Dear Ministry for Primary Industries,

I have two requests regarding the fisheries observer programme:

Question 1:
• I request a table showing the annual level of fishery observer coverage on deep-sea trawl boats for each year since 2000, disaggregated for each year by observer deployment status (i.e. dual observer, single observer, and no observer), expressed in days at sea.
• For this request, “deep-sea trawl boats” means any vessel targeting orange roughy, hoki, squid, oreo, or southern blue whiting within New Zealand’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), or undertaking transboundary fishing (i.e. both inside and outside the EEZ within the same voyage).

Question 2:
• I request an annualised table or simple total (if disaggregated data is not available) showing the number of fishing boats (of any fishery) in which the crew required a rescue at sea (e.g. capsized, sunk, or grounded) while a fisheries observer was on board since 2000.

I look forward to your response.

Yours faithfully,

Karina Sidaway

Dear Official Information Act,

Thank you for your response of 4 December 2025 regarding my Official Information Act request (OIA25-0777). I appreciate the time taken to consider the request. However, I would like to respectfully note that the refusal under section 18(f) did not meet the procedural requirements of the Act.

Under section 18B of the OIA and the associated Ombudsman guidance, an agency must first consider consulting with the requester to refine or clarify a request before refusing it on the basis of substantial collation or research. In this case, no opportunity for refinement was offered, even though both questions could be reasonably narrowed in ways that avoid the difficulty identified in your response.

To assist in progressing this request without undue burden on Fisheries New Zealand, I am now submitting refined versions of the original questions. These refinements substantially reduce the scope and allow you to provide information in whichever metric is most readily available.

Refined Questions

Question 1 (Refined):
Please provide a table of annual observer voyage deployments for the period 2000–2024, disaggregated by observer status (i.e., dual-observer voyages and solo-observer voyages) across all fisheries. This may be expressed in:

number of observer days, or

percentage of total observer days, or

percentage of total voyages, or

any equivalent metric that is logistically easiest for FNZ to extract.

If quantifying the full  series would still require substantial collation, please instead provide this information for the following four years only: 2000, 2008, 2016, and 2024.

Question 2 (Refined):
Please provide a table of the annual number of fisheries observers who required rescue at sea due to a fishing vessel sinking, capsizing, or being abandoned.
This may be restricted solely to the years and incidents recorded in your current Health and Safety database, and does not need to extend earlier than the period for which FNZ retains such records.

These refinements are intended to ensure that the request can be answered without substantial collation or research, consistent with section 18(f). They also reflect the Ombudsman’s position that agencies should release the information they are able to provide, even if not all information sought originally can be supplied.

I would appreciate confirmation that these refined questions can now be processed,.

Thank you for your assistance.
Yours sincerely

Karina Sidaway