A council ban that outran the fix
When the Waikato Regional Council notified a coastal management plan in October 2025 that would close most of the Coromandel coast to bottom trawling, Danish seine and dredging, it forced a question the government had been dodging for years. The plan exploited a precedent from the Motiti Protection Area case, which established that regional councils could use RMA powers to restrict fishing for marine protection purposes.
Fisheries Minister Shane Jones was blunt: “I’m astounded that RMA powers are being manipulated to give anti-development regional council bureaucracies power over the fishing industry.” Seafood NZ CEO Lisa Futschek said the council had “strayed beyond its jurisdiction” and called for law changes to keep fisheries management under the Fisheries Act.
The industry’s concern was not abstract. Fishing company head Roger Rawlinson warned that displacing effort from closed areas would concentrate pressure elsewhere, “creating areas of overfishing because we’re not allowed in the now-closed areas.” By November, Seafood NZ had filed its appeal, with GM Inshore Fisheries Tiff Bock noting that the Fisheries Act process includes statutory consultation requirements that “simply do not apply” when a council acts through the RMA.
The veto that arrived too late
The government’s legislative response looked decisive on paper. The Resource Management (Consenting and Other System Changes) Amendment Act 2025 introduced a Director-General of MPI veto: if a proposed council rule would have an undue adverse effect on fishing, the Director-General can block it from being notified.
Except the amendments do not apply to council plans already notified at enactment or currently operative. The Waikato plan was notified on 14 October 2025, potentially before or around the time these amendments took effect. The very plan that triggered the government’s response may be immune to the government’s fix. The appeal proceeds under the old legal framework.
The Environmental Defence Society’s Shay Schlaepfer called the amendments “a direct attack on the ability of local communities to safeguard their coastal environments” and criticised the MPI concurrence requirement as “onerous procedural hoops.” That framing matters because it signals the legal challenge to these provisions has barely started.
The compensation trap in the replacement legislation
Beyond the 2025 patch, the government’s longer-term RMA replacement introduces a mechanism that could reshape everything. Under the proposed Planning Act and Natural Environment Act, councils that impose protections beyond national minimums must compensate affected landowners or consent-holders through cash, rates relief, or bonus development rights.
For the seafood industry, this sounds like relief from Waikato-style bans. But EDS Reform Director Dr Greg Severinsen warns the practical effect is paralysis, not predictability: “Councils won’t be able to afford it, especially under rates caps. And it will create an entirely new takings industry for lawyers.” New Zealand tried a similar compensation regime under the Town and County Planning Act 1926. It was subsequently abandoned as unworkable.
The Fisheries Bill lost its teeth before it started
Running in parallel is the Fisheries Amendment Bill, which Jones framed as cutting red tape in a billion-dollar export sector. Its most controversial provision, scrapping minimum size limits for commercial species including snapper, kingfish and tarakihi, was withdrawn after 25,000 submissions in opposition via Legasea’s template. Legasea’s Sam Woolford put it plainly: “The seafood sector cannot take baby fish out of the environment that have not had a chance to spawn and expect there to be a fish population in the future.”
Seafood NZ called for a fact-based discussion, signalling it wants the bill’s remaining provisions separated from the political noise. But what remains, multi-year catch limits and restrictions on court challenges, faces its own scrutiny.
Investment certainty is the real casualty
With 78 local councils each holding discretion over resource consenting, the jurisdictional mess is not theoretical. Operators making capital decisions on vessels, processing plant or quota face a legal timeline measured in years, running through the Environment Court, the High Court and potentially the Court of Appeal.
Seafood NZ’s Bock calls the Waikato plan a “DIY fisheries management plan” that bypassed the people most affected. The industry’s position is the clearest articulation of the business risk: “We need certainty about how our fisheries are managed based on evidence.”
The word doing the work there is “certainty.” Three reform processes in, the government has produced a veto that does not apply to the problem that triggered it, a compensation regime that a century of evidence suggests will not work, and a fisheries bill that lost its headline provision before select committee. For an export sector that needs to plan in decades, not parliamentary terms, that is not reform. It is noise.
Sources
- Newsroom: Council to notify massive Coromandel bottom trawl ban, picking fight with Govt (2025-10-10)
- Newsroom: Fishing industry to appeal Coromandel trawl ban (2025-11-13)
- Ministry for the Environment: Amendments to the RMA – Fisheries Act Interface (2025-08-20)
- EDS: Government undermines regional powers to protect coastal biodiversity (2025)
- Newsroom: New RMA’s ‘chilling effect’ on councils threatened with court action (2025-04-30)
- EDS: RMA replacement bills introduced – fixes are needed (2025)
- Newsroom: Fisheries overhaul gets rid of minimum size limits for industry (2026-03-19)
- Newsroom: Fisheries rule changes buried deep in contentious bill (2026-03-30)
- Seafood NZ: The RMA is not OK
- Seafood NZ: Calls for fact-based discussion on Fisheries Amendment Bill (2026-03-23)
- Ministry for the Environment: Patterns in Resource Management Act Implementation