Conservation Minister Tama Potaka is playing down last-minute changes to a bill that would see 19 areas of Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf protected.
The “protected” areas won’t be protected from the ring nets of commercial fishers.
That’s produced a chorus of outrage from most of the many groups that have spent a decade or more trying to get consensus on moves to reverse the death of the area’s sea life.
Potaka says the amendments to the bill will have very little impact on the environment beyond the target species, and are there to balance the needs of communities, the environment and the economy. He says it’s all part of the government’s “direction of travel” on such issues.
That’s not a direction conservationists want to climb on board with.
And some are pointing out that New Zealand, formerly the clean, green, land of environmentally aware peoples, is making Australia, (top exports: coal, iron ore, petroleum gas, gold) look good.
The latest development in Australia’s change of focus has been its push toward protecting over half of the ocean space it governs by 2030. The global aim under the UN’s Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Treaty is 30 percent.
As part of that, Australia wants to protect the Lord Howe South Tasman Rise, an area of open ocean between us. It could be the first high seas marine protection area in the world, under the new treaty.
It’s also pushing on alone on restricting seamount trawling to just 30 percent of seamount areas in the South Pacific, after New Zealand harpooned the proposal – in spite of putting the idea forward in the first place.
“It’s not a good look when you’re sort of diverging from traditional baddies who say they want to do better … then New Zealand, the traditional good guy, is dragging its heels,” says Newsroom reporter Andrew Bevin.
One example – killing off the idea of a bigger sanctuary around the Kermadec Islands, after eight years of investigation. It had been announced with great fanfare at the UN in 2015 by then National Prime Minister John Key.
“New Zealand typically likes to think of itself as the sort of steward of the South Pacific, don’t we, harking back to the Rainbow Warrior? It does seem a little bit concerning,” says Bevin.
However, “Australia has a very mineral-reliant economy whereas New Zealand is more fisheries, lamb and beef – agrarian I guess you could call it. So bottom trawling is not as important to the Australian economy as it is to New Zealand. It’s not a big deal for them and it is potentially a big deal for us.”
But Bevin also points out it’s not as big a deal as it might have been once, after the figures are analysed.
The CEO of WWF New Zealand, Kayla Kingdon-Bebb, says she was sitting in the Global Nature Positive Summit in Sydney thinking it was hard to recognise Australia as it took the first steps toward that MPA in the south Tasman Sea. It is funding a research symposium to identify areas that are biologically and ecologically significant.
The area, in the international zone between Australia and New Zealand’s economic limits, is currently being bottom trawled by New Zealand, although activity has dropped off sharply since 2020.
“We need to be clear that right now the rate of species extinction is higher now than at any time in human history. That’s really significant, and if we don’t do something to address the loss of wild places, species and eco-systems we are pretty rapidly approaching global tipping points,” she says.
“In that wider context, Australia’s been doing some really innovative things around nature repair. So, experimenting with bio-diversity credits, a nature-repair market. They’ve been trying to get the right enabling conditions in place to enable the market to effectively do what it should and begin to invest in nature repair.
“It’s actually been pretty impressive … nothing’s perfect, they don’t have a perfect system, but credit where credit’s due, they’ve been having a go at it.”
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