New Zealand Fisheries Act Amendments: A Threat to National Waters and Global Ocean Protection

The New Zealand Parliament is considering several short-sighted amendments to the National Fisheries Act 1996, with an initial select committee vote expected by 6 August. If passed, these sweeping changes would expand industry influence over fisheries management, bypass vital public oversight and undermine ocean protection goals. Environmental organisations worldwide, including the DSCC, are sounding the alarm and calling for the bill to be rejected entirely.

Karli Thomas, Aotearoa and South Pacific Seamounts Campaign Lead for the DSCC said: “The public mandate in Aotearoa is to protect our ocean and stop destructive practices like bottom trawling – not to lock communities out of decision-making, bury camera footage from fishing boats, and strip basic environmental safeguards.”

In an oral submission to the Primary Production Select Committee, DSCC Legal Advisor, Duncan Currie, outlined several key failures within the proposed amendments. These included: 

• Dismantling environmental guardrails – Proposed clauses reject ecosystem-based management in favour of an isolated, single-species approach. This regressive approach fundamentally contradicts modern marine science and New Zealand’s international obligations, treating fish as if they exist in a vacuum, separate from critical habitats, seabirds, marine mammals, corals, and sponges.
• Silencing public participation – Allowing the Minister to set multi-year catch limits on a rolling automatic loop, the proposed amendments strip away the annual opportunity for stakeholders to scrutinise outcomes, evaluate new data, or flag sudden population collapses.
• Eroding transparency– The amendments intentionally exempt on-board vessel camera footage from the Official Information Act (OIA), permitting disclosure only under highly restrictive conditions. Hiding this footage prevents external verification of bycatch rates, shielding commercial operations from public scrutiny.
• Incentivising destructive fishing– Proposed changes create perverse incentives for indiscriminate, high impact methods, including bottom trawling, over more selective, lower-impact fishing. 
• Restricting judicial review – A restrictive new clause seeks to compress the timeframe for filing judicial review proceedings to just 20 working days. This unrealistic window serves only to insulate ministerial decisionmaking from legal accountability.

The DSCC emphasises that these proposed rollbacks represent a severe regression from the fundamental environmental principles of the Fisheries Act, and are out of step with current global reviews into bottom fisheries management. 

We continue to call on New Zealand to transition away from high-seas bottom trawling on vulnerable seamounts by the end of 2026, securing total protection for these critical habitats by 2027.

With the select committee report looming, New Zealand has a pivotal opportunity to protect its global reputation- a vital opportunity the Government cannot afford to throw away.