Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 27/9/24

Thanks, Minister – but our wellbeing would be greatly improved if we knew the cost of this mental health initiative

Small Business and Manufacturing Minister Andrew Bayly is among the ministers who contributed to a flood of announcements and speeches to the government’s official website in the past 24 hours.

But we suspect something is missing from his enthusing about the Government and Auckland Business Chamber entering a memorandum of understanding

Point of Order: While the PM and O’Connor were announcing VIP visits......

......Mahuta was pouring out some thoughts on the wretched water bill

News of the government hoovering the red carpet for VIP visits and cleaning up the environment by advancing the green cause emerged from the Beehive yesterday, including another announcement of Māori mātauranga being to the fore in the government’s conservation programme.

And there was a speech from Nanaia Mahuta which affirmed the Water Services Entities Bill is a done deal and (she expects) the bosses of the four new co-governed water entities will be appointed before the end of the year.

Barrie Deas: Fishing and Brexit

Fishing will be a sort of litmus test for Brexit. As the UK begins the process of leaving the EU, we have entered a period of extreme uncertainty. The outcome of the exit negotiations, and the kind of trade relations that the UK will have with Europe after it leaves, will be dependent on many complex factors, not least whether an agreement will be possible at all. 

At the end of the negotiations it may still be uncertain how the UK will fare in the world; that may not become clear for some years or decades. But what will immediately be clear is whether UK fishermen still feel that they are shackled into a system that was designed with their disadvantage in mind.

Karl du Fresne: Leave it to Maori and hope for the best

The recent conviction of a Hawke’s Bay kaitiaki, or “guardian” of customary fisheries, makes a mockery of the word.

Napier District Court heard that authorisations issued by Rangi Spooner under customary fishing regulations covered multiple dates instead of the allowed 48-hour period. A man named Jason Brown obtained 11 such authorisations and was later convicted of illegally selling crayfish for $10 each. A separate hearing was told that Brown caught 1730 crays, supposedly for events at his house. That’s a helluva lot of crayfish.

Mike Butler: Fishery settlement mischief

Tribal misbehaviour and government favouritism is the outcome of a process that started nearly 30 years ago with a treaty claim by few part-time fishers in the Far North that was expanded by a Waitangi Tribunal ruling, a High Court injunction, and resulted in dividing up the nation's ocean fishery along racial lines. The assertion that the 1992 $170-million commercial fisheries settlement would “get young Maori into the fisheries business” was one of several sanctimonious justifications to obscure the naked opportunism and political weakness surrounding that settlement.

That settlement started off as a claim by Far North tribes for a share of quota introduced by the Fisheries Act 1983 which was an attempt to maintain fisheries at a sustainable level. The claim was on behalf of those who supplemented their income with part-time fishing.

Mike Butler: Fisheries favouritism pondered

A clause exempting iwi quota holders from having to use New Zealand-flagged boats after 2016 remains in the Fisheries (Foreign Charter Vessels and Other Matters) Amendment Bill despite an indication from Primary Industries Minister Nathan Guy that the amended bill would not stamp out bad behaviour.

The exemption for tribal owners of fishery quota until 2020 was included in the bill that would require all fishing vessels to re-flag and register in New Zealand by 2016. Tribal corporations claimed it would be uneconomical to fish the quota if they could not continue to use foreign vessels.