1. Fisheries management
By Sam Mossman
Eighteenth-century British
statesman and philosopher
Edmund Burke famously
once said that “those who
don’t know history are
destined to repeat it”.
G
overnment efforts to further restrict
recreational snapper catches in the North
Cape to East Cape zone (SNA1) need to
be viewed against the history of the snapper
fishery to get an overall viewpoint of the rights,
wrongs and fairness of this action.
The abridged version
As New Zealand recovered from the Great
Depression of the 1930s, rigorous controls were
placed on most industries. Commercial fishing
was in stagnation for many years; it was virtually
impossible to build a new boat and get a fishing
license. Twenty-four years passed before a
special Industrial Development Conference
provided a call to enlarge the trawling industry,
and in 1962 a parliamentary select committee
investigated how to do this. Its report, known
as the Scott Report, recommended freeing
up access and providing tax incentives to
encourage fish exports, but nothing much was
said about recreational fishing or conservation.
The brakes come off
Suddenly in 1963 the industry was opened up
to all comers. In 1964, 136 new vessels began
fishing; 209 more joined them in 1965. By 1967
investment in the New Zealand fishing fleet had
almost doubled. Many new boats had electronic
equipment that made fishing safer and easier.
This, combined with the exclusion of the
Japanese distant-water snapper fleet from New
Zealand waters around this time, saw the export
market for snapper burgeoning.
Wherever snapper occurred they were the
number-one target species, and no other
coastal fish was so rapidly and greatly depleted.
In the early 1970s the advent of pair trawling
(two boats towing one extra-large net between
them) made it easy to sweep up all the fish
over large areas of seabed. Although there were
numerous regulations and restrictions, they
were poorly enforced and ineffective. It was a
case of too few controls, too late.
Between 1964 and 1971 the total New Zealand
fish catch increased by a half, the volume of
exports nearly doubled, and the value increased
fourfold. In 1971 snapper made up a third of the
total wet-fish catch and the government was
doing all it could to encourage this. There was
a range of export incentives, including loans
and tax breaks for buying vessels and building
Snapper
– the history
The excesses of commercial trawling for
spawning snapper in the summer of
1977-’78 overwhelmed the on-shore
processing facilities at times and truck-
loads of snapper were buried at the Nelson
tip, a tragic waste of breeding fish.
Photo: Nelson Provincial Museum,
G.C. Wood collection 4225 FR23
12 New Zealand Fishing News September 2013

2. The Thelma G works her nets amongst the recreational fleet off Napier in January 2008.
factories, along with chillers, freezers and ice-
making plants. Building boats in New Zealand
was expensive, so special import licenses were
issued to bring in fishing vessels from overseas.
There were even subsidised fishing-vessel
ownership savings accounts to help encourage
young skippers to get their first boat.
Snapper collapse
By the late 1960s the word ‘over-fishing’ was
beginning to be heard among recreational and
commercial fishermen alike. There can be no
doubt that snapper were becoming fewer and
on average smaller, yet the official position at
the 1968 National Development Conference was
still that catch rates were continuing to improve
and there was ‘no evidence of serious over-
exploitation’. Ten years later, however, when
the snapper catch reached an all-time high of
18,000 tonnes, there could be no doubt of it.
This figure is not far short of twice the yield the
Ministry of Primary Industries today considers
acceptable.
Throughout the 1970s the then Ministry
of Agriculture and Fisheries had been under
increasing pressure to acknowledge the
overfishing problem and do something about
it. Although the bureaucrats were hamstrung
by weak legislation, they could have done more
had there been the political will. Part of the
problem was that the first Minister of Fisheries,
Duncan Macintyre, appointed in 1976, held
the marginal Bay of Plenty seat, an electorate
where fishing was simply too much of a nettle
to grasp. His ‘Think Big’ fishing policy had the
unintended effect of increasing pressure on an
already stressed snapper fishery.
The commercial destruction of the snapper
fisheries was almost completed in 1978-‘79
when the last of the spawning schools of
snapper were cynically cleaned out by large
new trawlers working close inshore. So many
spawning snapper were killed that shore
processing facilities in some areas were
overwhelmed and many truckloads of snapper
were taken to local landfills for burying.
Travesties like this saw the snapper catch
collapse in many areas.
The quota system
MAF experimented with new tighter
management options, including ‘controlled’
fisheries and an unwieldy bureaucratic process
called ‘fishery management planning’, but
these were supplanted in 1983 by the decision
to implement the quota system for inshore
fish, as had already been done with deep-sea
fisheries. Snapper were among the first inshore
fish allocated in 1986. A total allowable catch
of 6546 tonnes was set and divided up among
commercial fishermen according to their catch
history over the previous three years.
This established property rights: each tonne
of snapper quota conferred on its owner the
right to catch a tonne of snapper every year
in perpetuity. Effectively the fishery became
owned by the people who owned the boats
and caught the fish. However, quota could be
leased, sold, or bought, and the big fishing
companies set out to buy up as much quota as
they could get to ensure security of access to
fish in the future.
When first handed out, snapper quota was
widely spread among 752 quota holders, but
values rose rapidly. Many fishermen simply
could not resist the offer of a large cheque, and
by 1996 there were only 341 holders of snapper
quota, with 63% of the quota owned by just six
big companies.
Aggregation of fish quota by corporate
owners in the late 1980s set in motion a trend
away from small owner-operated vessels to
company-owned vessels which paid the crew
a percentage of the catch value. For the most
part the small-scale commercial fishermen
surrendered their power to own and control the
fishery.
Quota undermined
Unfortunately the snapper quota, initially set
at levels which would allow the badly-depleted
fishery to rebuild, was undermined by two
things: the Quota Appeals Authority and the
‘deemed value’ scheme.
The Quota Appeals Authority was set up
to hear commercial fishermen’s individual
grievances over the amount of quota they had
been awarded. According to some who were
there at the time, it became a bit of a scandal,
with fishermen pleading poverty, being granted
extra quota so they could make a living, then
immediately selling it for cash. In addition to
the original 6546 tonnes of snapper quota
allocated, the QAA dished out a further 1679
tonnes – a 25% increase, and the formal Total
Allowable Catch was adjusted upwards to allow
for this.
The ‘deemed value’ system was brought in
to encourage commercial boats to land fish
that they caught accidentally (or ‘accidentally-
on-purpose’) but did not hold quota for, so
these fish were included in catch reporting and
not just discarded at sea. Depending on your
point of view, deemed value can be like a well-
deserved penalty for catching fish that should
have been avoided, or it can be an unfair
penalty for accidentally catching certain kinds of
fish that could not be avoided while legitimately
trying to catch other fish.
There is another complication: sometimes
the deemed value is low and the fish price is
high, meaning there is a profit to be made by
‘accidentally’ catching fish for which no quota is
held. This happened with snapper, resulting in
even more fish being taken over and above the
level originally set to allow a rebuilding of the
fishery and the ‘extra’ doled out by the QAA.
Despite the rebuild of stocks being partly
nobbled by: the extra QAA handouts; the
commercial deemed value scheme (last year
this accounted for a further 3% over the top of
the commercial quota); and the extra fishing
mortality partly caused by trawling, Danish
seining, split nets, dumping of catches at sea,
and illegal fishing (allowed for as a further
10% for commercial quota), there has still,
remarkably, been a slow stock regeneration in
SNA 1, to the extent it has reached its minimum
acceptable level of 20% of what is estimated to
be the original un-fished stock level.
New Zealand Fishing News September 2013 13

3. Lawyers at dawn
Over the years, attempts to reduce
commercial catch in shared inshore fisheries
through the quota system have often been
aggressively resisted by commercial interests.
An example is the 1996 case between Sanfords
and the Ministry of Fisheries. In 1995, the
ministry attempted to reduce the amount of
snapper taken in SNA1 to help the fishery
recover. Recreational fishermen’s daily limits
were reduced substantially from 20 snapper per
person per day down to nine.
Recreational anglers both accepted and
welcomed the cuts for the sake of the future
of the fishery. But the commercial operators
refused to do their share, and rather than
accept any cuts to their quota, took the matter
to court. Initially the ministry won the right
to manage the fishery, but the decision was
overturned on appeal for what was considered
by many to be a technicality, and despite
the recreational bag limit being halved, a
commercial reduction was not imposed.
This case considerably soured relationships
with recreational fishers, who were from then
on reluctant to take any further cuts or trust
the fishing companies to do their share in
rebuilding the fishery that the industry had
largely destroyed in the first place.
In 2006, in response to Ministry of Fisheries’
efforts to cap the catches of recreational anglers
(which would result in continuing reductions
of individual catch limits as angler numbers
increased) in the ‘Soundings’ proposal,
recreational anglers were forced to go to the
High Court to establish their rights in law.
Known as the ‘Kahawai Legal Challenge’, the
case, although based on the setting of kahawai
quota levels, was really about establishing
a legal precedent that applied to all shared
fisheries, including snapper. It was led by
on-line public fishing rights group option4,
the NZ Big Game Fishing Council (now the New
Zealand Sport Fishing Council), the Recreational
Fishing Council and Te Runanga A Iwi O
Ngapuhi.
Although the case was between recreational
anglers and the Minister of Fisheries, the
commercial fishing industry could see that
case law in favour of recreational anglers might
potentially affect their profits, and were quick to
stick their oar in.
In a landmark decision, recreational fishing
was recognised as a right that stems from
common law; allowing for people’s wellbeing
(health or physical welfare) is the starting point
when setting the Total Allowable Commercial
Catch; people provide for their wellbeing
by catching and purchasing fish; and both
customary Maori and recreational fishing
interests must be provided for where they
exist. The same does not apply for commercial
interests.
This, for the first time, established the
recreational fishing right in law, and placed it
ahead of commercial fishing. The Minister of
Fisheries and the ministry accepted the decision
but, predictably, the commercial industry
appealed. Despite some aspects of the original
decision being subsequently watered down,
some important principles were established in
law.
Here we go again…
So, recreational (and customary) must be
allowed for before commercial limits are set.
But determining what the recreational catch
actually is has proven difficult. A number of
‘surveys’ in the past have been rejected by the
minister as wildly inaccurate, and an allocation
of 2600 tonnes (recreational and customary)
in 1997 was pretty much guesswork. And it has
never been adjusted since to allow for increases
in population or an increase in the popularity of
recreational fishing.
The Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI, the
successor of MAF and MOF) claims to have more
robust figures from more recent survey efforts
over the last few summers, concluding that the
recreational SNA 1 take is around the 3,700-
tonne mark – 1,100 tonnes over what has been
allocated.
This leads us to the current proposals to
even further reduce recreational catch limits by
cutting the number of fish allowed from nine
down to three or four, in addition to increasing
the size limit from 27cm to around 35cm
(the commercial size limit has never budged
from the original 25cm). Putting aside for the
moment the question how a one-third reduction
of recreational catch requires a two-thirds
cut in catch limits, and given the commercial
industry’s inclination to reach for its lawyers
first, I guess that the recreational sector is seen
as the easy option to wring another thousand
tonnes of quota from.
So, despite commercial interests being
largely responsible for destroying the snapper
fishery in the first place (with government
encouragement); despite it being handed a
massively valuable gift in the way of private
rights to what had been a public resource (at
no charge); despite derailing the rebuilding of
stocks through the Quota Appeals Authority
and Deemed Value scheme; despite illegal
fishing, dumping at sea, other fishing mortality
and wastage from split nets; and despite
commercial never having accepted any
meaningful cuts in ‘their’ quota (see sidebar)
while the public share has been crushed from
30 down to nine snapper, they want us to bend
over once again, while they remain untouched.
SNA1 Recreational bag limits – the history
In January 1985 the first daily snapper bag limit for amateur fishers was set at 30 per person and
minimum legal size (MLS) at 25cm.
In September 30, 1993, this was reduced to 20 snapper per person.
On October 30, 1995, this was further cut to nine snapper per person in SNA1 and the size limit was
raised to 27cm for amateur fishers only. These regulations have continued until the present day.
Amateur catch bag reductions to date are 66%.
If further reduced to three snapper as proposed, the amateur reduction since 1985 would be 90%.
Total Allowable Commercial Catch at comparative periods
1986-87 4710 tonnes
1993-94 4928 tonnes (increase)
1995-96 4938 tonnes (increase)
1997-2008 4500 tonnes.
Overall, commercial reduction since TACC introduced is only 4.5%.
Skeggs huge pair trawlers, the Hawea and the Wanaka
were part of the massive overfishing which saw spawning
snapper nearly wiped out in Tasman by the early 1980s.
Photo: Nelson Provincial Museum, the Nelson Mail
Collection (fishing, trawlers)
14 New Zealand Fishing News September 2013

4. The final analysis
Recreational fishers have taken the cuts
over the years and we are told there has been
a modest, but slowing recovery of snapper
to 20% of un-fished stocks. The proposals
currently before the minister would effectively
see all these gains transferred to commercial
companies for their private profit, while the
fishing public is reduced to a level where it is
hardly worth going fishing.
Well, I say NO WAY! The public have only
ever caught what they need to feed their
families, and if the fisheries wonks got this
number wrong, it is not our fault. In fact, there
is a pretty good economic and moral case to
make snapper a recreational-only fishery, but
we don’t have space for that discussion here.
Certainly further recreational reductions are
against fairness and natural justice. This is not
good enough by a long way (and, if you ask
me, a crazy move politically, coming up to an
election).
Then there is also the morally very dubious
situation of leading lights in the National
Party being major shareholders in our largest
commercial fishing company. Read into this
what you like.
Although it is fair to say that further recovery
of SNA 1 is very desirable for everyone,
recreational bag limits are already as low as is
reasonable. In the final analysis, commercial
overfishing broke the snapper fishery, so they
should stand up and (finally) bear some of the
pain of fixing it.
Cause-effect changes in commercial catch rate of snapper in the SNA1 region over time,
reflecting national trends. Catch data from pages 722-758 of the Fisheries Assessment
Plenary, May 2006: stock assessments and yield estimates. Compiled by the Ministry of
Fisheries Science Group.
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New Zealand Fishing News September 2013 15