Fishing is a criminal industry, with fishers routinely violating quotas, under-reporting bycatch, and engaging in fraud to profit from pillaging the ocean. To stop this criminality, the government has finally been dragged into putting cameras on fishing boats, so they can monitor what is caught and ensure fishers obey the law. But fisheries minister Shame Jones is a bought-and-paid-for tool of the fishing industry, so he's decided that the resulting footage will be exempted from the Official Information Act:
An overhaul of fisheries rules will allow greater catch limits when fish are abundant and stop on-board camera footage being made public.Which is exactly what burglars would say about security cameras, or police child-pornographers would say about their computer-use being audited. As for "vilification", if the fishing industry doesn't want to be vilified, they should not behave like villains. Simple.[...]
The move to exclude footage from the OIA was supported by Seafood New Zealand.
Chief executive Lisa Futschek said while it supported cameras on fishing vessels, they were a tool for "verification, not vilification".
"We accept that the regulator should have access to footage to ensure that we are doing what we say we do, but to enable members of the general public to see this footage is unfair," she said.
As for the policy, there's a strong legal argument against it - OIA exemptions violate the BORA-affirmed right to freedom of expression, so must be demonstrably justifiable in a free and democratic society. But "protecting fishers poor little fee-fees" isn't an "important public purpose", and that's before we even get to questions of proportionality. But beyond that, the reason we have cameras is because MPI (and its predecessor Fisheries NZ) were completely captured by the industry they were supposed to be regulating, and was ignoring its serious crimes, until their enforcement reports were leaked and OIA'd, creating public pressure for them to do their job properly. The lesson here is that transparency is vital to keep the regulator honest and prevent capture. All secrecy does is protect criminals. But then, that's precisely why the fishing industry and their $10,000 mouthpiece Jones support it.
