Shane Jones has shelved his own legislation, and in doing so handed bottom trawling to the election campaign.
The Oceans and Fisheries Minister asked the select committee reviewing the Fisheries Amendment Bill to extend its deadline in June, delaying the bill past the general election. He did not pretend it was going well.
"If it can be improved by some more panel beating, then I'm up for that," Jones said during a scrutiny week hearing, conceding there was disharmony inside the industry and across Parliament. He invited the committee to "take some time to pluck the fruits of democracy", accepted authorship and responsibility, and rejected the idea he had been pressured into it: "I don't take instructions in the way that you've described it, only from my leader, Winston Peters."
This followed an earlier reversal. In March, after Jones had labelled opponents "noisy voices", the coalition abandoned a clause scrapping most minimum size limits for commercial fishers. Provisions restricting judicial review timeframes and the release of on-board camera footage, including under the Official Information Act, remained in the bill.
The seafood sector saw the delay as reforms squandered. Seafood New Zealand chief executive Lisa Futschek said she was disappointed. "This Bill is about bringing fisheries management into the modern era," she said, describing an intent "to move away from a one-size-fits-all process that can be slow and blunt, and towards a legislative framework that is more responsive and better matched to the realities of the job." She was less diplomatic about the opposition campaign: "Some genuinely worthwhile reforms have been lost in the noise. It was very clear those who lobbied against were more taken with slogans than what could actually have been achieved."
Labour is not looking for a compromise version. Oceans and Fisheries spokesperson Rachel Boyack said the bill "needs to be completely pulled, and if anything, if there's to be any reform in this area, it needs to start again from scratch." She pointed to around 18 Official Information Act requests for on-board camera footage, all declined, with the Ombudsman upholding most of those calls. "It shows that the system is working," she said.
The factual battleground is a percentage. Ministry for Primary Industries analysis released by Jones in May put the 2024/25 bottom trawl footprint at 1.7 percent of the combined territorial sea and Exclusive Economic Zone. Trawling is "concentrated in specific fishing grounds", Jones said, and "the area impacted by trawling is extremely limited and has remained relatively stable for decades" -- though he allowed that the method "needs to operate under evidence-backed checks and balances".
Opponents attack the maths, not the measurement. The EEZ covers roughly four million square kilometres dominated by deep water no trawler targets, which makes 1.7 percent the most flattering available framing. Greens oceans and fisheries spokesperson Teanau Tuiono has branded the package "a handout to the fishing industry"; Greenpeace Aotearoa campaigner Ellie Hooper called the bill "a blank cheque written for the trawling industry", citing hundreds of tonnes of coral dragged up over 35 years.
University of Auckland marine science professor Simon Thrush treats the pause as usable time. New Zealand is one of just seven nations bottom trawling in international waters and the only one still doing so on South Pacific seamounts, home to corals and sponges that live for centuries and can exceed 20 metres. Trawling covered nearly half a million square kilometres of New Zealand waters between 1990 and 2025 -- close to twice the land area of both main islands -- and observers logged over 4,200 marine mammals caught in trawl nets between 1992-93 and 2017-18, most of them killed.
The scientific proposal on the table is a boundary, not a ban: protect 50 percent of the territorial sea and EEZ from bottom trawling, up from roughly 15 percent of fishable-depth waters closed today. Thrush also backs environmental assessment before any previously unfished ground is opened, designated trawl corridors avoiding key habitat, and larger buffers around marine protected areas.
None of it is cost-free. Bottom trawling took about 224,000 tonnes in 2024-25, two-thirds of the commercial catch by volume, from an industry generating around $1.57 billion in exports and employing roughly 9,000 people. That arithmetic is exactly why the bill's contested clauses are shelved rather than dead.
