Alan L wrote: The competence of MPI and their data is highly questionable...

Craig, reporting of recreational catch has never been successfully done overseas to get a true representation of what has been caught. The surveys done of recreational catch in NZ and the methodology has been peer reviewed by internationally recognized experts and has been found to be world class, FNZ accept it as a very good representation of recreational catch. The only people who don't accept the results are the commercial quota owners. All they are interested in is a narrative of shifting the focus off them and say look over there, nothing to see here. with us. The good old smoke screen ploy. It is very interesting that you say recreational catch should be recorded to the same level as commercial, well cameras on commercial boats have clearly shown that commercial are massively under reporting all sorts of things and now they are being found out.

It is extremely difficult to have a meaningful discussion on facebook about anything without halfwits taking it over and it quickly degenerates. I sometimes wonder if the people doing this are doing it purposely to kill a conversation lest it actually has some good reasoned arguments which may change people's ideas. 

It's all well and good pointing fingers between commercial and recreational catch but it's hard to take commercial seriously when after only reviewing a third of the footage from the cameras on boats, actual catch was up to 3.5 times more than what was recorded, plus significantly more sea bird and dolphin captures than recorded.

I agree more needs to be done to accurately measure recreational take, but it begs the question. What's the point? When the fishiries ministers repetitively make dicisions that go against the science.

I can tell you for sure it wasn't recreational catch that has caused the complete closure of the scallop fishiries in SNA1.