Analysis: Shane Jones has his claws out this week. First at Parliament’s question time, when he brought along a live crayfish given to him by a Kāi Tahu delegation. Then a couple of hours later at the Seafood NZ conference.
The first question the Fisheries Minister was asked seemed innocuous enough: would he consider delaying the his controversial amendments to the Fisheries Act until after the election, to avoid politicising issues like undersize fish and cameras on boats?
But it sent Jones into a rage. “Well, that sounds like a National Party voter,” he told the hundreds of delegates gathered at the Tākina convention centre in Wellington. “I obviously have been taken for granted by that wanker.”
He continued: “Folks, if you think you’ve got a better option with a better politician standing up for the commercial fishing industry, then you’re still hungover from last night.”
The so-called w**kers who vote for National aren’t the only demographic to attract the NZ First deputy leader’s ire. Through the afternoon, he singled out TV’s extreme fisherman Matt Watson and the recreational fishing lobby, environmentalists, wokes, young people and women.
Election strategy is usually about wooing as many voters as possible – but sometimes that’s done by delineating those seen as opposing your cause. And over many years, NZ First has proved itself adept at “othering” certain minorities – from immigrants to iwi groups, Chinese and Indians to Pasifika and Mexicans, transgender and non-binary people, women boxers and women rugby players….
Speaking to the conference, Jones rejected women’s sensibilities over his criticisms of “wokeness”.
”I do feel in New Zealand the pendulum has swung too far, and I do feel that there’s not enough of us in political life that are calling out the excessive spread of cancel culture, of revisionism, and I’m sorry, ladies, if I’m upsetting you using the word ‘woke culture’, but I do believe that.
“And I wanted to be that politician on behalf of my leader and the wee party I belong to, calling that out, and I accept that – even my wife says this to me – I accept that some of the language and some of the challenges I put out do go a tad too far. But there’s no one else in public life, maybe David Seymour, occasionally Winston, who’s doing it.”
Jones said he had a very modest upbringing near Kaitaia, up early to milk 70 or 80 cows. But he pulled himself up, went to Harvard University, had four kids, and came home with an enormous debt.
“So sadly, young people, I don’t have a lot of sympathy when you bitch and moan about your debt. I came home with a monstrous debt from America.”
He said neither he nor anybody else had any idea how many fish are being taken out of the ecosystem by recreational fishers, and he wants to change that.
“The moment we talk about reporting from that sector, then they hop on their Kawasakis and they start to bitch and moan, and they start to frighten all the politicians. Well, this is one politician they will not be frightening.
“And if you think for a moment that I will back down to all their threats, ‘we have 100,000, 300,000, 500,000, 700,000 voters, we will destroy your party’. Well, the more they shout and scream like that, have they not noticed that my leader is actually getting more popular?
“To you hard-nosed commercial people, please don’t imagine just by deploying woke rhetoric you’re going to defend your rights. You’ll wake up a little woke and all broke.”
After his speech, Jones identified several aspects of the Fisheries Amendment Bill that he would be negotiating with National MPs about: whether the penalty for leaking onboat camera footage would be $10,000 of the $50,000 he wants, his bid to require any court challenge to his catch allowance decisions to be filed with 20 days, changing the law to some species’ catch allowances can be set for up to five years, adding marlin to the quota management system and, most of all, being allowed to land and sell undersized fish.
He blamed the backlash against his changes, including the Prime Minister’s demand he back down on undersized fish, on the malign influence of social media.
“The National Party members on the Select Committee, they felt I went too far in terms of crimping access to the High Court, they’ve told me that,” he says.
“They also feel that access to video footage needs to be reconsidered in relation to people using it for legitimate purposes not being excessively penalised if an honest mistake is made. There’s also whether or not certain species should continue to be debated on a year by year basis, as opposed to being able to have the quota set over a longer period of time, and I just think a lot of that is excessively expensive, but hey, I’ve got to be pragmatic.
“But what really got out of control was this notion that I was murdering all the juvenile fish and enabling the industry to bring them back to shore and turn them into pet food and waste them, and then once that viral misinformation spread everywhere, it freaked out obviously all of the political parties. So my own leader said to me, ‘look, park that up’. The Prime Minister said, ‘Shane, that you’re going to have to reconsider that’ – and look, it just shows the power of social media.”
For a future Parliamentary term, if NZ First is returned to Government and he’s made fisheries minister again, he would like to set up a mechanism to measure and control the take by recreational fishers.
“We don’t have a mandate to extend the quota system to the recreational sector, but I really think that we need I need to find some recreational leaders who want to engage rationally, and they must cease immediately from threatening to terminate the commercial inshore sector, and they must cease immediately from threatening to unravel the Maori fisheries settlement.”
He told Newsroom that he was going to find out who the “idiot” was who asked him about delaying the contentious bill until after the election.
Did he regret calling the person a “wanker”?
“I’m at an industry conference where I’m the champion of the industry, and someone conceives a question like that designed to embarrass me. I’ve got no time for people like that.”
Seafood industry backs minister
Seafood NZ chief executive Lisa Futschek says the industry supports most of the proposed law changes, including landing and counting undersized fish rather than throwing them back, and setting some species’ catch allowances for up to five years.
But Seafood NZ doesn’t think constraining court challenges to 20 days, when the minister decides catch allowances, is justifiable.
His $50,000 fine for those who inadvertently share onboat camera footage is too high, she says, but it’s right that access to the footage should be excluded from the Official Information Act.
“There is a range of reasons why it’s just simply inappropriate for that raw footage to be available,” Futschek says. “Privacy is one of those reasons, and remembering, of course, that this is not just a workplace, it is also for some extended periods of time, the home of our fishes at sea.
“There are also commercial in-confidence considerations – IP about where our fishers are fishing, the kind of gear, technologies and innovations that they are using.
“But also, there’s another quite unfortunate element to that, and that is the fact that a number of our detractors will use that footage out of context in a way that is purposefully trying to highlight behaviours on social media and in other areas that are just verging on bullying and very, very dangerous behaviours for guys and girls that are out there minding their own business and doing a fantastic professional job of what they do.”
Asked if the industry’s detractors (by which she means environmental groups) risked being penalised for using the footage in context, in a legitimate manner to raise awareness of bad practices, she said that was the job of the regulator.
“Our regulator reviews the camera footage, it verifies that what our fishes are reporting by their electronic reporting mechanisms is accurate, and so we now have access to verifiable data, which again we can use to really great purpose in terms of improving the speed with which we make decisions around our sustainable fisheries management.”
But who watches the watchdog? “It’s not just the regulator, but there are 17 other government agencies that have access to that footage as required,” she replies.
