For months, locals along the east coast north of Auckland have been forced to witness the same disgusting spectacle. Busloads of predominantly Chinese immigrants descending with buckets, chilly bins, spades, and even piano wire, turning vibrant rockpools into lifeless deserts.
I called it the “rape of the rockpools” earlier this year because that’s precisely what it is. A fragile, irreplaceable ecosystem being plundered like an unlimited free-for-all supermarket by people who show zero regard for New Zealand’s environment or basic rules.
These organised foraging raids, often coordinated via Chinese-language social media, have stripped bare everything from shellfish and seaweed to starfish, anemones, and whatever else fits in a bucket. Locals report seeing entire groups vacuuming up marine life with industrial enthusiasm, leaving behind barren rocks where thriving intertidal zones once existed. This is not casual gathering. It is wholesale devastation, driven by an apparent unwillingness to adapt to the host culture’s limits or respect the ecosystems they have invaded.
Now, thankfully, NZ First has turned raw outrage into concrete action.
Oceans and Fisheries Minister Shane Jones has slammed the door shut with a two-year ban on taking a wide range of invertebrates and all seaweed species from rockpools and surrounding coastline areas north of Auckland. This targets the epicentre of the destruction head-on, halting the relentless pillaging that has been collapsing these delicate habitats.
The closure kicks in from 12 March 2026 and will be backed by real enforcement from Fishery Officers, with infringement penalties on the table to make sure the message sinks in.
Just as crucially, NZ First’s Oceans and Fisheries Under-Secretary Jenny Marcroft has been working with locals, visitors, and officials. Fisheries New Zealand has been directed to support community volunteers and roll out multilingual education materials, hopefully in languages that will actually reach those responsible, so people finally grasp the rules and stop treating our coast like a personal buffet.
This aligns with the call from Ngāti Manuhiri Settlement Trust, who pushed for a temporary fisheries closure and plan their own rāhui. The Government’s statutory ban gives it real teeth.
In blunt terms, NZ First has delivered a much-needed circuit-breaker against the daylight robbery of our rockpools. The systematic stripping, largely by those who arrive in hordes, ignore bag limits, and treat the environment as expendable, finally hits a hard legal wall in March.
It is about time these exploiters faced consequences instead of locals being left to watch their beaches get trashed.
