Bruce Bisset: Slap me if you've heard this one

Bruce Bisset

Every time a new report surfaces uncovering the latest indiscretions of our fishing industry – and nothing happens – I am reminded of the classic Monty Python "fish slapping dance" sketch.

In which a soldierly Michael Palin hops in and out, repeatedly slapping his presumed commanding officer John Cleese on the cheeks with a couple of herring. Finally Palin stops, at which point Cleese removes a large bass from his shirt and, with one blow, knocks Palin off the wharf.

It's absurdist theatre at its best. You don't know quite why it's so funny, but you laugh anyway.

Consider Palin as the Ministry of Fisheries, latterly Primary Industry, producing endless rather pungent revelations about quota scams, overfishing, dumping, and other illegal practices, and Cleese as the industry itself, stoically ignoring everything they slap at it with.

Then all the complaints are dismissed with one good well-worked line: "This report's out of date and our practices have changed since then".

At which point the ministry shrugs, says prosecution won't achieve anything, and goes back to finding new ways to tweak our so-called "sustainable" quota management system so the industry can continue to ruin our fisheries and charge us for it.

Absurdist theatre, indeed. But it's only the seafood companies laughing.

Apparently enforcement is only triggered if it's a whole company doing bad business. But if it's "just one or two" boats in a fleet the size of Sanford's or Talley's, MPI takes the view it's better to let the company reform them than to go to court.

Which is all very well, but the message it's sending to all concerned is: you can get away with dodgy stuff so long as not everyone does it.

So they do. Time and time again.

Whereas if, as now finally often happens in cases of foreshore poaching, the assets used to fish illegally were seized and sold, putting those "few" bad fishers out of business, well, wouldn't that send an even better message?

There's a challenge for new minister Stuart Nash. It would clean the industry spick and span in no time.

Mind you, scamming it aside, the quota system doesn't actually work because the catch limits get tweaked to suit the fishers, not the fish-stocks; and despite roughly half the industry is now iwi-owned or managed, our fisheries continue to be plundered beyond sustainable limits while the handful of remaining independent boats dwindles yearly because they can't compete with condoned corporate malpractice.

So why no great outcry? Why do these reports come out every year or two to general public indifference?

Because when most people look at the ocean, they see pretty blue waves. They don't see – and therefore don't think about – what's happening under those waves.

Contrast this with dairying. Everyone can see the cows, and their droppings, and the effect too many of them are having on the land.

Few see the effect bottom-trawls have on the seabed, ripping the benthic environment to desert; nor the finfish and (now) deep ocean fish disappearing, leaving whole bands of underwater ecosystems near-empty.

It's not in your face, so you don't protest.

Result? Environmental deniers like National's Simon Bridges can flippantly remark, when opening the breeding grounds of Maui's dolphin (now more endangered than ever) for oil exploration in 2014: "Well, we have plenty of other fish around our coastline."

But there aren't, Simon. Around 80 per cent of all sea-life is now in decline, more than half critically so, sparking scientists to conclude we are already well into the sixth global extinction event.

Quick, slap me.