Environment – An election bottom line

Bottom trawling destroys everything on the sea floor and in the water column in the path above it. It’s indiscriminate. Its heavy weighted nets destroy whole ecosystems, and release stored carbon, contributing to climate change.

The fishing industry and some political parties say that’s OK. They argue that bottom trawling covers just a small area of New Zealand’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). About 68 per cent of fish by volume, caught in New Zealand’s waters, are captured via bottom trawling. It generates important revenue. It catches fish that Kiwis love to eat. It’s worth the trade off because most of the EEZ can’t be bottom trawled, and what is has been destroyed already.

New Zealand is one of the last countries in the world that still carries out bottom trawling on the high seas. Greenpeace has been campaigning against bottom trawling on the Chatham Rise for decades. There, ancient corals thousands of years old, are wrecked, hauled up, and discarded. Jono Ridler swam an epic 1,367 km across 90 days with over 468 hours in the water, to highlight the destructive impacts of bottom trawling. According to a Horizons Research poll, 78 per cent of New Zealanders want a ban on bottom trawling on the high seas.

But what is perhaps less well known, is that bottom trawling is allowed within two nautical miles from our mainland shore. Trawlers can plough up the seabed, catching everything in their wake just off the breakers. And bottom trawling is the worst killer of New Zealand’s own dolphins – Hector’s dolphins. By fishers’ own admissions, at least 16 Hector’s dolphins have been killed by bottom trawling since the roll-out of cameras on fishing boats in October 2023. They get caught in the nets and drown.

Māui and Hector’s dolphins are only found here in New Zealand, nowhere else in the world. They’re the world’s smallest dolphins, and are being wiped out by the fishing industry. They’re as Kiwi as the kiwi, but rarer. So imagine if a bulldozer repeatedly ploughed through kiwi habitat, killing them up and casting them aside. It would be outrageous. Bottom trawling killing Hector’s dolphins is outrageous too.

Political parties have been questioned about their bottom trawling policies already as we lead up to the November election. On one end of the spectrum are pro-industry advocates like Shane Jones. At the furthest other end of the spectrum, the Green and Opportunity parties call for an immediate ban in the most sensitive areas and a phase out everywhere else.

No Hector’s dolphin should be killed in a fishing net. All these deaths are avoidable. New Zealand’s dolphins are ours to save. Alive they are priceless. And a Westpac Bank report last year found marine tourism generates twice as much income and employs twice as many people as the fishing industry.

A ban on bottom trawling, to protect precious Hector’s dolphins, must be an election bottom line.