New Zealand once led the world in marine protection. Now it looks like we will fail to meet our international promise to protect 30 percent of our ocean estate by 2030. Why is stopping fishing so politically fraught? How might our ideas about marine protection need to change? And why, when our seas are in need, is it taking us so long to learn to talk to each other?

This is an updated excerpt from the July - August 2023 New Zealand Geographic feature article 'Taking on water'.

In 1975 five square kilometres from Cape Rodney to Okakari Point was made a marine reserve, the first in New Zealand, and possibly, the world.

"Nothing to do at Goat Island anymore," declared the local newspaper.

Three hundred thousand people now visit every year. And research indicates that this small, protected patch is helping to contribute fish to surrounding areas.

Lunching on experiments

The Marine Reserves Act was created in 1971 in response to campaigning by the late Bill Ballantine, among others. He was director of the University of Auckland's Leigh Marine Laboratory which was established in 1964. But staff and students soon discovered people were eating their experiments.

So that's what the Act was created for: 'the purpose of preserving, as marine reserves for the scientific study of marine life, areas of New Zealand that contain underwater scenery, natural features, or marine life, of such distinctive quality, or so typical, or beautiful, or unique, that their continued preservation is in the national interest.'

Today, with our ocean ecosystems under increasing pressure from commercial and recreational fishing, sedimentation, pollution, and warming, we need our marine protection to do more than preserve small areas for scientific study.

But it's not an easy task. Most marine protection proposals face extensive push back that delays the process for years, sometimes decades.

"It's really, really hard to manage it appropriately," says Professor Chris Hepburn, marine scientist at the University of Otago. "It's land, sea. It's different user groups, it's rights, it's things like the settlement, it's people not understanding each other's points of view."

The act that ignored the Treaty

'The settlement' is the Treaty of Waitangi (Fisheries Claims) Settlement Act 1992, an attempt to restore some of the rights taken from Māori when it comes to fisheries…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details