ACT supports marine protection areas but calls for consistent compensation

Press release: ACT New Zealand
January 12, 2015. 1:05pm

ACT Leader David Seymour welcomes the Government’s proposal to pass a marine protection Act, with some reservations.

“Recreational and commercial fishers alike know we don’t have the abundance of fisheries available to generations past. We need to do better at conserving fish and their habitats while giving mineral and fishery investors certainty.

“For too long we’ve had an ad hoc approach that is overly politicised and uncertain for investors.

“In fishing and mineral exploration, we’ve seen specific operators take a loss that is large to them but ignored by the Government. These are real people with livelihoods. It’s not good enough to say to those who work and invest ‘we’re big, you’re small, you lose, too bad.’

“We need a clear process that asks: What is the conservation objective, who benefits, who loses, and who should compensate whom when there are losses? The public should be willing to pay for conservations benefits, rather than gutting operators who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“The proposal gets this right in some areas then stops half way.

“Compensating commercial fishers who lose out when a Recreational Fishing Park reduces their catch is a very positive step. However the refusal to compensate when Species Specific Reserves, Seabed Reserves, and Marine Reserves are formed is not only wrong, but strange now that the Government has opened up to the compensation principle for one type of reserve.

“ACT has long championed proper recognition of property rights and compensation for regulatory takings, and this proposal is a move in the right direction but stops too early.

“A second area of difficulty is the desire to create further special positions for Maori. The Government needs to explain why it believes you might have better or worse insight into resource management and marine biology depending on who your great grandparents were.

“ACT intends to support this initiative while pushing the Government to implement a transparent framework to compensate regulatory takings.”

ENDS

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