Professor Tasman Crowe:

I will address the last question first. It is a tricky space. We have special areas of conservation, SACs, and special protection areas, SPAs under the European directives. My sense is they landed very badly with the communities involved and that is a sad thing. That was a consequence of the under-resourcing of the National Parks and Wildlife Service. It did not have the resourcing. There is provision in those directives for some stakeholder consultation but my sense was that there was not the time and money to do that properly. They have also been criticized because the conservation objectives and the management plans have been very slow to materialise. Many people who are invested in seeing them work are very distressed to see that people are continuing to do things that should not be done in them. There is no comeback for those people. What came out quite strongly in our stakeholder consultations for this different process was that the regulation and enforcement piece was going to be very useful. The stakeholder engagement, enforcement and communication pieces were important elements we needed to rectify. Many people are not aware of where those special areas of conservation and special protection areas are and they are not sure what the rules ought to be when they are in them. Those three things are very important, namely, engagement in the process, communication about what is there and why it is being protected and how it is being protected. People wanted simple rules. Skippers of fishing boats wanted to be able to know what they could and could not do as they move through the waters with different kinds of designations. People wanted there to be a meaningful enforcement that would really follow up on transgressions, which serve no one well. If the people are investing in and trying to protect the environment, they are really not happy to see one person getting away with murder, shall we say, in that space. Those, to me, were the big lessons that came to us through the stakeholder engagement process.