Fishermen in Uproar Over IEMRS Regulations
Invercargill commercial fishermen have recommended that MPI immediately halt and review the implementation of their
IEMRS. The meeting described Minister Nathan Guy’s rushed approach to IEMRS as “unworkable, excessive and possibly
unlawful”. In addition, the meeting recommended the Ministry address the unintended consequences of this process, remove
the blanket edicts which permeate the regulations and get serious about taking a collaborative approach with Industry
representatives.
The meeting’s spokesman, Bill Chisholm, said that fishermen had supported IEMRS in good faith, as it has the potential
to provide better data for fisheries management. However, the whole thing had degenerated into a series of unworkable
proposals based on the Ministry’s unilateral, rushed approach. With this comes uncertainty, high costs and low
probability of success.
“The potential for outages and cost overruns alone is massive, especially as the Ministry has duck shoved
accountability for running the IEMRS platform to private providers” Mr Chisholm said. “This means that if the system
goes down, we can’t go fishing. Imagine how that will work when the expected Novopay-like outages occur. The Regulations
place all the accountability on private companies and fishermen, and none on the Ministry officials who’ve dreamed up
this mess.”
The meeting recommended that the IEMRS project be immediately halted, and a full scientific and management review
undertaken. The review should take into account the real data needs for improving fishery management without the
unintended consequences such as fishermen going broke and more expensive fish in the shops. Legal issues relating to
privacy, Intellectual Property protection and outage management also need to be dealt with. Mr Chisholm explained “We
want to get this right first time, and not be beholden to unaccountable bureaucrats running their own agenda. All we ask
is that the Ministry genuinely works with us within reasonable time frames, so we can get this project right.”
ENDS