Fish & Game is acting more and more like a radical NGO than a lobby for fishers and hunters
FISH & Game NZ’s use in March of dubious survey results to justify slagging dairy farming prompted Rural News to urge farmers to ‘lock the gate’ to F&G members until the parent body shut up.
The newspaper reasoned that since Fish & Game’s governing body had such low regard for farming, it might want members even to forgo any association with farmers – by declining to hunt or fish on the properties of such scoundrels.
A serious call, yes. But we demanded, and we still demand, an end to Fish & Game’s incessant anti-farming carping.
Conservation Minister Nick Smith recently fell foul of the lobby; it demanded Smith resign, accusing him of threatening the group’s future. The minister reportedly told the F&G council “Fish and Game sometimes behaves like a rabid NGO,” which it does.
But Smith rejects accusations that he told Fish & Game members, at a tense meeting in July, essentially to pull back on campaigning or risk its council being stripped of its statutory powers.
In fact he wants Fish & Game to engage more with agriculture and irrigation so as to achieve the highest possible freshwater quality.
“While it is right for them to advocate for freshwater, they sometimes get into being anti New Zealand’s most important industry, the dairy industry.”
Smith in his defence released a DOC official’s notes of the meeting, including, “F&G needs to work out what it wants to be: a statutory body [with] legislation and a relationship with Government, or an NGO.”
Fish & Game is supposed to be an independent body with statutory authority to protect rivers, lakes and streams and the sole agency issuing hunting and fishing licences.
Rural News agrees with the Taxpayers’ Union which says, “The Fish and Game council’s campaigning is a gross breach of faith by a statutory body.”
Enough is enough! If Fish & Game wants to be in politics, the Government should abolish compulsory licences for trout fishing and hunting, by which the lobby funds its political grandstanding.