It's all quite absurd. Trident received the contract because the quota owners demanded it. They were given the choice of who they preferred to work with and unsurprisingly chose Trident.
The accelerated roll out of 400 cameras to cover the commercial fleet raises some basic reality issues. Each vessel would generate conservatively 2500hrs of video. 400 such vessels will generate in excess of 1 million hours of video files each year.
Who, how, where. Even taking an auditors view 50 full time staff would be needed to monitor 10% of the total.
You have to ask why is all this going on in an Industry claiming to embody the finest stewardship ethics? Without a Commission of Inquiry the public will never learn the truth about New Zealand's Fishing Industry and the success it has achieved in capturing fisheries science, policy, administration and politics, and the unseen hands on the tiller.

Weston: so, in an export based economy (NZ), continued production relies on stability of exchange rates (maintaining competitiveness). Where is the downside of pegging the NZD to a basket of our trading partners currencies? Wouldn't this deliver relative stability over the medium term, and encourage investment in production rather than property? Real products to real customers.

Nat: careful now; drilling down in an economists field usually involves hitting a lot of effluent. A really interesting topic, though, and who would have expected the controversy regarding the RB policy; after all, it was enshrined in legislation as a sign it would never be altered, and this would give comfort to investors/speculators that apparently are so in need of warm and fuzzies.

The thing to understand about the RB policy is that it's basically crap. Limiting inflation to less than 3% is only as worthy or valid as the definition of inflation. In the 5 years away in the US we return to house prices that have doubled, fuel costs have doubled, electricity costs have almost doubled, food cost are steadily climbing. I consider inflation to be the difference in buying power of my dollar, over time, and now it seems to buy less than half of what it did 5 years ago. Price stability?

I can't see the Holy Grail of current policy; the need to maintain the status quo. Someone must be banking shitloads of cash somehwere, but it's not kiwis - they're too busy importing people so everyone can borrow more to buy imported shit they don't need with money they don't have! It sure sounds like a receipe for a fair dinkum '20s style crash. Keep the wood shed full.