The cameras were working
Before on-board cameras arrived on New Zealand’s commercial fishing fleet, observer coverage of fishing events averaged just 5% per annum. The government spent $68 million fixing that. By mid-2025, cameras were installed on roughly 220 vessels, covering approximately 85% of total inshore finfish catch by volume and monitoring over 64,000 fishing events. MPI’s own consultation document noted improved accuracy in fisher reporting and better disclosure of discards and protected species interactions.
The programme was delivering exactly what it was designed to deliver. Then the Fisheries Amendment Bill arrived.
What the bill actually does
Introduced on 18 March 2026, the bill proposes to exempt all on-board camera footage from Official Information Act requests. It creates a $50,000 fine for anyone who leaks that footage, five times the $10,000 maximum the Ministry of Justice recommended. It limits judicial review of catch-limit decisions to 20 working days. And it allows multi-year catch limit decisions stretching up to five years.
Fisheries Minister Shane Jones has not been subtle about his intentions. On the leak penalty, he said: ‘I don’t want anyone doubting that to deliberately release data designed to demonise and stigmatise the commercial fishing industry, I regard that as a capital crime.’ He described opposing judicial reviews as ‘a carnival of vexatious, frivolous litigation.’
Jones is a former Sealord chairman who declared fishing industry donations for the 2023 election. That context matters.
His own officials said this was too far
In 2025, Cabinet documents showed MPI preferred a three-month deadline for judicial review of catch-limit decisions and six months for other sustainability decisions. The regulatory impact statement warned the 20-day limit ‘could be viewed by fisheries stakeholders as restricting the right to judicial review’ and ‘might not allow for a comprehensive gathering and analysis of all relevant information.’
More telling still, the same document admitted judicial reviews had been ‘resulting in better outcomes.’ The oversight mechanism the minister wanted to curtail was doing exactly what oversight mechanisms are supposed to do.
Environmental Law Initiative director Matt Hall noted in 2025 that 20 days was ‘simply not enough time’, pointing out that OIA responses from the ministry regularly exceeded statutory timeframes. You cannot meaningfully challenge a decision if you cannot get the information behind it.
The Ombudsman draws the line
The Ministry of Justice found no Bill of Rights infringements. But Chief Ombudsman John Allen, in a letter dated 17 March 2026, stressed that existing obligations of confidence would ‘generally apply’ to camera footage while insisting ‘each case must be assessed on its own merits.’ The existing OIA framework already gave agencies power to withhold footage where disclosure would breach confidence or harm the public interest. The Ombudsman was not endorsing a blanket legislative exemption. He was signalling the bill goes further than necessary.
That intervention changes the character of this story. When the Chief Ombudsman questions a transparency measure in a $1.6 billion export sector, it stops being a fishing dispute and becomes a governance problem.
The industry’s argument has a hole in it
In 2025, Seafood NZ CEO Lisa Futschek argued cameras should be ‘a tool for verification, not vilification’, citing an example where a reported 950% increase in kingfish discards actually represented 7.7kg per fishing event. The concern about decontextualised footage is legitimate.
But a $50,000 fine and a blanket OIA exemption is a sledgehammer for a context problem. LegaSea’s Sam Woolford asked the question the industry has not answered: ‘If we have a world-leading quota management system and we have nothing to hide, why are we being so secretive?’
Every regulated business should be watching
Here is the precedent being set. A well-organised industry with ministerial sympathies can lobby to exempt its compliance data from public scrutiny, impose criminal-level fines on whistleblowers, and compress judicial review to a window its own regulator said was unworkable. If this playbook succeeds in fisheries, there is nothing stopping it being run in agriculture, mining, or any other sector with the right connections.
Environmental Defence Society policy director Raewyn Peart warned in 2025 that restricting court access would produce ‘more, not less, legal action’. That prediction aligns with MPI’s own finding that reviews were improving outcomes.
The bill has attracted 25,000 public submissions via LegaSea’s template alone. Jones has already withdrawn a plan to scrap most minimum size limits after backlash. The camera and judicial review provisions remain. In an election year, the select committee process will reveal whether New Zealand’s accountability framework is robust enough to resist a minister determined to shield his industry from scrutiny, or whether regulatory capture simply works when nobody is looking.
Sources
- Newsroom: Hefty penalty for leaking commercial fishing footage (2026-03-19)
- Newsroom: Fisheries rule changes buried deep in contentious bill (2026-03-30)
- Newsroom: Fisheries minister’s constraint on court challenges ‘restrictive’ – officials (2025-08-27)
- Newsroom: Fishing industry nets changes to cameras, discards and quota restrictions (2025-08-06)
- MPI: Fisheries Cost Recovery Levies Annual Report 2023/24 (2024)
- MPI: Consultation – Cost Recovery for On-board Cameras from 2026/27 (2025-09)
- MPI: Overview of the rollout of on-board cameras on commercial fishing vessels (2024-02-09)
- Regulatory Impact Statement: Wider Rollout of On-board cameras (2025-07-17)