Proposed licensing options for fishing

In The Future Catch – Preserving Recreational Fisheries for the Next Generation, Dr Randall Bess urges recreational fishers to embrace a licencing fee to protect the pastime they love.

Bess is a research fellow for The New Zealand Initiative, responsible for a series of fisheries management research papers examining fisheries management practices in New Zealand and overseas.

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Arguments around licencing have raged in the country’s homes, pubs, boating and fishing clubs, within families and between fishing mates, for as long as I’ve been writing about recreational fishing – probably longer.

While elements within the commercial-fishing lobby strongly support recreational fishing licences and/or other controls on recreational fishing, recreational fishers remain largely opposed to any form of licencing, a stance representative bodies such as the NZ Angling and Casting Association, New Zealand Sport Fishing Council and advocacy group LegaSea steadfastly maintain.

But the times are a-changing, says the New Zealand Initiative. New Zealand’s population has doubled in a generation and continues to grow at pace, so there are now far more New Zealanders fishing, diving and gathering kai moana. Thanks to improved fishing tackle, much more widely disseminated fishing knowledge and an explosion in the number of recreational vessels, access to recreational fishing is much easier. Tourism is booming as well.

Commercial fishing hasn’t stood still either, having adopted industrial fishing methods and dazzling new technologies in the quest to catch more fish.

Commercial or recreational, we are better fishers than our fathers and there are many more of us. Something must give, says The New Zealand Initiative.

‘New Zealand faces the same challenges as other fishing nations as demand increases for limited fisheries resources. Improving our own fisheries management will be easier if we learn from the successes and failures of other jurisdictions,’ writes Bess.

Overseas examples

Bess investigated management practices for stressed or commercially-endangered shared fisheries in several overseas jurisdictions, including Texas and Northern California, USA, British Columbia, Canada, and Western Australia.

We are told many of New Zealand’s commercial fisheries are well managed, receiving international recognition for sustainability. But, says the report, most of these are offshore fisheries for species such as orange roughy, ling and hoki. They don’t include ‘shared’ fisheries for species valued by recreational fishers, such as snapper, kahawai, kingfish and blue cod, which are largely found closer inshore.

Commercial quota holders have offshore fishing all to themselves, so it’s in their best interest to manage these fisheries for their own benefit, changing their behaviour where necessary to ensure sustainable fishing. But in shared fisheries the incentives for quota holders to change their behaviour ‘are reduced when much of the benefit is enjoyed by recreational fishers’.

Quota holders sometimes trade off the certainty of the present against the uncertainty of the future; taking extra catch benefits (for example, through misreporting and discarding) in the short term that cause the long-term consequences to be shared amongst all quota holders, including Maori and recreational fishers.

Commercial fishing rights evolved over many decades and are well defined, writes Bess, as is the way commercial fisheries are managed, but the evolution of non-commercial fishing rights and fishing management has been shorter, slower and far less well documented.

The evolutionary process for recreational fishing rights and management must be sped up, says the report, as the demand for recreational fishing grows.

All sectors share the same goals of greater fish stock abundance, fair and equitable TAC (Total Allowable Catch) allocations and a better fishing experience, writes Bess.

The New Zealand Initiative’s fisheries project aims to elicit constructive debate about these shared goals...

Better fisheries management

Improving the overall management of shared fisheries requires changes for both commercial and recreational fishers, says the report.

For rec fishers, this could mean an end to releasing ‘undersized’ fish for instance, which may in fact hinder stock rebuilding due to excessive fish mortality.

Mortality through barotrauma, poor handling and other causes is another factor highlighted by the report, suggesting it may be better for recreational fishers to keep every fish they catch until the daily limit is reached.

In the overseas fisheries Bess investigated, jurisdictions had taken varying approaches to lift vulnerable fisheries back into sustainability, but all had recreational fishing licences for residents and licences with higher fees for non-residents in common, much like freshwater fishing licences in New Zealand.

Of the examples, Bess felt Western Australia’s management of its recreational fisheries was the most useful model for a way forward in New Zealand.

Unlike in Western Australia, New Zealand’s Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) doesn’t fund any initiatives that directly benefit recreational fishing, apart from a team of two staff tasked to engage with the recreational fishing sector, support the inshore fisheries management team, and work on recreational fishing issues.

Commercial fishers, on the other hand, in part directly fund fisheries management (including on behalf of recreational fishers) through the MPI’s cost-recovery levies, supplemented by tax payers, many of whom don’t fish.

Recreational fishing licences

Probably the most contentious issue raised by this report is licencing. The right to fish recreationally in New Zealand’s marine environment is one of the few remaining free-of-charge public goods available to everyone.

But, as the report points out, because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s without cost. Licensing, in line with a user-pays philosophy, is one way (and the best option the report argues) to partially fund fisheries management for the benefit of recreational fishers.

The sharp discrepancy between the management of recreational and commercial fisheries is driven by funding differences. The management of commercial fisheries is largely funded on a cost-recovery basis by quota holders.

Bess suggests the government is unlikely to invest further in recreational fisheries management without some reciprocal means of sharing the costs, if not the responsibilities, with the recreational fishing sector.

Presently MPI looks after those that make greater contributions to the export economy, and fund their own sectors on cost-recovery basis. That is, commercial fishers. By introducing a licence system, and then utilising the funds generated for fisheries management, the recreational sector will be in a much better position, says Bess.

How much?

The report has several funding recommendations for managing recreational fishing, including collecting the excise duty on petrol used in boats, which would then be utilised to benefit boat users, including recreational fishers.

Other options include individual contributions (licence fees) similar to those already charged for freshwater game fisheries (trout and salmon). The fees suggested are relatively modest ($10 per year, $20 for tourists) and may be adjusted or discarded altogether if the excise option proves workable.

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As part of the discussion around individual contributions, there’s a whole lot more around the ability to gift funds, even by non-fishers, via a ‘koha card’ scheme.

The third licencing option from the Initiative calls for separate boat and land-based licences, which includes a registration system licencing the boat, not the individual fisher. The report is suggesting a fee of $20, but the mechanism for registering and collecting fees (as with all of the recommendations) is complex.

This proposal seems to advocate selective boat licencing (power boats), something the Kiwi boating public has resisted for many years. It also doesn’t appear to include people who fish from non-powered vessels, such as yachts and kayaks, or from shore.

Causing a flap

This report has already caused quite a flap within the recreational fishing fraternity, re-opening the licencing debate.

As a rec fisher, I am somewhat suspicious of the motives behind it, since these reports were largely funded by the commercial fishing industry. However, Bess and his team do address some real issues, namely: a growing population placing increased pressure on shared resources; the inability of recreational fishing interests to take a meaningful part in fisheries management due to lack of funding; and the way the commercial-fishing industry has hijacked MPI’s fisheries management.

The WA model

Bess led a group of interested New Zealand fisheries stakeholders, including non-commercial fishers, to Western Australia (WA) to learn from that state’s collaborative management practices.

In WA, Recfishwest, the peak non-governmental representative body for recreational fishers, receives funds from the Minister of Fisheries, drawn from the proceeds of recreational fishing licence fees, along with additional funding. Licence fees are reserved entirely in the Recreational Fishing Account for recreational fisheries management in WA.

Funds within this account are set aside for specific purposes, including recreational fisheries management, research, education and compliance. A quarter of recreational fishing licence fees is allocated to the Recreational Fishing Initiatives Fund each year.

Special projects encompass: habitat restoration and enhancement, including artificial reefs and fish-aggregating devices; development of young leaders within the recreational fishing sector; construction of recreational fishing and crabbing platforms, including full disabled access; restocking efforts; re-establishing a recreational prawn fishery; and projects that increase community participation in fisheries.

GIVE THEM BACK TO US

Whether the New Zealand public’s fishing rights are less well defined than the rights of the commercial fishing industry is, I think, debatable.

LegaSea would argue that non-commercial (public) fishing rights for shared fisheries are very well defined under the Fisheries Act, which states non-commercial fishers shall ‘be allowed for’ before the commercial catch is allowed by the minister.

In a shared fishery, it is entirely possible under the Fisheries Act that an MPI minister could legally allocate the allowable catch to firstly, Maori Customary, and then ‘Other Mortality’, with the balance going to recreational fishers. The outcome of the Kahawai Legal Challenge, mounted a few years ago by a coalition of recreational fishing groups, showed that this was possible.

Many rec fishing advocates also make the point that fishing companies access wild fish for free. They were given the quota (access to the fishery) for nothing, but can sell it on as property.

The public pays for the management of fish stocks through their taxes, but MPI manages the fishery largely for the benefit of fishing companies, which pay levies to part-fund MPI’s fisheries management.

Fishing companies not only profit from a public resource; recreational fishers also blame them for seriously depleting many fish stocks.

Another option for managing inshore fisheries currently shared with commercial-fishing companies is to give them back to the New Zealand public, according to Northland Regional Councillor Mike Finlayson, commenting on the New Zealand Initiative’s report for an article in the Northland Age.

He places the blame for diminishing fish stocks squarely at the feet of the fishing industry.

“Trying to imply that it is your average Joe who goes out to catch a feed for the family who is to blame is beyond ridiculous. It was Piggy Muldoon’s enthusiasm for ‘thinking big’ on everything that wrecked our inshore fisheries. Down at Onehunga Wharf there were dozens of fishing boats called San this, that and the other, that thrashed our coast and collapsed the fisheries,” he said.

Finlayson reckons our right to catch a decent feed has been stolen by our own government and given away to private interests. Those interests thrash the fisheries to death, then want to blame recreational fishers and make them get a licence and pay for it.

To mitigate pressure on our inshore fisheries, give them back to us, he says. Finlayson wants the first 8km of coastal waters for public use (commercial fishers can have the remaining 313km out to the edge of the economic zone) and would ban trawling inside the inshore fishery zone (he doesn’t say whether he would ban commercial fishing altogether).

“Drawing an 8km line around our coast means that every harbour in Northland would belong to the people; every island would have a sanctuary around it. Locals could get together and decide how to manage ‘their’ fishery,” he says.

   This article is reproduced with permission of   
New Zealand Fishing News

February 2018 - Sam Mossman
Re-publishing elsewhere is prohibited

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