NZ First and National are both claiming credit for killing the most toxic clause in Shane Jones\u2019 Fisheries Amendment Bill, writes Catherine McGregor in today\u2019s excerpt from The Bulletin.<\/p>\n
To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday,\u00a0sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Whose backdown is it anyway?<\/p>\n The government on Tuesday backed down on one of the most controversial elements of the Fisheries Amendment Bill \u2013 removing minimum size limits for commercial fishers \u2013 and descended immediately into a coalition squabble over credit. As\u00a0Stuff\u2019s Emma Ricketts and Jenna Lynch report<\/a>, NZ First leader Winston Peters and prime minister Christopher Luxon posted near-identical statements within minutes of each other, both claiming to have spoken to fisheries minister Shane Jones and killed the measure.<\/p>\n Jones was dismissive of Luxon\u2019s version of events: \u201cThere\u2019s only one person that\u2019s capable of instructing the matua, and that\u2019s the rangatira Winston.\u201d Peters concurred \u2013 Luxon had \u201cabsolutely nothing\u201d to do with it. Luxon said the important thing was the government had \u201cgot rid of the most egregious\u201d part of the bill. Jones continued to defend the underlying principle that commercial fishers should be forced to count undersized fish against their quota rather than dumping them at sea, \u201cbut I understand that the recreationists are concerned about Nemo\u201d.<\/p>\n How the bill blindsided everyone<\/p>\n As\u00a0the NZ Herald\u2019s Sarah Curtis reports<\/a>, the removal of minimum size limits was only discovered when LegaSea volunteers read the draft legislation line by line when it was released on Thursday, with almost no notice before its first reading this week. Recreational fishing advocate and TV host Matt Watson called it the largest overhaul of fisheries legislation since the quota system was introduced in 1986.<\/p>\n The stakes, Watson argued, were stark: \u201cAs fish stocks deplete, the larger fish disappear first\u2026 there are more small fish. Instead of ensuring enough fish are going into the future, we\u2019re now taking the little ones too.\u201d Also buried in the bill was a proposal to reduce the window for appealing fisheries decisions from several months to just 20 days \u2013 a change Watson said was designed to prevent opponents gathering evidence given that Official Information Act responses routinely take longer.\u00a0Forest & Bird<\/a>\u00a0was blunter: \u201cIt\u2019s as if the Minister has looked through all the good things in the Act and wiped them out entirely.\u201d<\/p>\n Jones accused critics of \u201csaltwater amnesia\u201d, saying recreational groups had agreed to the size-limit changes in 2022.<\/p>\n Gulf war<\/p>\n The sizing disagreement is part of a broader political rupture over fishing. At National\u2019s BlueGreen conference last month, conservation spokesperson (and current conservation minister) Tama Potaka announced National would reverse the decision to allow commercial ring netting in two of the Hauraki Gulf\u2019s 12 high-protection areas \u2013 a decision his own government had made.<\/p>\n