These criteria were released in August 2001 in the Final Advice Paper from the Ministry to the Minister on the Fisheries Management Proposals dealt with in the IPP 2001. It was overlooked by option4 and others until we read references made to the "general criteria" throughout the IPP for 2002. When we asked for clarification we were directed back a year to the 2001 FAP where we found it under the section headed "Statutory Considerations and Consultation".

Why did we miss it then? Well we were entirely focused on the Ministerial Consultative Group (MCG) process which the Minister had initiated in March 2001. In fact the date the "Allocation of TAC between Stakeholders" paper was released was right in the middle of the MCG series of meeting that were occurring with the Minister and Ministry.

You will recall that the purpose of the MCG was to offer the Minister a "sounding board" on Ministry policy proposals. There was no reference whatsoever to this all important policy paper that the Ministry was preparing at that time and in fact was released to the Minister in the Ministries Final Advice Paper in September 2001. We feel aggrieved that there was no reference made to this paper during the MCG. We feel slightly foolish that we did not become aware of it until 10 months later. However, the experience has improved our understanding of how the Ministry operates.

Our next task is to research the background to this paper and offer some analysis of its content.

This paper is quite long - please allow up to 1 minute for download on a 56K modem

If you have Microsoft Word www.option4.co.nz/documents/stakeholders.doc (79Kb)

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