Tuatua on a Northland beach. Photo / Linda Shepherd
Fisheries inspections at Northland’s Tauroa Peninsula have sparked questions about fisheries management in the area, including whether national catch limits there should be relaxed.
While a rāhui (ritual prohibition) remains on taking pāua at Tauroa, whānau can still gather other kaimoana (seafood), including tuatua, kina, snapper and kutai (mussels).
Fisheries New Zealand director of fisheries compliance Steve Ham said the recent inspections found a high level of compliance.
Local kaitiaki (guardian) Reuben Taipari, who voluntarily monitors fishing activities at Tauroa, especially Ahipara, says the inspections raised a question of whether rigid national catch limits should apply in areas where tikanga-based fisheries management has produced strong local outcomes.
Taipari said years of local stewardship, including rāhui and voluntary compliance, had helped restore and protect seafood stocks at the peninsula.
“Our pāua rāhui is going amazingly. Our tuatua are in great stocks – everything’s in great shape, and that’s got a lot to do with our own voluntary input into looking after our local environment,” Taipari said.
He acknowledged that while inspections were part of fisheries management, he believed some had been carried out in ways disconnected from the collaborative approach the community had worked hard to establish.
Taipari said it highlighted the need to revisit how limits were set and enforced when species are abundant.
Taipiri said some whānau gathering tuatua – which have a daily recreational limit of 150 per person at Tauroa and most parts of the country – have been repeatedly required to demonstrate compliance.
“I’ve known people who’ve had to count every single tuatua two, three times over just to get a specific count,” he said. “We’re just trying to get a feed here for our families.”
National catch limits did not always reflect regional variation or seasonal abundance, particularly in rural coastal areas where whānau relied heavily on kaimoana, he said.
“These environments are organic – they’re living,” he said. “The abundance here is totally different to Houhora or Whangaroa. And the people best placed to understand that are the people who live here.”
Taipari said the issue was heightened by cost‑of‑living pressures, with rising food and fuel costs meaning more families were turning to locally gathered seafood.
“There’s a lot of pressure on everybody with the economy now,” Taipari said. “People want to do the right thing – they want to respect both customary rules and the law – but they still need to feed their families.”
Speaking on behalf of the Ahipara Marae Takiwā – a collective of Roma, Wainui and Korou Kore marae – local kaumātua (elder) John Paitai said the takiwā (district) remained strongly supportive of working with Fisheries New Zealand to protect kaimoana.
“They’ve got the legislative teeth we don’t have, and we can’t advance the preservation of our kaimoana without that support.”
Paitai said Taipari raised legitimate points about applying limits to species that were currently plentiful.
“The tuatua are so abundant at the moment, they’re almost pushing each other out of the sand,” Paitai said. “You can see them lying up on the surface because there are so many of them.”
He believed asking people to repeatedly count tuatua was “a bit full-on”, particularly when the species was currently abundant.
Paitai agreed rising fuel costs and wider cost‑of‑living pressures meant families in rural Northland were increasingly reliant on kaimoana as a food source.
“So kaimoana becomes about putting food on the table,” he said.
Fisheries New Zealand said catch and legal size limits had been adjusted elsewhere, including seasonal rules for the Kāikōura pāua fishery and parts of the North Island where kina limits were increased and tuatua limits vary by region – 150 per day around most of the country but 50 in the Auckland-Coromandel area, to reflect harvest pressure in a highly populated area.
Any changes would require careful consideration for sustainability, Fisheries New Zealand’s Ham said.
“We regularly work with tangata whenua and local communities on local fisheries management issues and ensure their input is taken into account as part of the decision-making process, so that current limits and rules are appropriate for the area,” he said.
Public consultation on whether to introduce a temporary legal closure on taking pāua in the area is open until 5pm on April 24.
Along with the rāhui imposed last November, representatives of local marae, hapū and other community members had agreed to investigate a temporary legal closure under section 186A of the Fisheries Act 1996 – a mechanism tangata whenua can request where customary fisheries resources are under pressure.
Fisheries New Zealand said it had received five submissions to date, expressing a range of issues.
Once consultation closed, submissions would be considered alongside scientific information before advice was provided to Minister for Oceans and Fisheries Shane Jones.
The decision to introduce the ban ultimately rests with the minister but tangata whenua support is required, the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) said.
Taipari said some of the recent beach inspections had made him “tentative” about lending his ongoing support to the proposed Government-led closure, which, in his view, risked shifting the relationship away from consent and accountability toward enforcement.
“Things are working really well now, and you don’t want to bring in the heavy hand,” Taipari said.
“I much prefer communication, hui, kanohi‑ki‑te‑kanohi [face to face] – that’s more sustainable long term."
Ham said recent inspections were routine compliance activity – “business as usual” – and that officers had positive interactions with fishers in the area.
Sarah Curtis is a news reporter for the Northern Advocate, focusing on a wide range of issues. She has nearly 20 years’ experience in journalism, most of which she spent court reporting in Gisborne and on the East Coast.