Professor Tasman Crowe:

I think we can do that, absolutely, and I modified my opening statement a little bit to reflect that as the written statement was only put together a couple of days ago. We have the capacity to bring that agility and flexibility to the situation and to take a leading role in international best practice. As I said, I was in Brussels last week at an EU project meeting which had members there from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN, from the Oslo and Paris Conventions organisations, OSPAR, from the Helsinki Commission, HELCOM, and from leading universities. Already, we were tabling some of the ideas that are there in that advisory group report and they were very well-received by that group as ways to look at and carry forward this process. We should not be thinking of just copying others but taking a lead.

There is certainly a mixture of levels of commitment to that kind of co-management and co-creation side of things, but it was very much taken as read around that table of leading thinkers, practitioners and protectors that that was what is done and that it would not be conceived of to go forward with an MPA process where there was not a good level of stakeholder involvement. Obviously, our thinking around exactly how to do that is evolving and emerging. There are people who have expertise in what works well and what does not. We have some very good experts in this country with some very good experience doing that, so we are in a position to establish innovative practices that others will follow.