New Zealand’s Exclusive Economic Zone covers about 4 million square kilometres, and the country manages 642 fish stocks. Around 350 are fished regularly, and they vary hugely in their biology and importance.

Shane Jones, the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries, ultimately makes decisions such as how much fish can be caught, and the advice he does – or doesn’t – follow comes from Fisheries New Zealand, part of the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI). Fisheries New Zealand informed Jones that there was one general process for setting catch limits, but with limited resources, only 20 to 30 stocks go through the sustainability-setting process each year. It argued that the system was too slow to respond when changes were needed, whether that be to increase catches when stocks were abundant, or reduce them when sustainability risks emerged.

Jones set out the Government’s position when consultation opened in February 2025. “Sustainability will always be the bottom line in fisheries management,” he wrote, and he wanted catch limits to rise more quickly when stocks were doing well and fall more quickly when they were not.

With this Bill, the Minister could set catch limits several years in advance or approve what the Bill calls a “management procedure”, a set of rules agreed in advance that would allow MPI’s chief executive to adjust them later without starting the whole process again. That wouldn’t mean a catch limit was fixed regardless of what happened, as monitoring would continue and the Minister could change course if new information changed the picture.

The overall goal was to reduce how often the system had to restart, which would give Fisheries New Zealand more room to deal with other stocks, and fishing businesses more certainty about what they could catch. The Bill is still before Parliament, although Jones said in June that it wouldn’t be progressed before the next election.

Who had access?

In March 2026, a Greenpeace Aotearoa campaigner called Jones “the seafood industry’s puppet” and wrote that he was promising “commercial fishing donors the world” to fund his campaign for re-election. Jones told Radio New Zealand in 2024 that his views on the importance of the fishing industry predated both his political career and any money he received. He called suggestions that donations had tainted his judgement “factually incorrect but politically predictable”.

When I started looking at this story, I expected a story about political influence. Industry proposals were taken into the policy process, but what I didn’t find – in the Cabinet papers, ministerial briefings, Forum records and correspondence I reviewed – was anything linking a donation to one of those requests and then to a ministerial decision. Indeed, those records can show how proposals moved through government, but they aren’t, on their own, a record of political donations.

Jones set up the Seafood Industry Forum in February 2024, bringing senior figures from commercial fishing together with Fisheries New Zealand, with Te Ohu Kaimoana, which represents collective Māori fisheries settlement interests, also represented. Alastair Cameron, Director of Primary Sector Policy at MPI, told me the Forum had been asked to “help identify opportunities to grow the commercial fisheries sector”, while a subgroup was established to “help develop and test options” addressing operational and regulatory cost pressures.

The subgroup was meant to meet every one or two weeks, and its terms said it had “no decision-making authority” while giving it a role in developing and testing operational, regulatory and legislative options. Lisa Futschek, chief executive of Seafood New Zealand, which represents the country’s commercial fishing sector, told me that “overall, industry involvement helped inform the development of proposals”, but “it did not determine the outcome”. By September 2024, a Forum document was referring to a “potential Fisheries Amendment Bill”, while other agendas show the subgroup working on changes to catch limit setting and other parts of the fisheries system.

I wanted to know who else had been given any access comparable to this before the public consultation began. Cameron told me that from September 2024 MPI had also engaged with organisations representing iwi/Māori interests, recreational fishers, environmental groups and other government agencies on proposals ahead of public consultation. Jamie Fowler of WWF New Zealand told me that chief executives from the major environmental NGOs were given an initial update in early November 2024, and WWF was then invited to a one-hour pre-briefing later that month, where officials shared high-level proposals and tested options. WWF gave feedback but said it was not invited to any further workshops, working groups or meetings before public consultation opened.

Chelsea McGaw of Forest & Bird, one of New Zealand’s most prominent environmental organisations, told me it wasn’t given a formal role in developing the reforms. She said Forum access would have provided “more definitive information”, while what it received was “piecemeal, high-level” and generally lacked dates or detail. The Environmental Law Initiative (ELI), a public interest environmental law group that has brought fisheries cases through the courts, told me it couldn’t find any record of being consulted on the Bill or possible changes in this area.

Twenty working days

If you want to ask a court whether a decision – such as a catch limit – was made lawfully, judicial review is the process for asking. One such case involves the New Zealand rock lobster, which eats kina, a type of sea urchin, while kina eat kelp. Off Northland’s east coast, rock lobster numbers fell, kina multiplied and large areas of kelp forest disappeared, leaving kina barrens that are less biologically diverse than the kelp forests they replace.

In November 2022, the High Court found two catch decisions made by the then Oceans and Fisheries Minister, David Parker, unlawful, and ordered the 2022 decision to be reconsidered. His successor, Stuart Nash, signed the replacement decision in March 2023, and in February 2025 that decision was found unlawful too. Officials had given Nash four options, and the judge in the 2025 case found none was based on the best available information and none could achieve the objective Nash had set himself.

Geography was part of the problem, because on the east coast rock lobster numbers had fallen so low that they weren’t keeping kina under control; commercial fishing had largely left that side of the fishery. Meanwhile, on the west coast, where more than 90 per cent of the commercial catch was being taken at the time, the same problem hadn’t developed. A cut applied across the whole fishery would therefore fall mainly on commercial fishers in the west, away from the area where rock lobster numbers most needed to recover. The judge found that the option Nash chose damaged the interests of commercial operators without delivering any environmental benefit. The Minister has appealed parts of that judgment and, according to ELI, the Court of Appeal heard the appeal on 16 and 17 September 2026. 

I wanted to know what bringing one of those cases actually involved, and Reto Blattner of ELI told me they began by reviewing Parker’s March 2021 decision to leave Northland’s rock lobster catch limit at 203 tonnes before filing proceedings around 12 November that year. “There was a lot of work during that period of 7 months-ish,” he said, including building relationships with local Māori kinship groups, working with experts and having barristers review the claim. When Parker set the following year’s limit in March 2022, reducing it to 193 tonnes, ELI added that decision to the case.

I then put that period beside 20 working days. The court case wouldn’t have to be finished in 20 working days, but the challenge would have to be filed by then, and before that you need to know there is a challenge to be made, gather the information, and get enough of a case together to file it. That can include asking the government for the documents behind a decision, and through experience an Official Information Act (OIA) request can itself take up to 20 working days for a final decision, and sometimes longer, while the challenge to Nash’s replacement was filed five months after his decision.

Jones preferred a maximum of 20 working days, and at the Bill’s first reading on 31 March 2026 he said fisheries litigation should take place within “manageable guardrails” and not become a “free-for-all”. The 20 working day proposal, according to officials’ own analysis in the Regulatory Impact Statement, came after the February to April 2025 public consultation had concluded, and the same statement records MPI warning that 20 working days might not allow comprehensive gathering and analysis of the relevant information; MPI officials had previously recommended three months for decisions about catch limits and six months for other sustainability measures.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment also recommended three months for decisions about catch limits, while Seafood New Zealand said it had neither proposed nor advocated for 20 working days and was unaware of another industry participant that had. It called the period too restrictive and warned it could push people into filing protective cases before they knew whether they had one. 

The Minister’s final policy recommendations, including 20 working days, were subsequently agreed by Cabinet, and anyone needing more time would have to apply to the High Court for an extension within those same 20 working days.

The cameras

In Fisheries New Zealand’s update for April to June 2026, cameras were operating on 224 commercial fishing vessels, with the footage used to check what fishers report catching and returning to the sea. 

Back in 2012, MPI put cameras on six commercial set net fishing vessels as part of a pilot looking at Hector’s dolphin captures. Hector’s dolphins are found only in New Zealand and are classified as Nationally Vulnerable, and when the footage was reviewed, it showed something the official record didn’t: two Hector’s dolphins being caught, with only one of those captures logged as required.

That history wouldn’t change under the Bill, as fishers would still report their catch and Fisheries New Zealand would still use cameras to check those reports, but what would change is one route available to people outside Fisheries New Zealand who want access to camera footage. As it stands, camera footage can be requested under the OIA, which does not mean it will be released because MPI can refuse, but it needs to explain why, and the person asking can ask the Ombudsman to review that decision.

The Fisheries Amendment Bill would remove camera recordings from that process altogether. Proposed section 227H says: “Nothing in the Official Information Act 1982 applies to camera recordings.” Footage could still be released in specific circumstances, but the OIA route of request and review would close.

The Bill would also create three offences around how camera recordings are disclosed and passed on, each carrying a maximum fine of NZ$50,000. The Ministry of Justice advised that NZ$5,000 to NZ$10,000 would be more appropriate, while MPI had initially proposed NZ$10,000, but Jones sought the NZ$50,000 maximum; Seafood New Zealand said that figure may be excessive.

The Government says the footage “poses significant privacy and commercial sensitivity concerns for fishers” and should be held securely and used only for limited purposes, but the Privacy Commissioner separately told MPI that the case for an exemption on privacy grounds hadn’t been made. Futschek told me that “the question for us has always been what additional public benefit is achieved through access to the footage itself”, while Chief Ombudsman John Allen said the change was not justified because the OIA already provides protections for information that should not be released, warning that the measures risked “undermining the OIA, and lowering trust and confidence in both the fishing industry and in government.”

Where the time comes from

The 20 working day judicial review limit and the camera offence and penalty provisions were added after public consultation had closed, and at the Ministry for Regulation’s request, Cabinet was told the proposals “do not meet Cabinet’s impact analysis requirements”. Cuwan van der Wat at the Ministry for Regulation told me its Regulatory Impact Analysis team only became aware of the proposals in late July 2025, when MPI sought advice on how to proceed because there was not enough time to prepare the required analysis. A later Supplementary Analysis Report covering the camera offence and penalty provisions was completed before the Bill was introduced and assessed as partially meeting the quality criteria because of the lack of consultation, while Van der Wat said: “Satisfying the SAR requirement does not negate the previous instance of non-compliance.”

I also asked where the 20 working days had come from. MPI didn’t identify who first proposed it, Seafood New Zealand said it had neither proposed nor advocated for it, and Jones’s office didn’t answer that question before my deadline.

Through the evidence available and the conversations I’ve had, it’s clear to me that Fisheries New Zealand is stretched. It can’t review everything every year, and things like judicial reviews take time and money, so I can understand why a government would want to make parts of the system quicker. If you’ve got limited staff, limited money and hundreds of stocks to manage, the attraction of speeding things up is obvious; what I struggle with is how they are doing it.

Industry had a regular place inside the development of these reforms before the public consultation, while the environmental groups I spoke to described briefings and limited pre-consultation engagement rather than a recurring role comparable to the Forum and its subgroup. Where Jones’s own preferences show, the picture gets even more complicated, because on the 20 working days he went further than Seafood New Zealand wanted and further than officials had recommended, while the same happened with the camera penalty, with Jones seeking NZ$50,000 after lower figures had been recommended.

Sometimes delay really is a waste of time, but sometimes it is there for a reason.

I think that is what I am left with: if you need to make the system quicker, how do you decide which delays are getting in the way and which ones are stopping you from getting it wrong?

This is a special feature written for Oceanographic by Luke McMillan.