What New Zealand is removing to speed up its fisheries

Twenty working days

If you want to ask a court whether a decision – such as a catch limit – was made lawfully, judicial review is the process for asking. One such case involves the New Zealand rock lobster, which eats kina, a type of sea urchin, while kina eat kelp. Off Northland’s east coast, rock lobster numbers fell, kina multiplied and large areas of kelp forest disappeared, leaving kina barrens that are less biologically diverse than the kelp forests they replace.

In November 2022, the High Court found two catch decisions made by the then Oceans and Fisheries Minister, David Parker, unlawful, and ordered the 2022 decision to be reconsidered. His successor, Stuart Nash, signed the replacement decision in March 2023, and in February 2025 that decision was found unlawful too. Officials had given Nash four options, and the judge in the 2025 case found none was based on the best available information and none could achieve the objective Nash had set himself.

Geography was part of the problem, because on the east coast rock lobster numbers had fallen so low that they weren’t keeping kina under control; commercial fishing had largely left that side of the fishery. Meanwhile, on the west coast, where more than 90 per cent of the commercial catch was being taken at the time, the same problem hadn’t developed. A cut applied across the whole fishery would therefore fall mainly on commercial fishers in the west, away from the area where rock lobster numbers most needed to recover. The judge found that the option Nash chose damaged the interests of commercial operators without delivering any environmental benefit. The Minister has appealed parts of that judgment and, according to ELI, the Court of Appeal heard the appeal on 16 and 17 September 2026. 

I wanted to know what bringing one of those cases actually involved, and Reto Blattner of ELI told me they began by reviewing Parker’s March 2021 decision to leave Northland’s rock lobster catch limit at 203 tonnes before filing proceedings around 12 November that year. “There was a lot of work during that period of 7 months-ish,” he said, including building relationships with local Māori kinship groups, working with experts and having barristers review the claim. When Parker set the following year’s limit in March 2022, reducing it to 193 tonnes, ELI added that decision to the case.

I then put that period beside 20 working days. The court case wouldn’t have to be finished in 20 working days, but the challenge would have to be filed by then, and before that you need to know there is a challenge to be made, gather the information, and get enough of a case together to file it. That can include asking the government for the documents behind a decision, and through experience an Official Information Act (OIA) request can itself take up to 20 working days for a final decision, and sometimes longer, while the challenge to Nash’s replacement was filed five months after his decision.

Jones preferred a maximum of 20 working days, and at the Bill’s first reading on 31 March 2026 he said fisheries litigation should take place within “manageable guardrails” and not become a “free-for-all”. The 20 working day proposal, according to officials’ own analysis in the Regulatory Impact Statement, came after the February to April 2025 public consultation had concluded, and the same statement records MPI warning that 20 working days might not allow comprehensive gathering and analysis of the relevant information; MPI officials had previously recommended three months for decisions about catch limits and six months for other sustainability measures.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment also recommended three months for decisions about catch limits, while Seafood New Zealand said it had neither proposed nor advocated for 20 working days and was unaware of another industry participant that had. It called the period too restrictive and warned it could push people into filing protective cases before they knew whether they had one. 

The Minister’s final policy recommendations, including 20 working days, were subsequently agreed by Cabinet, and anyone needing more time would have to apply to the High Court for an extension within those same 20 working days.