Fishing is a criminal industry. Fishers routinely lie about catch sizes, illegally dump bycatch, and cover up the murder of protected species. After a long campaign by NGOs in the 2010s, the Ardern government was finally dragged (kicking and screaming, against the wishes of two corrupt fisheries ministers) into putting cameras on boats to ensure criminal behaviour could be monitored and deterred. The fishing industry felt that this was unjust, and immediately began lobbying and bribing to have the footage declared a state secret, so it could never be used by NGOs to hold them to account. And they've got what they wanted. The new Fisheries Amendment Bill, introduced today, includes one of the most draconian secrecy clauses I have ever seen, with protections exceeding those given to classified security information.
First up, all fisheries camera recordings are declared exempt from the Official Information Act. But that's not enough for the fishing industry. There is also a clause that they cannot be disclosed outside the ministry, except to certain agencies or for certain purposes. Any other disclosure, or disclosure by anyone it has been lawfully passed on to, is a criminal offence, with a penalty of a $50,000 fine. And naturally, there's no whistleblower exemption (so if a recording exposes serious wrongdoing, and the ministry refuses to act on it, reporting it to appropriate whistleblower authorities is a crime. Which is one way of the criminal industry preventing anyone bypassing its captive regulator...)
This information isn't a threat to national security. It doesn't endanger the maintenance of the law, or any any person's safety. Its not even commercially sensitive. If it was any of these things, the law wouldn't be necessary. Instead, its potential exposure - and the potential for the exposure of their crimes, and for oversight of MPI to ensure they enforce the law properly - hurts the poor widdle fee-fees of the fishing industry. And that, to this regime, is "an important public purpose", proportionate to the consequent destruction of our BORA-affirmed right to free expression (which includes the right to receive information), and the least infringement on that right, and so a measure which can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
That is simply bullshit. Protecting a corrupt criminal industry and its captive regulator from public scrutiny is not an important public purpose. It is the very opposite of a public purpose. But its what happens when you put a man who has taken tens of thousands of dollars from that industry in the position of regulator.
This bill is simply an affront to democracy. It is an abuse of our human rights, an insult to transparency, and the product of corruption. It should not be allowed to pass.
