Council of Outdoor Recreation Associations of NZ Marine Reserves no Panacea for mismanaged Fisheries.

Marine Reserves are no solution to New Zealand's mismanaged and depleted sea fisheries says the Council of Outdoor Recreation Associations of New Zealand (CORANZ).

CORANZ co-chairman Tony Orman of Marlborough said the preoccupation of the Ministers of Conservation and Fisheries and the Department of Conservation aided by the forthright green lobby dangerously ignored that sea fisheries had been run on a "boom and bust" approach for the last half century.

"Marine reserves have their place but they're the small picture. The big picture is the fishery in total," he said. Mr Orman said the Minister of Fisheries should be calling his ministry to heel and telling them to manage the fishery in the public interest instead of for powerful corporate companies often in collusion with foreign interests.

"There's a very strong argument for a full public enquiry into New Zealand's fisheries mismanagement that stretches from the crayfish and oyster crashes of the 1950s and 1960s to todays depleted fish species collapses and the demise of the orange roughy fishery."
Mr Orman cited the Marlborough snapper fishery and kahawai fisheries as "thrashed to low levels."

In addition the minister and the ministry had been "deliberately dilly dallying" over enshrining the public's right to go recreational fishing for food he said.

"Overall the whole situation has been a shambles, a raiding of a public resource, under successive ministers over the decades and mosty recently, National's John Luxton and now Labour's Pete Hodgson," said Mr Orman.

Contact: Tony Orman, R D 3, Blenheim. Ph/Fax (03) 570 5888