A research group is making a case for the creation of an advocacy body to balance the interests of inshore recreational fishers with those of the commercial sector.
The group, The New Zealand Initiative, said hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders fish recreationally each year in inshore waters but that too little attention had been directed at improving the fisheries that were important to them.
The late Sir Douglas Myers, himself a keen fisherman, supported the research project, which recommends New Zealand adopts a regime similar to that in place in Western Australia, under not-for-profit organisation Recfishwest.
In a supporting letter, Recfishwest's co-founder, Ian Stagles said the old adversarial commercial-versus-recreational environment had largely disappeared since the organisation was established in 1994.
The report, by Randall Bess, a research fellow at The New Zealand Initiative and former a consultant for the US-based Environmental Defense Fund, said if changes are not made to the management of recreational fisheries, Kiwis can expect increasingly stringent constraints on their access to fisheries resources.