HPA's and the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park

What does it feel like to grow up where crayfish once filled wooden sea tanks and kahawai boiled along the beach all year, then watch that richness fade to mud and empty reef? Sitting above Omaha and looking across to Goat Island, we talk with Tī Point local and former commercial fisherman Barry Talkington about how the Hauraki Gulf slid from abundance to scarcity, and how we can turn it around.

Barry takes us from the mail-truck days of sackfuls of crays to the industrialisation of inshore fishing: bottom trawls, heavy gear, and the sediment plumes that flatten shell and sponge habitats into lifeless mud. He explains why marine reserves like Goat Island are “better than outside,” yet still bounded by the health of adjacent waters. We dig into high protection areas, displacement of effort, and the uncomfortable truth that closures often signal failure, not success.

We also lift the lid on the economics. Quota concentration, closed markets, and rent-seeking leave small-scale fishers squeezed and fillets overpriced, while innovation stalls. Barry argues for de‑industrialising inshore waters, preferring static, selective methods, and reforming the Fisheries Act to set higher biomass standards that rebuild abundance across the entire Gulf. That means separating inshore from deepwater management, restoring fair public value through resource rentals, and opening pathways for local, transparent supply from boat to plate.

This conversation is blunt but hopeful. COVID’s quiet showed fish returning when pressure lifted. Clubs are leading with selective gear and stewardship. Councils can tighten runoff and protect the first few hundred metres of intertidal and shallow reef. Most of all, we can choose laws that leave more fish in the water today so our kids inherit thriving reefs, not stories about them. If the Gulf recovers, everyone wins—customary, commercial, and recreational.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a mate, and leave a review with the one change you’d make to restore the Hauraki Gulf. We’re listening.

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Barry And A Richer Past
• 4:30 Childhood Abundance And Crayfish Lore
• 10:15 Shifting Baselines And Vanishing Species
• 15:40 Industrial Fishing’s Inshore Impact
• 21:30 Trawling, Seafloor Damage, And Sediment
• 28:10 Can The Gulf Recover Without Trawling
• 33:40 Policy Bias And Biodiversity Decline
• 39:20 Marine Reserves: Promise And Limits
• 45:00 HPAs, Displacement, And Public Buy-In
• 51:30 Process Failure And Stakeholder Stalemate
• 57:20 Shellfish Collapse And Lost Filtration
• 1:02:10 Quota, Cartels, And Fish Prices

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome back to the NZSFC Pod and Reel Podcast. I'm Mike Plant from the New Zealand Sport Fishing Council. Today, we're sitting in one of the most beautiful yet contested bits of coast in our country, Tea Point, overlooking Omaha and Goat Island Marine Reserve. For a lot of Aucklanders, this is a holiday playground, but for our guest, it's his home. You're about to meet Barry Talkington. Barry grew up just down in the bay behind us. His earliest memories are of his father and uncle unloading crayfish by hand. He remembers Omaha Harbour thick with snapper, Trevallian, Kawaii, kalp-lined reefs full of crayfish, things most of us will never see in our lifetime. In this conversation, we asked some pretty hard questions. What actually caused the decline in the Hodaki Golf? What would it take to rebuild abundance in our oceans so your kids and mine can still catch a feed in our backyard? Settle in, keep an open mind, stay curious. Here's my conversation with T-Point Local, former commercial fisherman and longtime advocate for the golf, Barry Talkington.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12

My father was a commercial fisherman. After the war, him and his brother went fishing, they went cray fishing. And uh some of my earliest memories are of their unloading their their catch. Was that down at the wharf that still stands? Not at Lee, down here, down at T Point. Okay. And outside, just at the entrance to the harbour, they would keep crays in big wooden tanks. They used to call them tanks that floated made out of pine. And uh when the unsail day was, unloading day was, they would tow these tanks in with the boat at high tide up into a little bay down there. And as the tide receded, they would take them out and put them into chaff sacks, put them on the back of a little truck, and take them down to the end of the road to catch the mail bus as it went back down to town, the mail mail truck. So that's that's my earliest memories of it.

SPEAKER_01: 2:01

These alien creatures scattering around, or were they quite contained the crayfish at the time?

SPEAKER_00: 2:06

Um yeah, th because there was no shortage of them. They were sh they were big. And uh uh I can remember uh my dad saying that I asked him one time, he said, What was your best pot? What was it your best pot? He said, it had eight crayfish in it and they weighed 64 pounds. I said he it nearly killed him getting it on aboard the boat.

SPEAKER_01: 2:27

The weight to lift that and the technology in those days was a lot more basic than what you've got in a hand pulling, right?

SPEAKER_00: 2:34

Everything was done by hand, there's no winters. Their peak they worked about 70 pots is all they could do. They lost a lot because uh having to haul by hand, you needed light gear. Storm come through and you pots would be up on the beach.

SPEAKER_01: 2:48

So those who don't know where we are, we're north of Auckland, Tea Point actually overlooks Omaha, which was made famous when John Key was Prime Minister and would holiday there as a kind of a place for hobnobbing Aucklanders to go up to.

SPEAKER_00: 3:01

Right. And and for us locals it's just a blot on the landscape.

SPEAKER_01: 3:06

So so the development has happened since then, and you've seen a marine reserve start at Lee, which we'll talk about, and you've also seen potential areas being looked at as high protection areas or potential marine reserves. So today we're going to find out why marine reserves start, what their function is, and what happens to Kiwis who just want to catch a feed for their family or friends, and where we all fit in, I guess, this game with your knowledge of a commercial fishing background as well, of how things used to be and maybe how we're trending.

SPEAKER_00: 3:40

Oh, we're we're trending down and have been my whole life. Um there's just a steady, steady decline. Um uh fish losing range, so they contract to smaller areas where they're where they're available. Uh and and that's sort of non-stop. Uh in you're talking about Omaha, inside Omaha and Fongitiao harbour. There were I could remember dragging a net and getting half a ton of snapper, we actually wanted some craybait, some praori for craybait. There was that many fish around there. The the it's hard to imagine now for people to understand what it was like. And that's when I was it. My grandfather was here and my great grandfather was here. So we don't have their stories of their experience either. So we're not starting from I don't start from new, unused, I start from pretty heavily exploited.

SPEAKER_01: 4:36

And uh So I have my own picture of which is 40 years old, yours are a bit longer than mine, but we all have our own exact depletion story somewhat. And I think that's nationwide as well.

SPEAKER_00: 4:47

I think it's t it's typical because we when we're uh just young growing up, that's when we form our impression of what the sort of natural state of affairs is. And as we get older and we see that decline, we think that our experience is the starting point. What we don't know or acknowledge is what went before that that that led us to that starting point. So we get a series of staircases of people's experiences, each one thinking that they're that they're observing the decline, but they're only observing this small portion just of the whole slope.

SPEAKER_01: 5:21

Aaron Powell Because I remember kawaii smashing up on the beach and catching a ten or twelve pound snapper off the rocks. That that would be a very remarkable day to see either of those two things these days.

SPEAKER_00: 5:32

This Omaha Bay out here was uh full of kawaii. You couldn't you couldn't tow a a dummy along that beach without catching kawaii any any day, any month of the year. They just lived there. They lived around the rocks at the top of the kelp. Uh now it's very rare to see a school of kawaii in there.

SPEAKER_01: 5:51

Aaron Ross Powell What other fish were in the Gulf that we may not catch so much these days that that you've noticed have live out of the golf. Because I remember a lot of John Dory. As a kid, you'd catch a baby snapper and a John Dory would eat that. I don't see John Dory anymore around the wharfs or that like I used to as a No, they're quite rare now.

SPEAKER_00: 6:10

And um and they're taken very small. Those big old John Dory that you used to get, and they don't see those anymore. The big old kingfish that used to come in in the summertime, the harbour, uh rubbing alongside of the boats, and uh uh they don't do that anymore. And as I was saying, that harbour was full of snapper travelli and parori. Um the snapper and travalli are very rare, and it's it's it's sort of a juvenile area, a bit of a nursery area. That's about all. The adult populations aren't there. The cockles are gone, the goe ducks are gone, crayfish are gone, the goatfish are gone, it's red mochey's gone. There's a whole range. And particularly when you start at high water and you work work your way down that first shelf of uh of reef.

SPEAKER_01: 6:55

There'll be people thinking, well, I know a little honey hole which actually holds crayfish. What's he talking about?

SPEAKER_00: 7:00

Every everybody does. Everybody everybody has their spot where they can still go and get something. But what's that a measure of? It's certainly not a measure of health, ecological health. It's um what it is is uh it can be a measure of success for one moment in time. That's all. And you'll find that very few people have the same honey hole that they had twenty years ago. They certainly don't use the same equipment they had twenty years ago. You see the range of equipment that's available now to f for finding, luring, and catching fish. Uh it's a bit the old days where it was just a s a square hook and a bit of pink squid on a bit of cool online, uh you wouldn't you wouldn't catch anything now.

SPEAKER_01: 7:44

Aaron Ross Powell Well, as a kid launching at West Haven, doing the Waitamatata, Rangitato, or or the inside of Waiheke, that was kind of the extent. And going further than that, you you never really had to. The noises was quite an adventure. But nowadays people are going the squiggles. And so is that what you're talking about? More of an adventure to try and catch what you're used to.

SPEAKER_00: 8:04

Trevor Burrus, Jr. And you don't see the people fishing off the shore that you're used to, because the catch isn't there. So the Kahawai aren't there. The kelp snapper aren't there because the kelp's not there. And uh anyway, the and the the the um the depletion, the loss of the kelp and the depletion of snapper have mean that those kelpies that you used to catch and are are rare now.

SPEAKER_01: 8:25

So the question is, how did we get here? And is it one thing we can point our fingers at or is it a combination of of things?

SPEAKER_00: 8:32

Aaron Powell Well, people will say it's a combination of things, but I think the the truthfully, the essential element was the industrialization of commercial fishing and the inshore is that it's sort of acknowledged internationally that inshore stocks, shallow water inshore stocks, can't withstand industrial fishing practices. So when the um improvements in trawl, pear trawl, sane bigger, better diesel engines, bigger, better uh nets, better fish finding technology, all of that was just deployed at will on these inshore fisheries. I was around at that time and I and it just crashed it. It crashed it within 15 years. The place, the juvenile areas were were thick with juveniles, they got cleaned up quite and it's never recovered from from that onslaught. You know, it used to uh had a great friend his old fisherman used to be at the Great Barrier, moved over here. And he said the only one rule in the Gulf, and that's catch a fish on a hook. If you just restrict it to catching your fish on your hook, you won't have to do much else.

SPEAKER_01: 9:38

So those who don't know the method of uh like bottom impact trawling, uh what's actually going on here that's different to long lining or other commercial methods?

SPEAKER_00: 9:49

The main difference is that the gear moves on the bottom. It it it contacts the bottom and moves. Long lining or or stray lining or rod and reel just tends to be benign and it's static. So it's this movement of gear. Big uh foot chain, trawl doors getting dragged along the bottom, there's a plume of sediment that comes up behind it, resuspends those fine sediments that go back and settle down again and smother the the habitat for all sorts of little creatures. So you tend to get mud, mud bottoms where once there was some gravel and shell and and bits and pieces tends to just homogenize the whole thing into mud.

SPEAKER_01: 10:27

So once you've done that once, you hear it sometimes, we only traw the areas we've always trawled. So is is that an argument to continue doing trawling?

SPEAKER_00: 10:37

No, no, it's it's not. I I think the recovery th from seafloor it will be quite slow. Might be it might be a magic key, but it's just that's part of the habitat and the cycle of productivity that that manifests in all kinds of ways to little wee tiny creatures that are important for other creatures, um small plants and and creatures that live on the floor or just under the floor. Uh they are all really essential for for productivity.

SPEAKER_01: 11:06

So this is all being stirred up. And is it being brought aboard this the fishing boat when it comes on board or wh why are they doing this?

SPEAKER_00: 11:14

Not not now because there's none left. But in the 50s uh at Trifina, when single trawling was pretty m elementary. It wasn't wasn't particularly sophisticated. But the Colville Channel was full of soft corals. Was uh it's a high velocity uh water movement through there, which sponges and those kinds of uh creatures like. And so they thrived there. But of course they're not much good for a trawler because they tend to get tangled up in the net. So the evening shot would be a uh uh toes across the channel, bring it on deck, bring it into Trifina where they stay for the night, and as they when they get in there, they'd sort it all out and chuck it all over the side. So there'd be sponges and all this marine life just getting dumped over the side until there wasn't any left. And then it's a nice clean shot. We don't have to do that anymore. And I'm not the only one. I mean I I know people other people who've seen it and and and witnessed that going on. So we can't change the history.

SPEAKER_01: 12:12

No, and and that's what people are saying, we can't we can't change that back.

SPEAKER_00: 12:15

No, but but if you left the Colville Channel alone, it might take ten years, twenty years, fifty years, a hundred years, whatever, but that's its natural state with the water velocity and the nutrients, its natural state is to attract those forms of life. They will they will re-establish, most likely. And uh and just because there's n nothing there now doesn't mean that it's sort of invaluable. It's that it's uh some of these attributes can recover.

SPEAKER_01: 12:43

Trevor Burrus, Jr. And so in the whole ecosystem, when you're trawling like this, you're going for snapper predominantly as your target species.

SPEAKER_00: 12:50

Aaron Powell Not all the time, but some uh sometimes they'll they'll uh look they'll go for terakey, you can traw for terakey, snapper, gurnard.

SPEAKER_01: 12:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you're saying you know your surface lining or that, you're never going to catch Gurnard that way. So But the bottom line lining catches Gurnard. So you don't need to bottom trawl for Gurnard, actually.

SPEAKER_00: 13:10

You don't need to bottom traw for anything.

SPEAKER_01: 13:13

So so as as an option is as well. Is it cost effective? What is the reason what's the battle for it to to still remain?

SPEAKER_00: 13:22

The battle is that those that profit from doing it don't have to pay the cost of what they're doing. Because it's you and I that end up with the cost of the environmental damage, the loss of productivity, habitats damaged. Uh that's for everybody's cost to pay for that, not the person who undertook the activity. And so it's the externalizing of that cost onto us that makes it so profitable.

SPEAKER_01: 13:51

Do you think Kiwis know who owns the fisheries? Or or where where is the ownership of the fisheries?

SPEAKER_00: 13:58

No, I think that's probably variable, actually. I think there's probably a few view on that. Um I do I do like the idea that it is just uh common property and uh managed on the people's behalf by a government agency for the ben for the benefit for the public benefit.

SPEAKER_01: 14:16

So uh it looks to me like there's two angles to public benefit. One is GDP receipts from exporting them, and that helps prop up the economy. Um the other is uh beautiful backyard that we can have recreation and tourism and something to be proud of, the pure New Zealand. So these two are at a bit of a juxtaposition, and those controlling the fisheries are also those who are exporting the fisheries as well. Is there a bit of a conflict of interest there?

SPEAKER_00: 14:45

There is a bit, but I think it's a bit of shallow thinking in that as well, is that if there isn't a productive ecosystem that is replacing the fish that you take, then you're not serving anyone's interest. No one's interest is being served. You might be able to cash out a few fish for the short term, but if you're declining, you're gonna eventually that's gonna become unprofitable, as it has in for for some stocks. Um and the public won't get to enjoy a a fishery because it won't be there. And you know, the the participation of the public in fishing is largely success dependent. So if if they continue to go out for the weekend fishing and don't catch anything, well, they might as well try something else, some other recreation. So there's uh there's a level of of success which is required to keep the public engaged and participating. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01: 15:36

And there's a whole industry tied into that by humans and rods. And a lot of Kiwi businesses built off that.

SPEAKER_00: 15:41

There's a huge industry there, uh which isn't really acknowledged. I mean that the the normal way of looking at it is that commercial fishing is all about the money and that non-commercial fishing is all about playing. And that's just that's just not true. They both have uh a big economic investment in them, and they both need to be carefully considered. But paramount in all those considerations is to maintain the e productive ecosystem. Don't let it keep running down like it is now, and every fifteen years decide that you'll make a new plan. So you make write up a nice new rosy plan that looks very much like the last one that you didn't do anything about, full of all aspirational language and nice cuddly words, but don't do anything. And so another fifteen years later, oh, we've gone down another slope. We better have another plan. So we'll have another plan. Um, so it's not even a band-aid approach because I've got a plan here from 1985 which talks about the same things of which the Haraky Gulf sea change plan is.

SPEAKER_01: 16:43

All these people are coming together with good intentions, but it's the strategy or or Is there an elephant in the room then not in the Trevor Burrus.

SPEAKER_00: 16:50

I don't believe it is in in in all undertaken in good faith. Okay. Uh that there's a there's a an an implicit bias in government agencies that see their role in facilitating commercial fishing and they they kind of um look at their job in that light. That they're sort of instructed their strategic plan is to partner with industry and increase export. And and that's Kiwi is feeding the world, us. And I think is that where some of this friction is? Sure. There's plenty of fish if if you want to go to Sydney, but there's not so much if you want to go to Waiheke. So this bias comes through in policy all the time, and it leads to this sort of stagnant position where no change occurs, and you get this rolling series of of hand-wavy plans that that lack any meaningful action or achieve anything useful. Um you can always shuffle the shuffle the cards around a little bit and say, oh well, I've done something. But if but if you haven't interrupted the decline in stocks and biodiversity, if you haven't halted that and reversed its trend, then I don't see the purpose of a plan. And if you look at the sea change planned as a classic example of uh the the the Waikato and Auckland Councils getting together and investing a lot of ratepayers' money. The Harake Gulf Marine Park was established by legislation in year 2000, so it's 26 years old. It's uh a forum to bring together all the agencies that that that participate in the management of the Gulf. And the idea is to get them all on the same page. So their actions are all integrated and that and they're all forward-looking. And every three years uh write a report on the status of the Gulf, the State of the Gulf report. Well, right since the first one, the State of the Gulf reports have been describing more and more depletion and more and more ecosystem strength, less productivity. So what happened to this integrated vision? And uh so when it comes to managing the the the fishery resources in in the Gulf, in the in the park, the first thing you need is to describe the park as a fisheries management area. Once you've got a discrete area in which you can address, then you can look at nuanced management where it might be needed. But while it just sits in this little pocket of a great big area from East Cape to North Cape, it's it doesn't get any it doesn't get any attention that reflects the purpose of the marine park, which is as a largely recreational and a sort of flagship uh marine environment, and f certainly for economic reasons, economic use, but um also for conservation and and just the public use. So it might just be for sailing, canoeing, might be for a bit of fishing, it might be for whatever. Uh and alongside that there might be some aquaculture going on and there might be some bit of commercial fishing going on. It it wasn't uh it didn't um prevent anyone from from operating in there. But the lack of a specific fisheries management area means that there's no nuanced management in the in the in the Gulf.

SPEAKER_01: 20:15

So is it smarter thinking or better collective thinking?

SPEAKER_00: 20:19

What what where have we gone wrong at three CG? Oh, I think there's that there's no app uh real appetite to do what's needed. Is that the aren't uh the people a lot of the people who want to improve the state of the Gulf believe that all you need is some marine reserves. You know, if you just have some marine reserves, that's a silver bullet. You know, that'll t everything will be tickety-boo.

SPEAKER_01: 20:40

Okay, so that's a great point because we're looking over one down here, one the oldest one in the country, and I think even worldwide it's quite leading as far as locking up an area. Let's see that window into what we could have had. How do you explain that to people who are watching this and never come across uh a bad word about a marine reserve? Because there marine reserves don't seem to be the magic bullet that everyone thought they were initially. There are issues with marine reserves, right?

SPEAKER_00: 21:10

Yeah, yeah, they're not a silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. And uh and it's uh it it's uh it in fact does more harm than good by people signing up to this vision of we just need a few marine reserves and w and everything's good. Because what the experience at Goat Island here has taught us is that the reserve, the f the marine life inside the reserve will be more diverse, more healthier, and and more balanced, the ecosystem more balanced than that outside. But a distill only relative to that outside. It it doesn't go back to virgin state, unfished state, because it's constantly rubbing up against the boundary.

SPEAKER_01: 21:47

Fish have tails and they don't listen to man-made borders. Right, right.

SPEAKER_00: 21:51

So you get an improvement in the reserve relative to the to the adjacent waters, right? So if you want to have a really good marine reserve, you've got to have really good adjacent waters. Okay. Right? So the secret to a successful marine reserve is to lift the abundance and diversity across the whole park. And if you don't do that, then the little reserves that you put in will just make this little bit of difference. It won't ever won't ever be anything spectacular or particularly great. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01: 22:20

So what about people who want to make the whole park a marine reserve or join up all these little ones and make a huge no-take area? What's your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_00: 22:27

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Well, I think it would be just an absolute waste. I think the resources can be used, but the tendency is to overuse and uh and just use for short you know short-term thinking. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01: 22:39

Because the problem we've got now is these little windows, if we call them that, of Goat Island being a marine reserve. Now these proposed, or now they've come into ore, actually, HPAs. Um, but in between them, it's business as usual, controlling, overtake, these kind of behaviors are still happening, runoff, there's all the factors still there.

SPEAKER_00: 22:59

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Which mean that the HPAs are never going to flourish and to be anything particularly useful or grandiose as people imagine they're going to be, because the adjacent waters are continuing to degrade. And the the fishing that used to occur in there is just being displaced. It's not going away, it's just being displaced to deplete some other area. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01: 23:20

So I feel like the average Kiwi goes, Oh, I'm happy to sacrifice that spot for a couple of years to give it a chance to come back. They're buying into this a and trying to do their best for it. Can you give us a bit of a crystal ball prediction into how that's going to play out?

SPEAKER_00: 23:34

No, I don't think it's going to be successful at all. Because I think that people buy into marine reserves, if the rest of the golf is healthy. They don't mind not going there and not going over here if they can go there and succeed. But if they can't, if they can go over there and now there's four times as many people trying to fish over there, and there's no bloody fish anyway, uh, they just get squeezed out. And for no great benefit. It's not like the HPA, I mean, they differ by their location. I think uh the ones at the Makahina's will be um uh uh effective. Um northern side of Little Barrier, um I don't think will make much difference.

SPEAKER_01: 24:19

We've tried to have our say as you know a group of recreational fishers. There's been submissions put through by Legacy and the Sport Fishing Council. There's been a lot of science and attending forums and workshops the whole way through. This has still happened. Now we're seeing a bit of a public uproar at it happening. How did we get here? And if we use that as a bit of a learning, what could we do different in the future to to stop this kind of approach?

SPEAKER_00: 24:46

My own view is that it was insincere, that the agencies engaged in the sea change process were not really um engaged in an unbiased way, and that I don't think there was ever an intention to address the underlying issues of over-exploitation, of sedimentation running off. Because the whole ecosystem in the Gulf is being squeezed from from fish depletion, from fishing, damage to the near shore and the and the sea floor coming out of s sedimentation and uh and still this ridiculous um permission to use industrial bottom contact methods that just simply exacerbate that problem. Because remember, it wasn't that long ago when you could go and get a feed of muscles off the rocks, no problem. Inner gulf um mussel beds, they were fine. But what happened when they put an industrial application on? They said we can dredge, we don't forget them one at a time, we can dredge them off the bottom, right? Yeah, for about six or seven years until there's no muscles, and there hasn't been since. Who pays the price of that? The water quality and the gulf. Yeah, those things were massive filtration system running there, gone. Uh now just soft mud.

SPEAKER_01: 26:04

I see a lot of finger pointing these days, and look, you were previously a commercial fisher, and now wrecks are pointing fingers at them. Uh commercial guys are saying, Look, I'm just trying to earn a crust, you know. How would you like it if you had a camera in your workplace, all these kind of things. What do you think is the the way forward for everyone to maybe get over this little argy-bargy and and collectively do something meaningful for the Gulf War? What do we need to do there?

SPEAKER_00: 26:28

Oh, I think that's um it's never gonna happen by joint stakeholder working groups because people go in there, protect their corner, and do not sign up for a long-term vision at all. That because I've got a loan, I've got to pay, you know, commercial fishermen have got to make a crust, they've got to make it work. Um so everybody gets very defensive. And that in the sea change process, I was uh on the first um stock, fish stock and biodiversity groups, and it was very obvious right from the start that it was like our job here in this process is to minimize any impact on us. Right? So everybody took their corner and everybody promoted a view that had the least impact on them. And the agencies weren't sincere, they weren't buying into it either, they just w were pretty benign. Um, it takes uh a real strength of regulatory intervention to do it. If you just sort of waiting for people to agree uh doesn't work. It hasn't worked. And and writing stupid toothless plans every 15 years that make no difference at all and saying, oh, we're doing it, we're managing it. You know, these these closures, the the scallops, the loss loss of shellfish, um all of these, the loss of craze, they're all a badge of failure. Every one of those fisheries that are closed, no, sorry, there's none none left there now, not enough to take anymore, we close them.

SPEAKER_01: 27:55

An acknowledgement that we have this big history of mismanagement that goes back decades, that ends up Marine reserves almost that as well, uh an acknowledgement of some failure?

SPEAKER_00: 28:06

Because if things were abundant and healthy, we'd be if there wouldn't be this screen for marine protected areas, not to the extent that there is, if the health of the Gulf is better. But people are get are desperate. They say we've got to do something. Yeah, you've got this idea that well, if we've got to turn half of the Gulf into a marine reserve, then that's what we'll do. We won't look at other tools. We won't look at at um the councils who who promoted and paid for this plan can't even manage their own runoff. They can't manage their own rules and regulations on developers. They just don't have the resources, they don't have the people to to do it. So the they can't regulate the sedimentation, they don't have the uh ability to do it. So it's just it's just priced in. It's just accepted as part of the deal.

SPEAKER_01: 28:52

Aaron Ross Powell For those out of Auckland, I was in Myrangay Bay the other day, and where there used to be one house which would have had maybe a hundred square metres of roof and and a family of four or five live there, there's now fourteen houses that are all on that same section. That's all going down towards Myoranga, and that's Auckland wide. You know, it's intensification. Some will say that's the price of progress barrier.

SPEAKER_00: 29:15

But if and that's true, if if that's the if that's the view of people that, oh no, well, that's just what happens. Well then stop worrying about marine parks and spatial plans and things and and just price it in and get and carry on till there's nothing left.

SPEAKER_01: 29:30

Because that's stirring up sediment and squashing the seafloor, right?

SPEAKER_00: 29:34

And I saw it out at just at Walquith, at the back of Walquith there, hillsides of bare clay for for over a year, all getting flushed with every rain down the Marangi River. Then the oyster farmers can't harvest because the water quality is not good enough. And then the sewerage plant overflows and puts another dump down there, which is again the council can't manage that. Um So it's just this big this big sink that goes down. And uh and the Gulf, the ecosystem in the Gulf pays the price.

SPEAKER_01: 30:04

So who would want to get into commercial fishing these days? Because it seems like the odds are stacked against you. You're fishing often for someone else's quota who's taking the money. So you're not fishing like your great-grandparents or grandparents under similar circumstances fish for. Long, hard days at sea, time away from family, none of that's changed either. That's still part of it. It's a dangerous occupation. I know guys love it and it's their and it's your intrinsic feeling. I am a fisherman, you know, that's what I do. Um but it seems a real battle under the current current situation.

SPEAKER_00: 30:37

Oh, it is, it is. And there's no or very little investment going into inshore fishing. Uh and the small-scale inshore fishermen, which is the most efficient of uh less fuel, um uh lighter footprint. They can change what they're doing if circumstances demand it. Um just about uh gone. They're just lost from all these ports, like the local ports from here. Uh there's just a steady trickle of them.

SPEAKER_01: 31:06

So these are the small Kiwi businesses that we've always liked to back, you know. And those are disappearing.

SPEAKER_00: 31:11

They're disappearing. And in their place are coming big purpose-built trawlers that are you know designed to to catch a thousand tons a year is their is their plan. Um And is that being exported or is that feeding Kiwis? Oh, a bit of both. It's a bit of both. Um the the New Zealand market's quite big uh f for fish. These are restaurants, which Yeah, and supermarkets. A lot goes through supermarkets too now. Uh and of course, Australia is a big market.

SPEAKER_01: 31:41

Yeah. But the cost is what people are complaining about across the board, right? So Napa fillets, even a whole car wire's uh there's an expense to that now. But then on the flip side, going to catch one, fuel cost, ice cost, everything else to do the right thing, and then quite often you'd be out there all day, maybe catch nothing. So it's a bit of a risk there as well. So it's quite a bleak proposition to to get a protein source into your diet.

SPEAKER_00: 32:08

Yes, it is. And it's not getting easier. Um and fewer people are succeeding at it. And I think the the the price is a good good point. I mean uh that's what's happened with the no competition within the industry. There's the the whole thing's captured by a a few entities, and um and they're more than collecting the the the gravy from the trade.

SPEAKER_01: 32:31

Uh because why can't some of the boats locally here feed a restaurant straight off the boat? Because what what is the actual travel of a fish that is caught here? Goes down to what Hamilton or Auckland to be filleted?

SPEAKER_00: 32:44

Yeah. Some of it some of it can be filtered here, but that tends to be mostly supermarket um driven. The supermarket chain owns the local fisheries.

SPEAKER_02: 32:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 32:55

Um So yeah, so it goes down, g goes down to another shed, gets processed, gets filleted, then gets trucked back again to uh to a restaurant. Or and the there's a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble. The domestic market's difficult now for supplying restaurants and things like that. I know the the companies are pretty challenged trying to manage that. Costs are very high, and uh there's not much left in it for the restaurant.

SPEAKER_01: 33:23

So for Kiwis wanting to do the right thing and maybe support by purchasing behaviour better options than others, what would you recommend?

SPEAKER_00: 33:32

Uh look, I don't really have any strong recommendations for that. I don't see any particularly ethical or preferred source. Um and for the main reason that the there's so much of the cost of the fillet in the from the supermarket is taken by the quota owner processor. So the fisherman that gets five dollars a kilo for his fish, uh fillet's selling for fifty dollars.

SPEAKER_01: 33:59

Where is that la tuff?

SPEAKER_00: 34:00

So there's about twenty there's about twenty dollars that a kilo that's not needed in there that somebody is is pushing aside, pushing because just because they can. And this is because of the quota management. Yeah, it's a closed it's a closed system. There's no competition within it. And when you get an industry like that with no competition, you don't get innovation, you don't get value creation, you just get this captured rent-seeking behavior where how much can I sting? How much can I sting? And I don't have to worry about somebody else competing because this is a closed closed industry. It's a cartel. Yeah, and it's like it's like you know, we complain about the two supermarket chains making sort of a million dollars a day or whatever it is in uh in super profits. Well, that's what happens in the in the uh seafood industry as well. That that same closed nature of the industry allows for that rent seeking.

SPEAKER_01: 34:53

Guess it must be hard for you, Barry, as an ex-commercial fisherman, to admit that commercial fishing is the problem that's caused all this issue in the Gulf.

SPEAKER_00: 35:01

Yeah, no, no, I don't uh I don't don't blame the commercial fishermen completely for what's happening. I have a soft spot for them. I have a very soft spot for small scale commercial fishing. I have a um I really dislike industrial fishing because uh I see that as one of the prime drivers of the state that we find ourselves in now. And over exploitation. Small scale fishermen are particularly fuel efficient, they are flexible, they can change what they're doing, they have a very light environmental footprint, they can have. Uh so no, I don't see it as a blanket thing at all. I think uh it's to de-industrialise, uh and particularly the Harrick Gulf Marine Park, and I'd like to see all of coastal New Zealand as much as possible, where where alternatives exist to where static methods can be used. I'd prefer them to be used. Uh and the small-scale fishermen are particularly in the squeeze now. And so I don't see I don't hang my coat on there, uh coat hanger at all. Yeah. I think they're just doing what they're permitted to do and what they need to do. So playing by the rules that are at Ab absolutely. The the problem is not them, it's a problem of the regulator. What what's been happening over the decades since 1950 is that we've been over exploiting the stock. We're fishing them down to smaller and smaller sizes. The the size of fish in the catch goes down, the um number of the fish in the water goes down, uh the the ability of the of the whole ecosystem to reach a balance is destroyed. It's it favours one species while losing another. Uh and uh this um searching for this myth of maximum sustainable yield, what's the most fish we could justify taking? Without having an impact on the water, yeah, yeah. We can make some numbers up that make it sound like this is really cool, how many fish is is something out of Disneyland. It's not reflected in the experience and what happens on the water. What what's happening is that there's a continual decline going down. And every now and again you get a thing like snapper, which has had a burst, but yeah, who knows how long that'll last.

SPEAKER_01: 37:10

But when you say decline, we're essentially counting dead fish to say that. We have this many dead fish this year. Last year it was that many.

SPEAKER_00: 37:18

Yeah, and if you that's just it's a fish in the water, is that we need to recalibrate the m the amount of fish in the water that we insist we have before we start taking fish. So we want the nature to replace the fish we take, not accept and rationalise a lower and lower biomass. And say, oh no, so it's okay, it's okay, we can still take these fish from this little biomass, this little biomass. Because once it goes decade over decade over decade over decade, suddenly what happens, Mike? Lapse. At closure. Yeah. Oh, we've got to have an HPA now, we've got to close this. There's not enough scallops, anyone close this beach over here. Um craze are gone, uh, Harpook are long gone.

SPEAKER_01: 38:00

So we're celebrating marine reserves, but really we should uh be in mourning of getting to a sea and marine reserves.

SPEAKER_00: 38:07

Exactly. That's just a badge of failure. And uh and that's probably the most frustrating thing for me, uh, in my experience, is the sort of inability or unwillingness to locate, identify the problem, and square up to it and live with it. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01: 38:26

I think that's where a lot of this frustration online from is we can't do anything. We f almost feel shackled like our hands are behind our back. And so we'll just carry on carrying on. Hey, I may put back the bigger breeders and I'm doing my part and I'm only taking what I need, or I'm gifting the frames to someone who is. Yeah, little little things. But if the game, as you call it, is against you, the rules of the game, and others are playing to those rules right up to the boundary, well what what can we do as kids?

SPEAKER_00: 38:55

It's the institutional acceptance of low biomass. This acceptance that we don't need to regulate. We don't need to regulate. The science says blip blip blip blip blip blip blip. So here we go, you know, you can go and catch them. It's it's perfectly all right. But if we look back over history and you get old dudes like me that look back over over you know sixty-five years of quite clear experience, you know, ten more of partial, you see, that's not true at all. There's been this massive decline, massive decline to where we are now. And if you get an old boy like me, and there's a there's quite a few around, you say, well, if if you imagine when you were fifteen and you were snorkeling and you're doing your thing and you're growing up here, you know, for every hundred crayfish that were on that bit of coast, how many do you reckon are there now? One, two, maybe, sometimes? None on s some bits of coast? That's the magnitude of the decline, but it's not reflected in the advice that that's used to set catchments.

SPEAKER_01: 39:55

We're only looking at previous. How narrow is that view? Because you're talking about your lifespan. Then you've also got a bit of insight into your father's. So you're going back quite quite a little while for a for a decent sliver. Our fisheries management currently, how thin is that little view?

SPEAKER_00: 40:11

It is. I mean, that's what and that's what permits it to still appear okay when it's not. Because we look back five years, ten years, and we say, Oh, catch rate's changed much in the last ten years. But what about the the 50 before that? Oh, that's we you know, we don't know about that.

SPEAKER_01: 40:26

So we it's it it's very variable and it's um Because I hear stories, I travel the country at fishing clubs, it's what I do for work. Go to some places and they're like, Oh, grandad used to take as many crays as he could fit on the boat and feed them to the pigs. Or grandad used to fish Miola Reef and catch harpooker.

SPEAKER_00: 40:45

Or Well you know, down here at Goat Island, you were just down there today, just on the right hand side of the beach, there's those sandstone rocks and they've got gutters that go up there. Well, when I was about ten, so that'll be about nineteen sixty, if you wanted a crayfish, you got a fence patent with a piece of number eight wire on the end of it, you cracked two kinner over into there and waited like three minutes and crays came out from under the ledge, and you just went, pow, that didn't it. Thank you. You know? So from that level of abundance to what's there now is a tiny fraction. Well, that's a marine reserve now, no take. Um unfished or undisturbed or unmodified. And that's fifty years of that. Right. And then you and then and then now you push that out to the open fished country, and it's even another step.

SPEAKER_01: 41:40

So this is getting into the crux of it, I think, Barry, is we're creating these high protection areas, but around it, the whole ocean is in a disse situation.

SPEAKER_00: 41:50

So which imperils the MPA, right? You're not going to get the benefit that you want from the MPA because you're not looking after the areas outside. And that it goes hand in glove. And and that's what that's what frustrates me personally, is that because I think people accept HPAs if the rest of the the grounds are being managed and and restored to abundance as well. And so that when they go out fishing, they can go and catch a uh snapper on the in out in the middle of the bay. They don't have to hang around the rocks and the trying to get something.

SPEAKER_01: 42:28

See, we've had I'm gonna get a little bit political. We've had for it fisheries ministers, conservation ministers of all political colours and stripes, but we're still trended this way. So it's not a political ideology or a leaning that seems to change this. What's it gonna take, Barry, to get there?

SPEAKER_00: 42:45

Well, at the moment it takes collapse and closure. So how do we how do we wind it back? It's got to be in the Fisheries Act. It's got to be by law. The standards that are in the law, the minimum standard that's currently in the in the law, is far too low. And we won't get any meaningful change until we reset that minimum to a higher level and achieve it, which means it's gonna affect people. There's it it's gonna require people to leave more fish in the water until we can build these animals' numbers up. And that's the essence of it. And there's very little political will to do that because that's objected to by the commercial industry, who in uh they want the economic level. So as long as they can catch it and make a profit, uh there's not much else comes into consideration. And to manage at higher levels means that they've got to leave more in the water that could be caught. Mind you, so does the public have to uh just just take it easy.

SPEAKER_01: 43:44

The come the public have frustrations if I'm trying to do the best. Here's a lovely 20-pound snapper. I know it's a breather, I've got my phone, I've handled it well, I've used circle hooks, I've put it back.

SPEAKER_00: 43:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 43:56

Then a trawler comes through.

SPEAKER_00: 43:58

Can you see the frustration? Yeah, I can see it. Yeah, and the the trawler won't catch a twenty-pounder.

SPEAKER_01: 44:03

But why won't the trawler ca just so we can explain that as well. Like why do we see 20-pounders at the at the um supermarket, for instance? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00: 44:11

Be because um each fishing method tends to have a selectivity um preference. So for example, trawling will catch small fish and up to a certain size. It's it's uh uh unusual for them to catch large amounts of big fish. Um I think I think they swim too quick. And uh and so each method has its own little bias on the size that it that it achieves. Um So that's why you don't see the twenty pounders, you've got to go and actually catch them on a hook. You know, that otherwise you won't see them. But no, that's that's the essence of the problem. The essence of the problem is that we fished everything down too far. We don't have an appetite to rebuild it. So if we without the appetite to rebuild it, we get HPAs because people get desperate and they want to see a change, and they're told that HPAs will is is will achieve this magic nirvana. Uh so that they're sold a uh a damaged bill of goods, really, on on that. And if they could just understand that the the MPA or the or the HPA is the health of that is determined by the health outside it. And if that was just accepted and and to say that that the real challenge is not designating HPAs, the real challenge is restoring the entire abundance and diversity of the system, the strength of the productivity, stop pouring shit down the rivers. Uh councils do your you know, don't worry about meddling in the Asia, clean up your side of the deal and s and stop this runoff coming down. Uh and and at least seriously address it and try and minimize it.

SPEAKER_01: 45:47

Did we see a break in overfishing during COVID? Is there something noticeable from that? Because people point to that and go, hey, here's a here's a time where we actually gave it a break.

SPEAKER_00: 45:57

And in that time, fish re-entered this harbour for the first time. There was no boat traffic. So it wasn't just it wasn't just catching. It wasn't just that there was nobody catching. It was that there was no boat traffic. So the whole thing just went quiet. The whole inshore just went quiet. And the fish and everything said, Well, this is all right. And they yeah, they entered back up because it didn't last long once it cranked up again. But uh yeah, so uh There's there's something in that, but I just it just drives me mad, Mike, that what to me is just an obvious dysfunction in the current system cannot get attention because of all the froth around the outside. We talk about anything except that. Yeah, so as soon as you say, no, look, let's let's increase this biomass, right? Give ourselves a cushion under here. That's just an economic loss. That's you know, I could have sold that could kill that fish and sold it.

SPEAKER_01: 46:50

Or you know I feel like uh it's where we're at at the moment is a lot of finger pointing. Like you're the problem commercial, you're the problem wreck, we don't know what you're taking, wreck. Uh customary, you're taking, we don't know what you're taking. How do we come together and address the issue? But this is looking forward now, Barry. Like what's the thing?

SPEAKER_00: 47:08

Looking forward, looking forward, the only thing that's going to solve this, in my view, is to amend the act. There's no but there's no political appetite for it. And without that, all you get are two things. You get you get this this we have a joint stakeholder working group, which puts a whole bunch of dysfunctional people into a room that simply cannot agree to anything rational because they're all defending their position. And you get a series of half-bake, aspirational, frothy plans that don't do anything, but keep people occupied for a few years while they write them and review them.

SPEAKER_01: 47:41

So uh does there have to be an admission to failure first to get past that to get past that.

SPEAKER_00: 47:48

Absolutely. And where's that coming from? It's not coming from anywhere because we are seeing the consequences of it. Every time there's a a collapse and a closure, uh a loss of a of a stock, a loss of an area. Each one of those is a complete badge of failure for the current system that's not promoted, not identified, and not pushed out for the public to say, look, you know, don't take my word for it that it's failing. Here's this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one that have gone with barely a mention, with barely a a hiccup. And there's a big cue behind them that's that's coming along.

SPEAKER_01: 48:22

No one likes to be told they've failed or or they're a failure, or they've made a mistake or they've bat the wrong horse. But it seems to be a lot of that that's happened historically, and we're still doing the same. Like we're almost expecting a different result from the same behaviour that we've always Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: 48:39

And and I I mean I don't I find it difficult to blame uh like the fisheries New Zealand people who who can are constantly writing about the success that they have and how how great a job they do. Uh that's quite divorced from reality. But that's their job. They can't, uh in all honesty, start trashing their own agency. They'll be down the road at working at McDonald's.

SPEAKER_02: 49:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 49:06

You know, so so that they're stuck. Even at you know, e even any doubts or or changes that they might which they've got to be very careful about what they do. Their job is supporting the government's position.

SPEAKER_01: 49:18

So what are we talking about? If we get down to the money, we're talking to a couple of billion dollars a year in exports, and that's including offshore as well as insurance. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 49:26

The insure's the inshore is pitiful. Um uh it's not not very much at all.

SPEAKER_01: 49:29

So what are we sacrificing in the scheme of GDP you know receipts? Uh like export receipts.

SPEAKER_00: 49:37

It it's it's less than half a per cent of GDP. If the inshore fisheries disappeared tomorrow, nobody would notice. The economy wouldn't notice it.

SPEAKER_01: 49:45

But the tourism and the local boat builders and the everything else could grow off the back of like a bountiful ocean that is a destination for fishermen.

SPEAKER_00: 49:54

An absolute gold mine to have the fish in the water that that can be sold to tourism or put on the table, to small-scale commercial fishermen who can maximize its value. They're not under this pressure to catch this huge quantities of fish.

SPEAKER_01: 50:10

I was down in Kikorta recently. There's a cray fisherman there who used to have to go out in all sorts of weather, battling the conditions to take his craze for export. He's now bought a local hotel, done it up, and he's got pools at the back of the hotel. Now he just goes out to the five not variables, gets the craze he needs, puts them in the pool, sells them for a better price to tourists who come in and get them than he was getting from his export. Happy days. Like that seem there are other ways of doing this or having innovation come through, right?

SPEAKER_00: 50:40

The current system stifles innovation and it it stifles value creation. So people aren't out there searching, you know. Your your brother-in-law in Hong Kong wants to buy some flounder, you know, and he's got a sp he's got a special couple of restaurants sitting on you. There's none of that's happening. Now I say, Oh yeah, we'll go and get these two guys and we'll ph when suddenly we've got ten dollars a kilo more for them by by finding the right none of that happens now.

SPEAKER_01: 51:05

It's like pairing a nice Kiri wine with a crayfish and so on.

SPEAKER_00: 51:08

That whole thing that that that whole thing is uh that whole innovation drive is gone. Largely people are just doing what they did twenty-five years ago. Very little selling dead bodies to the world is uh is the main main business. For the inshore, so economically it's not it's not significant. I think it has uh a a de-industrialized inshore which had greater abundance, had small-scale commercial fishermen out there feeding the feeding the public and finding some choice export markets as well. And uh and the public and tourism opportunities that that would provide uh is a far better model. But the current legislation and the way it's structured prevents any of that happening.

SPEAKER_01: 51:54

I don't know if you ever came across Fleur Sullivan who was in Moraki and had her own boat and had a restaurant and should you ate what Fleur caught that day. You didn't have a choice. You that's what made the men highly successful. Have we got openings to to just start moving that way for those who are bold enough to or do you need to be a quota owner?

SPEAKER_00: 52:15

You need to Yeah, yeah, you have to be a quota owner, which means a substantial investment for uh questionable returns. Uh the whole quota pricing thing uh is completely out of hand. When the system was first introduced, alongside the quota was a resource rental. And the resource rental was a payment made to the Crown, to to you and I for taking this fish and selling it. The idea of the resource rental that it would be set at a point where this quota didn't ever achieve very much value. So you couldn't get a closed system and start milking it because the resource rental would go up, right? Yeah. And say, oh, well, the quota's not worth very much, because it was never intended to be worth very much. It was never intended to earn a revenue stream on on its own. So it became privatized like a share market, kind of trading a share, right? Yeah, and it I mean what happened was that they lobbied the the the commercial industry lobbied very hard soon after the creation to get rid of that resource rental because then they could create this capital value around the the quota. So that was a uh and right from that point on, it's just it it it's prevented the sorts of innovations that you're talking about. Uh it's made them very difficult.

SPEAKER_01: 53:31

I don't know. The Kiwis I know love to back a Kiwi success story. Someone starts a restaurant, you go there, got great food, got a story to it. It's honest, it's humble. Um this industrial fishing isn't honest or humble. It's it's mass extraction for overseas mouths. And I think that's where a lot of the frustration is. And and combine that with our farmers do a similar thing, but they actually put a lot back into the grass that feeds the cattle or the beasts, you know, where fishing seems to be a lot of extraction, a lot of take, and not much giving back. How how do we address that?

SPEAKER_00: 54:11

It is an extractive um industry, very much so. Uh you you can't give much back except by way of resource rentals. There needs to the fish is given away. There's no no you're essentially running a business where you don't have to buy your stock. You just get to sell it. Well, you've just got to get it and then sell it. And uh and that's one of the problems. That there's there's no real benefit, public benefit from the monetization of that resource. I mean we do it with you know everything else. We do it with minerals. If you want to go gold mining, or if you want to go and get iron sands or start timber, state timber or whatever. You'll pay a rental, you'll pay a resource rental for it. And uh there's no reason why it doesn't apply to fish.

SPEAKER_01: 54:53

Aaron Ross Powell Kiwis just aren't adding value to the um uh export chain system. We're selling primary products, whole trees, whole beasts, not broken down into plywood or into hamburgers.

SPEAKER_00: 55:07

Fisheries pretty much the same thing. Pretty much the same. It's a commodity trading system. Um there's a little bit of value added goes on, but it's pretty, pretty budget. Um Is that where we could create more jobs and more, you know, m by television? Only by opening it up. Only by taking away the barriers to of entry. As soon as you put up barriers to entry, like high quota costs to go in, you prevent people coming in. So you slow down the entry and exit of participants. And as soon as you slow that down, you you lose that fresh blood that comes in, the fresh ideas that come in, the contacts around the place. You just tend to do what you've always done. And that was, you know, I caught the fish, I chilled it, I put it in a box, I sent it to the Sydney fish market, and it got X number of dollars, and I paid the fishing industry. And I'll do the same again next week and the week in the week. There's nobody out there pushing the edges that you get when it's an open industry.

SPEAKER_01: 56:04

What I've got out of today is we're heading almost like a fork. One's to just collapse and lock up and collapse under the QMS, and the others maybe rewriting the rules, as you could. Because we're everyone's playing to the rules, but it's creating this down.

SPEAKER_00: 56:19

So how do we rewrite the rules or or revisit the QMS or I think the first the thing that's missing, and the m one of the big mistakes that was made, was considering that a single system would be suitable for the deep water fishery, which was developing at the time, and the inshore fishery, which was overfished and stressed at the time. And that we'll just and we'll just have one system that encompasses both. They have very little in common, the two industries. They have completely different capital structures, uh, different markets, different products, uh whole different drivers, the whole thing. The the what was missed before and what could be done now is to separate the two. Because it may well be that the QMS, by and large, suits the deep water. It achieves its purpose in the deep water. It's not achieving its purpose in the inshore. So separate that out and just deal to the inshore. Because remember it's not that huge. If it's a small fraction of one percent of GDP and can disappear and not be noticed, then surely it can be managed to better perform than it is now.

SPEAKER_01: 57:23

But to get there we need to admit failure. And our admission to failure is more marine reserves. So by proxy, we are admitting failure by creating more high protection areas or marine reserves. Correct. Correct.

SPEAKER_00: 57:35

Because that's that's seen as a solution to a problem. And uh so it's just again, it's this frustration of not identifying the problem and it's squaring up and addressing that. And once that's done, the rest of these things will f tend to flow and fall into place. But whatever we pretend that, oh no, we're we're world leading, we're just this magic country down here that's got everything right. We just, you know, we're just brilliant little people down here. And uh where others have tried and failed, we've succeeded. And while we go ahead with that, we're just bullshitting ourselves. And we're j and we're losing a steady little stream. I mean, it's not going over a cliff, it's a steady stream. That's why it's so insidious. It is. And it's not until you get an old crank like me who can go back and remember unloading craze in 1955, that you see the extent of it. And never on any of that period did it go bang over a cliff. Just changed. And it just changed until all the places where we used to crayfish here in in the bay, they were gone, there's nothing nothing there. And and much wider than that. It's al it's already well for for the people to say, Oh, there were never any there were never any craze in Cowwell. Well, back in the day that supported three people slightly, it's crayfishing there. They had Takato in in Cowwow. So uh you know, there were there were plenty of crays around. Be curious. You know, that's that's what we suffer from is a lack of curiosity.

SPEAKER_02: 59:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 59:07

Is that and I mean, you notice it over your lifetime, the things people talked about local affairs all the time when there wasn't much else to do. TV was a mysterious black and white box in the corner. And so people have lost the this this sort of the curiosity of the local and and that's the thing with fisheries. Unless you're curious about it, it'll always seem this dark blob that's impenetrable. But if you're curious about it, uh it's quite it's quite understandable and quite logical.

SPEAKER_01: 59:37

Thank you for your time with us today, Barry. It's really good to know the history of your backyard here and how we've got to where we are today. I think it's really affected me as I'm a new father and I've got a son who's gonna experience all of this in his own way as well. And uh it would be tragic for him to see that kind of depletion in his lifetime. So how do we change our behaviours as a whole? and and maybe do something about this because it sometimes the speed of the world and all these other distractions, it's too hard to dedicate some some grey matter to to it and uh you know feel like we can do something about it. What would your suggestions be?

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:16

Well I think first um maintain curiosity about what's happening. So keep listening. Keep trying be informed. Um sign up for the legacy newsletter. Uh they put out quite a lot of good informative material that's uh that that tries its best it can to be unbiased and and and straight. They try and just tell it how it is. So that's an important important source. And I think don't give up because there are people around who would like to see fundamental change here. And in a broader way than just grasping at an MPA as a silver bullet that's going to suddenly do it. There are people around who have a wider view and and legacy encompasses a lot of that and uh it it you know it's not the most riveting s subject a topic it's not like following the all blacks northern tour or or or anything. It can be a bit you know bone jarring and and boring at times it seems but it's crucial. Unless people stand up and get together and and together embrace this need for change, a fundamental change. We we can't expect anything different when we just keep doing the same things.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:28

I feel that's a real role fishing clubs have actually taken upon themselves in recent times is yeah they used to go out and have competitions and kill them all but that whole attitude has changed to actually what are we going to do for our backyard patch for our people to try and restore that abundance and they're bringing in new behaviours, ways of fishing, a lot more selective methods and and behaviors.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:50

Is is that maybe that's a great avenue a great avenue to to provide information, keep those people informed, keep them engaged and they talk to their neighbours and they talk to other people around them that might won't necessarily belong to the club and that just broaden the understanding. At the moment there's going to be a lot of people really disappointed with the HPAs that have been announced that it's where they've always fished and suddenly they've been told they can't fish there anymore. In some of them they've been told they can't fish there anymore while a commercial fisherman can come in and fish there. Well that's just a that's insulting. So there's going to be a lot of people that are that are annoyed at it but it's important that they get beyond an understanding just beyond that little little piece that's happened there. If they just stay engaged and just say well what's really go what's happening here? Because if if I'm excluded from this area now, what's going to happen in five years' time? What does the future look like? Is there just going to be less and less? Are there going to be just no fish? You know should I invest in a new outboard? Is it going to be is it gonna am I still going to be able to do this? So uh they need to to stay awake and and uh and keep engaged and keep understanding that there needs to be a fundamental change in our attitude and law that that is managing this because we are failing, as demonstrated by the HPAs, we are failing. It's an evidence of commercial, recreational, customary all of us even though we may point fingers at each other, we actually need to be banded together to to really make a change to this exact well I just think that if you just forget the division, forget the the competing participants or whatever, and just look at the ecological health and wellbeing of the park, of the Gulf that because if that's not right, no one's gonna get to NeedsMet, no one's gonna get what they want. They'll all be fighting over the last scraps. Yeah. So put all that aside say we're not gonna we're not gonna get into that. What we're gonna do is recognise that we've depleted this area too much for our own good and we need to change what we're doing and turn the tide the other way. And it won't be through writing Mickey Mouse plans or putting little postage stance HPAs around the place with big promises. It'll only happen with a fundamental change in the law and the and institutions that we use to manage them. Which was one of the good good aspects of the Ahumuana initiative was that it really dealt with that sort of first few hundred meters of the the intertidal zone and the first few hundred meters where a lot of the human impact can be and a lot of the human impact from new migrants can be and uh if that had been fully in engaged in this in this Hariki Gulf plan, then there would have been nuance available in that zone where you can make special rules for special places within the park where that was an issue because I suspect that there's a lot of those intertidal areas which just need to be left alone. Just like keep away as there is with the first five to eight meters of rocky reef. Leave it alone. It's it's showing the signs of over exploitation it the whole ecological balance has been thrown out and we've got to change our attitude and behaviour about what we do in that shallow zone shallow rocky reef zone. So there's um I don't think there's any silver bullet there. I think it's uh that's just part of the process. Well thank you for your time today Barry.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:21

You're most welcome you're most welcome just so insightful to hear that and I really hope maybe my generation or at least my sons will be the one that bucks this trend and the way it's you've seen it but I guess decrease in your lifetime hopefully there's still time to change there is there is there is and I hope and I hope it happens I hope I hope our grandkids can can still go out and experience a vibrant diverse ecosystem out here that you can fish you can use but it's not used beyond its limits