Maoris grapple with fish quotas

Press, 11 October 1988, Page 3

Maoris grapple with fish quotas

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Wellington

Setting up a Maori Fisheries Corporation to receive fish quotas from the Government and allocate them among the Maori tribes is not proving easy.

The Maori hui held at Parliament on September 30 agreed to set up a corporation and began discussions on how it should work. The formula for allocating quotas between tribes was defined in a Ngai Tahu submission to the hui as being “in proportion to the total commercial fishery resource in the waters off their coastal boundaries both inshore and offshore.” That will pose particular problems off the coast of the northern North Island where tribes are tightly packed and boundaries are in contention. There was general agreement at the hui that quotas should be received from the Government and held in trust, the tribes being the beneficiaries of that trust as the respec-

tive Treaty of Waitangi partners with the Crown. Discussions on the form this should take are being held by the tribes on their maraes. There was a mood at the hui that where there were inter-tribal boundary disputes, quotas should remain unallocated within the trust pending the settlement of disputes over affected waters. The hui was told that there was a great deal of allocated domestic quotas going uncaught in both the inshore and deep-sea fisheries. There was a wide variation in the inshore fishery between the amount of a species caught as a percentage of the total quota. For example, the elephant fish catch was 111 per cent and the paua

catch 100 per cent, while the red cod catch was 33 per cent and the blue warehou catch was 47 per cent. The over-all average was 64 per cent. For deep-sea species, the orange roughy catch was 96 per cent while the hoki catch was only 53 per cent, the over-all average being 63 per cent. Only 18 per cent of the amount caught of the 432,791 tonnes of domestic quotas was by New Zealand vessels. Only 11 per cent over all was caught by New Zealand vessels. Of the total inshore and deep-water domestic quotas of 490,637 tonnes, only 16 per cent of the quotas held was caught by New Zealand vessels. The hui was told that these Ministry of Fisheries statistics showed the

commercial fishing industry, as of August 31, 1988, was catching very little of the quotas held.

These figures are being used by the four Maori negotiators on Maori fisheries claims to get the Government to relax its tight requirements for Maori quotas to be “substantially used” by Maoris, as defined in the Maori Fisheries Bill.

The bill gives Maoris unrestricted rights on the use of their quotas, including sale, but decrees that once sold these quotas no longer qualify as Maori quotas.

That has been objected to by the Maori negotiators on the ground that it puts Maoris in a less flexible commercial position than other fishermen.