The Greens support this bill. Until now the marine farming industry in this country has been a very successful one. Most people do not know it, but in Marlborough alone the aquaculture industry earns more for the province than the famous wine industry does. It is an industry that has been characterised by a boom-and-bust mentality in applications for water space, but also by delays in the clash between the Resource Management Act and the Fisheries Act, and it has been characterised by moratoria.

This legislation was designed to get around that. It was designed to create aquaculture management areas, where people could apply for marine space within the aquaculture management area, and they could not apply in the exclusion zones outside the aquaculture management area. It took officials something like 3 years to write the bill. As others have said, about 4 weeks were given for submissions, and then the Primary Production Committee had about a month to hear submissions and another month to consider. The timescale was not good. However, although we perhaps have not made a silk purse out of a sow's ear, I think we have done an extremely good job in changing what was unworkable legislation into something that is very workable. It is a credit to all the people who have worked so long and hard to get it to where it is today. I would like to pay particular credit to the officials - a couple of whom are here today — plus our select committee officials, and all the members of the select committee, led by David Carter, the chair.

I think that the main problem before this legislation came into being was the clash of cultures between the essentially community-based Resource Management Act and the essentially centrally based legislation of the Fisheries Act, and the different cultures of the groups that administered those two different Acts. This bill is trying to put the control of aquaculture into the hands of the community; in other words, through the regional councils under the auspices of the Resource Management Act. The Ministry of Fisheries will still have input at a very early stage. So rather than somebody going to the council, getting a resource consent, and then sometimes waiting for years to get a fisheries permit, it is all done in one step under this bill.

The aquaculture management areas are designed so there are areas in our sheltered waterways that are suitable for marine farming and for which people can apply for space, and the exclusion zones are all those areas other than the aquaculture management areas, where people cannot apply for space. Having said that, it is possible for people to apply for space in the exclusion zones by initiating a plan change with the local council. That is a much higher hurdle than the resource consent as it is at the moment.

As others have mentioned, one of the main issues of contention in the bill as it was originally tabled was security of tenure. The bill provided that when an existing marine farmer had a lease that expired, that space would go to tender. In other words, it would go to the highest bidder. One does not have to be a rocket scientist to work out that it would not have taken very long for tendered space to always finish up in the hands of those people with the most money and, almost inevitably, they would be the big corporates. It was clearly an unworkable idea. On the one hand, marine farmers said: "What we want most of all is security of tenure. We want the right of renewal in perpetuity." Members of the committee said: "No, this is public open space. This is commons, from which you are trying to derive private profit. It is not appropriate for you to have a permanent right of renewal. Look at what has happened with the high country leases - we had to buy them back." On the other hand, there is the underlying reality that this is a biophysical process. There are physical limits to how many marine farms we can have in an area. It is not about simply allocating space; it is about asking whether marine farmers will be able to operate in that space.

The compromise that we have come to, which I think is a very good compromise, is that instead of the water space being tendered, the incumbent farmer has the right to make an application for a resource consent first. In other words, that farmer's application is heard first. If that application is successful, the farmer gets a renewal of the lease for another 20 years. If the farmer's application is unsuccessful, then other things kick in, and at that point it could go to tender or other applications could be received. There are a couple of instances where the person who is an incumbent will not get the right to make the first application. One of those instances is where the council decides that the area where the farm is will no longer be considered an aquaculture management area. In other words, the council has changed the plan and the area is no longer suitable for aquaculture. At that point the incumbent farmer says: "Right, that's it. I'm out of here." The farmer has no recourse, and there is certainly no compensation to be paid. The other instance in which the farmer may not have the right to apply first for renewal of the consent is where he or she has not complied with the existing resource consent conditions. If the farmer has been convicted of some kind of unsatisfactory behaviour, then he or she is deemed not to be suitable in terms of their specific resource consent.

What the bill now states is that the people not only have to comply with their resource consent, but also have to comply with the industry standards.

The incumbent farmers basically have to be good, corporate citizens. There is no formal statement that this is an industry standard, but what we are intending, and hoping I guess, from the passage of this legislation, is that the industry will get together and form its own voluntary standards, because the last thing people want is for their space, which has become a valuable commodity, to be taken from them and tendered to somebody else.

The other really contentious issue, I suppose, in this legislation is the 20 percent of new marine space that will go to Māori. In essence, the Government is trying to say that 20 percent of any new space that is created in an aquaculture management area is to go to Māori, plus any existing space that was created between 1992 - the year of the deed of settlement for fisheries — and the present, also has to go to Māori. That was intended to be on a willing buyer, willing seller basis, so that if incumbent farmers wanted to sell and move on or to retire or whatever, then the Government would move in, buy farms, and allocate that to Māori. The problem, as we foresee it, is that insufficient space will come up in a sufficiently short period of time for Māori to get 20 percent of that space. What the bill is allowing for is that Māori get 20 percent of the new space, plus it may be that there is another 20 percent, or up to 20 percent, of that new space to take account of the 20 percent from the existing space that is unable to be allocated to them.

We are also aware that if existing marine farmers want to extend their farms, then the new space they are occupying would be treated as new space and 20 percent of that would go to Māori. This sounds fine, but if there are farms dotted around the Hauraki Gulf, the Marlborough Sounds, or wherever, we will finish up with tiny little patches of marine farms that have been allocated to iwi Māori. It becomes absolutely unworkable as they are uneconomic units. What we are trying to do is to encourage councils to aggregate these small areas so that iwi Māori have their space in a particular area, in an area that is representative of the productivity of the rest of the space that has been allocated from 1992 until the present. The Greens are happy to support the bill.