Documents released under the Official Information Act show Fisheries Minister Shane Jones pushed for a $50,000 maximum fine for anyone who leaks footage from on-board fishing boat cameras, five times the penalty available under the Privacy Act, after his own officials warned the figure was unreasonable and risked breaching the Bill of Rights.
The papers, reported on Thursday by RNZ, reveal a sustained internal argument between Jones and senior officials at the Ministry of Justice and the Office of the Ombudsman over how aggressively the new Fisheries Amendment Bill should police footage gathered from cameras now installed across the inshore commercial fleet.
The Ministry of Justice told Jones that a $50,000 cap was “unreasonable” and that a maximum penalty of between $5,000 and $10,000 would be a better fit, in line with the Privacy Act. The Office of the Ombudsman went further, saying it “strongly reiterated to MPI that it does not support exempting on-board camera footage from the Official Information Act” and warning the proposed exemptions could breach fundamental rights.
Jones overruled both pieces of advice. In a statement to RNZ he argued that the high penalty was needed as a deterrent, framing leaks as a threat to the fishing industry rather than a transparency issue. “It’s a figure that I chose to show how dangerous it is for people to manipulate, misuse information that I fear will be exploited to taint and undermine the fishing industry,” he said. He went on to say state surveillance information should not be given indiscriminately to people who would weaponise it, and added that he regarded a deliberate release of the footage as something close to “a capital crime”.
The footage in question comes from cameras introduced after years of campaigning by environmental groups and recreational fishers who say bycatch and dumping have been chronically under-reported. The cameras were rolled out across the inshore commercial fleet over the past two years and produce a continuous record of what is caught, what is kept and what is discarded. Until now, that record has been treated as an official document in the same way as any other ministry data, meaning it could in principle be released under the Official Information Act.
Under the bill, footage would sit in a special category exempt from OIA requests, with judicial review of decisions over its release limited to a 20-day window. Anyone who received the footage through legitimate channels and then passed it on, including journalists and campaigners, would face the new $50,000 maximum fine.
Green Party fisheries spokesperson Teanau Tuiono said the proposed penalty was “completely out of whack” with the rest of the regime, pointing out that a commercial fisher prosecuted for illegal trawling earlier this year was fined just $3,000. He told RNZ the proposed regime created a system where the punishment for telling the public what was happening at sea was more than ten times the punishment for the thing being exposed.
The Ministry of Justice advice also flagged that the combination of high fines, the OIA exemption and the truncated review period could amount to a disproportionate restriction on freedom of expression under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. The ministry asked Jones to reconsider, and the legal vetting process required under section 7 of the Bill of Rights Act will eventually have to be tested in front of Parliament.
Submissions on the Fisheries Amendment Bill closed on Wednesday. The bill has drawn unusually broad opposition, with submissions from environmental groups, recreational fishing organisations, media bodies and legal academics all pushing back on the camera footage clauses. Greenpeace Aotearoa called it the worst fisheries reform in a generation, while Legasea, the recreational fishing campaign group, has run a public awareness drive opposing the secrecy provisions.
Jones told the NZ Herald he was open to reducing the maximum fine through the select committee process, leaving the door ajar to a compromise that brings the figure closer to the $10,000 the Ministry of Justice originally suggested. He has not, however, signalled any movement on the OIA exemption, which is the part of the bill most experts and editors have flagged as constitutionally significant.
The political problem for the coalition is that the camera scheme was originally sold as a transparency win. Cameras went onto boats so the public could trust what was being caught and how it was being handled. A regime that then makes the resulting footage harder to obtain than almost any other government dataset, and that fines anyone who shares it more heavily than the Privacy Act fines a serious breach of personal data, is going to be a hard sell once the bill returns from select committee.
It also gives the opposition a reasonably tidy line going into the next election, given that the underlying camera programme was put in place under the previous Labour government and that several National MPs publicly supported it at the time. With the general election now five months away, voters comparing party positions on transparency, fisheries and the freedom of the press can use the Newswire voting tool to see where each party currently sits.
Whether the $50,000 figure survives committee scrutiny will be the first real test of how much of his original position Jones is prepared to defend in public.
What do you think, should fishing boat camera footage be available to the public under the Official Information Act, or is the minister right that it needs special protection? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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