Healthy Oceans: fisheries reform, marine protection and a blue economy

The document’s core argument is that the Quota Management System manages one species at a time and misses the relationships between them. TOP would review fisheries management to allow ecosystem-based approaches, drawing on the Rescue Fish / Ika Rauora pathway developed by LegaSea and NZ Sport Fishing. Secure catch entitlements would stay, with ecosystem health requirements, bycatch limits and habitat protection added around them. Inshore and offshore fisheries would be managed differently.

Three thresholds move at once, so that stocks are “genuinely abundant rather than merely not collapsed”. The document notes the government reports 87 percent of stocks in good shape while recreational fishers report declining catch, and attributes the gap to these baselines being set too low.

• Management targets rise from 40 to 50 percent of virgin biomass
• Soft limits, below which a stock is considered depleted, rise from 20 to 40 percent
• Hard limits, which trigger immediate action, rise from 10 to 20 percent

Cameras would be rolled out to all commercial vessels over 8 metres, including deep-sea trawlers and scampi boats currently exempt under the present programme. Footage would be independently reviewed to verify catch reporting, monitor protected-species bycatch and feed stock assessments. Independent observer programmes would be kept alongside the cameras rather than replaced by them.

Bottom-contact methods — trawling, dredging and Danish seining — would be phased out on a timetable rather than banned at once, with transition assistance for affected operators to retrain, retool for other methods, or exit the industry.

• Immediate closures in the Hauraki Gulf and other inshore areas facing critical ecosystem decline
• A three-year phase-out on all seamounts, where the document says New Zealand is the only South Pacific nation still permitting the practice
• A five-year phase-out on other deep-sea features, including cold-water coral habitats

Commercial fishers already pay fisheries management costs under the Fisheries (Cost Recovery) Rules 2001, but the document says industry levies cover less than half of what monitoring, enforcement and administration actually cost. TOP would move to a beneficiary-pays system of resource rentals funding protected-area management, threatened species recovery, habitat restoration and research — set, it says, at a level that keeps the industry viable.

The expansion would be planned across Parliament rather than in one term, and designed using systematic conservation planning rather than drawn on a map. The Marine Reserves Act 1971 would be replaced, on the grounds that it offers only one tool — the full no-take reserve — through an adversarial process. Planning would be run in resourced partnership with iwi and hapū, commercial and recreational fishers, tourism operators, conservation groups, scientists and councils.

New Zealand would support regional blue corridors — linked protected areas across several nations’ waters following migratory whales, tuna, seabirds and turtles — and legislate to ratify the High Seas Treaty, the first legal framework for protecting international waters. All seabed mining applications in the territorial sea and EEZ would be opposed.

The economic case rests on the claim that between 60 and 90 percent of the commercial catch is exported with little processing. TOP would implement the nine concluding recommendations of the Sustainable Seas National Science Challenge and use the existing Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures fund to back value-added processing, premium branding and direct-to-consumer distribution.

• Seaweed farming, which sequesters carbon and absorbs excess nutrients
• Shellfish aquaculture, which filters water and creates habitat
• Land-based recirculating systems for finfish, avoiding biosecurity risk and marine pollution
• Integrated multi-trophic aquaculture combining species as natural ecosystems do

Wetlands, mangroves, seagrass meadows and salt marshes are treated as carbon sinks as well as fish nurseries, sequestering carbon at rates the document says far exceed terrestrial forests while buffering storm surge and sea-level rise. Investment covers wetland restoration, seagrass rebuilding and riparian planting to cut sediment and nutrient runoff before it reaches the sea, with a target of more than 10,000 hectares restored.

The policy would resource iwi and hapū to develop and implement marine management plans in their rohe moana, on the basis that many are already doing this work and filling gaps left by central government. It also commits to repealing the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) (Customary Marine Title) Amendment Act 2025.

Four agencies currently operate under different statutes with none accountable for the ocean as a whole. TOP would reinstate an Ocean Secretariat with statutory authority to give cross-agency advice, explicitly mandated to prioritise the interests of future generations, coordinating MPI, DOC, the EPA and regional councils. Alongside it: a national open-access ocean data platform pooling research, citizen science, commercial fishing data and monitoring, and 20-year regional ocean plans for the Hauraki Gulf, Tasman/Golden Bays, the Marlborough Sounds, Fiordland and the Subantarctic.