pjc wrote:
Seeing how comms pay for quota ..... |
Warning - Rant follows.
Exactly how do they pay for quota??? The only way they pay for most quota is by one commercial fisherman paying another commercial fisherman or fishing company for ACE. Ain't no serious money ending up in the public purse from that. I wonder how many people here have not understood that the only public purse return on our commercial fisheries is from PAYE on the people employed and whatever minimal company tax the fishing companies can't avoid paying after sending dividends to their offshore owners.
That is the crux of nearly everything that is wrong with our QMS. The government gave effective ownership (property rights) of virtually all our fisheries to a small group of people who happened to be commercial fishing at the time the quota was distributed. Screwed 1000's of others who they decided they didn't need to talk to and had a huge impact on some of most vulnerable coastal economies. How dumb was that. Give away $billions of perpetual public income and a large degree of control over our public fisheries for no sane reason. If anyone has a sane reason I would love to hear it.
The only other publicly owned resources I can think of that are/were provided free to commercial interests are our fresh water, air, and public spaces. In return the commercial users give us back mass pollution that we then have to live with and eventually pay to clean up. We do however get to enjoy the public waterways, spaces, and air for free so it isn't all bad (at least when the pollution isn't killing you).
Look at how everyone is now trying to line up a way to take ownership of fresh water so they can screw the public for more money from a resource that belongs to the public today. Same with what we always considered public spaces. In some case the government charges for commercial use to help fund the management which makes some decent sense whilst in others cases the Maori 'claimants' have started charging or preventing commercial operations even when the 'public space' ownership might still be technically public. Haven't seen any serious claims against the ownership of the air yet but sooner or later someone will dream up a reason why they should own it and charge everyone for using it. That is how our country seems to work.
Bottom line is that all public owned assets should be returning something to the public that is commensurate with it's value whether that is in money or enjoyment rights. Fish is the only major public asset to date where we have given away all the money, most of the management rights, and a hell of a lot of the enjoyment privileges for a tiny little return to the public that could be massively higher if it had been managed sensibly. Imagine if the public still owned the Quota and leased the ACE to the fishing companies as should have happened. Another $B or so in the public purse every year? How many surgeries or school books or training programs etc could that fund instead of making a tiny handful of people super wealthy.
Lets see if we learned enough from that debacle before the same thing happens with our Fresh Water.