A stumbling block for sensible, sustainable management is the donations to political parties by corporate companies, e.g. Talleys and Sanfords as mentioned in the article. Corporate companies are adept at manoeuvring and manipulation. Then they expect – and get – favourable considerations from Governments.

An investigative article into corporate fishing companies’ donations to MPs and parties would be very interesting.

Disappointingly, Nash has failed to deal with ministry lethargy. True, he has the onerous police portfolio but that shows just how lowly the health of the public’s fishery, rates with government. It should not be forgotten that fishing has five times more participants than rugby and recreational fishing has a yearly economic value well over a billion dollars.

Also, Labour pledged pre-2017 election, to review fisheries’ tradeable quota system, loaded heavily in favour of corporate companies. Nash rejected the promised review.

Andi Cockroft, Chairman, Council of Outdoor Recreation Associations

Reforms disaster

Damien Grant (Opinion, February 9) is just the most recent pundit to propagate the myth that New Zealand’s ‘Rogernomics’ revolution was anything but a social and economic disaster for the country. The so-called reforms went too far and were carried out far too quickly, simply in order to ensure that no-one would have time to step in and stop them.

The immediate result was a gutting of our manufacturing sector and unemployment higher than at any time since the 1930s. The longer-term and lasting effect was a widening of the per capita income gap with Australia to around 25 per cent, where it remains to this day.

The best we can say about the Rogernomes is that they simply don’t understand how a competitive market economy operates. The worst is that they succeeded only too well in their real objective – to make New Zealand a haven for the very rich.

Tim Hazledine, Professor of Economics at The University of Auckland

Grant is correct about the ridiculous aspects of Muldoonism that led to, among other things, rorts such as unprincipled farmers overcounting their flocks, there is an aspect of Rogernomics that requires a comment.

I refer to the dignity of work. Accepted, some government departments, had a lot of padding in their workforces, but we also had minimum unemployment, and, with minor exceptions, every household had at least one parent who went to work and came home with a pay packet, and that was the healthy environment their children grew up in.

Contrast that to today’s welfare dependency-ridden society, where several generations of families have never known anything different than that their money comes from the Government.

Has anyone ever taken the time to measure the financial cost of today’s welfare expenditure, and compared it to how much those old government departments cost?

As someone who grew up in the immediate post-World War II era, where everyone was on struggle street apart from a fortunate few, where most people knew their neighbours and cared about them, whether they were of the same religion or not, I don’t consider we have made progress, in fact, I think we have lost our way.

David Lee, Papamoa

Our society was less unequal in the 1970s and early 80s. We still