{"id":641227,"date":"2026-10-25T21:44:27","date_gmt":"2026-10-25T21:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/641227\/"},"modified":"2026-10-25T21:44:27","modified_gmt":"2026-10-25T21:44:27","slug":"opportunitys-odd-couple-vow-to-manage-conflict-on-bottom-trawling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/641227\/","title":{"rendered":"Opportunity’s odd couple vow to manage conflict on bottom trawling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Analysis: Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the Kuntzsch\u00a0household, of Nelson.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nelson candidate Jodie Kuntzsch is guaranteed a seat in Parliament next month, if the Opportunity Party crosses the 5 percent threshold with its bottom line of phasing out bottom trawling.<\/p>\n

Her husband Volker is the former chief executive of fishing company Sanford, one of the biggest bottom trawlers in the South Pacific<\/a>. When he headed the company, it was convicted and fined $36,000 on three representative charges of illegal bottom trawling by its 64m trawler San Waitaki. The $20 million ship was forfeited.<\/p>\n

He moved to the leadership of the Cawthron Institute, where he stuck to his trawling guns. As head of a publicly and commercially funded marine science institute, he admitted to me in 2023 that fishing does need to address its environmental impacts \u2013 but said controversial practices like bottom trawling paled in comparison<\/a> to destroying biodiversity by ploughing land.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He acknowledged the harmful impact of trawling seamounts, but said that should be put in perspective. \u201cWe are not trawling across coral reefs \u2013 when I say \u2018we\u2019, I mean the fishing industry. And any fisherman out there would always be careful about where they put their trawling gear.\u201d<\/p>\n

That earned him a telling off from the Cawthron Institute\u2019s then chair, Meg Matthews, who was unimpressed by his rousing message, to a sympathetic industry symposium, that New Zealand had no future without fishing.<\/p>\n

She told him he\u00a0should have expressed his views better<\/a>.\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t think he\u2019s expressed them in the way that he should have expressed them,\u201d she said. \u201cI think he was challenging the status quo. I think he was hoping to shift mindsets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jodie Kuntzsch, in an interview with my colleague Hanna McCallum<\/a>, chooses her words more carefully than her husband did, when asked about her position on the party\u2019s \u201cbottom line\u201d of phasing out bottom trawling.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She says there\u2019s an awareness that a conversation is needed and there is an openness to having one. Investment is also required to facilitate such a transition. \u201cWe can have a thriving economy and a thriving environment. It\u2019s not one or the other; they\u2019re mutually reinforcing, and that is really our commitment to the industry: to work alongside that transition,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Want to stay across stories like this? Start your day with Newsroom’s top stories and analysis in your inbox.<\/p>\n

At Newsroom, I\u2019ve been approached by some who perceive a scandal in the Kuntzsch household.<\/p>\n

I take a different view. For my money, I think the world needs people who can find a way to disagree and get along. And New Zealand is a small country \u2013 we will have clashes and conflicts of interest. The question is, always, how we declare and manage them.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve asked\u00a0Jodie\u00a0Kuntzsch about whether her household finances are reliant on the trawling industry. \u201cThe work of Cawthron and where their income comes from, I don\u2019t have that information,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ve been very clear with the party that I\u2019m married to Volker and what his role is.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the party or Parliament requires her to declare any perceived conflict, or recuse herself from any decisions such as\u00a0bottom trawling, she would do so. \u201cI don\u2019t want to predetermine what those are, but being open and transparent about who I am and my relationships\u00a0has always been a part of my work.\u201d<\/p>\n

I suspect that conflict will be more difficult to manage for Cawthron than for Opportunity. Customers and other stakeholders will want assurance that the chief executive has no influence on the fisheries research, especially around trawling.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday night at the NZME powerbrokers\u2019 debate, Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong was asked about the party\u2019s five bottom lines, which include phasing out bottom trawling. To be clear, that\u2019s 70 percent of NZ\u2019s commercial fisheries; it\u2019s also a\u00a0big part of how the quota returned to iwi in the Sealord settlement is fished.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It prompted one of the more intriguing exchanges of the night, when Greens co-leader Marama Davidson said her party\u2019s bottom line was\u00a0getting rid of this Government.<\/p>\n

Wong retorted: \u201cHow sad is it that our politics is in a state that a bottom line has to be getting rid of the Government? It should be about proactive policies that take our country forward. That is what our five bottom lines are about.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that is, perhaps, a realistic assessment of how Parliament could work and on occasion, does already work. For all the headline-grabbing clashes in politics, Parliament progresses non-controversial laws pretty much every sitting week with\u00a0across-the-board support. Not everything has to be a fight.<\/p>\n

Even the Greens have, in the past, signed a memorandum of understanding with the John Key govt to progress\u00a0shared policy areas, without forming a formal coalition or confidence-and-supply agreement.\u00a0These included home insulation retrofits, energy-saving initiatives, trying (and failing) to regulate natural health products, cleaning up\u00a0toxic industrial sites and building a national cycle trail.<\/p>\n

So when Qiulae Wong and the Opportunity party are accused of naivety for suggesting they can build case-by-case policy agreements with anyone in Parliament (perhaps in a confidence-and-supply arrangement), all strength to their arm. Because that\u2019s how we work in business. And that\u2019s how we reach agreement in our communities \u2013 and yes, in our homes.<\/p>\n

Even Winston Peters knows about that \u2013 debate moderator Ryan Bridge\u00a0asked him about domestic politics last night.\u00a0\u201cDoes Jan ever bug you to retire?\u201d<\/p>\n

Peters pushed back: \u201cI don\u2019t come here to talk about private matters,\u00a0do you mind?\u201d But then he paused, then opened up a little more. \u201cThat\u2019s one of the things about our great society, you have got a private life, so to speak. And I won\u2019t have any of my family members ever troubled by politics, I\u2019ve kept them out of it because it\u2019s such a difficult and tough job.\u201d<\/p>\n

This analysis was first published in the Newsroom Pro subscriber newsletter. If you\u2019re interested in seeing more content like this, you can subscribe here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Analysis: Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the Kuntzsch\u00a0household, of Nelson.\u00a0 Nelson candidate Jodie Kuntzsch…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":641228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[273,111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-641227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}