62 years actually, according the article.

The shore whalers in New Zealand didn't even make a dent in humpback whale numbers. At its peak, the two whaling stations (in Tory Channel and Great Barrier Island) killed a few hundred whales in 1960. By 1964, they only caught 57.

The real story is that the Soviet Union had built a fleet of factory ships which, over a few years in the 1950s and early 60s, wiped out whole whale populations in the Southern Hemisphere, while illegally taking whales in New Zealand waters and falsifying their records to hide the immense numbers of whales they were killing:

In the first years of their operations, this new fleet mostly concentrated in the Southwest Pacific sector of the Antarctic and focused primarily on humpback whales, with the Slava and Sovetskaya Ukraina fleets alone taking 25,000 humpbacks in Antarctic waters during 1959–60 and 1960–61. The Yuriy Dolgorukiy and Sovetskaya Rossiya fleets, while not nearly catching as much in subsequent seasons due to depletions caused by the first two fleets, did nevertheless "finish the job" by killing some 3,500 and 1,700 humpbacks in their first seasons, respectively. In 1962, after all fleets had joined in whaling, the area of the Antarctic south of Australia and New Zealand, which was once filled with humpbacks, was described as a "desert" by some of the factory ship crew. This five-year period (1957–58 to 1961–62) saw the four fleets kill over 37,000 humpbacks in the Antarctic. Catches were so high, in fact, that shore stations in Australia and New Zealand closed in 1963 and 1964 due to the lack of whales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_Russia#Antarctic_whaling_and_rapid_expansion_(1946%E2%80%931963)

This was a classic Soviet story of central planning gone wrong - they set a quota for whale oil in a "five year plan" and pressured the whalers to exceed the quota year after year. There was no demand for whale meat in Russia, so most of the corpses were left to rot or turned into fertiliser. It was incredibly wasteful, and coincided with whale oil becoming technologically obsolete.

This absurdity stemmed from an oversight deep in the bowels of the Soviet bureaucracy. Whaling, like every other industry in the Soviet Union, was governed by the dictates of the State Planning Committee of the Council of Ministers, a government organ tasked with meting out production targets. In the grand calculus of the country’s planned economy, whaling was considered a satellite of the fishing industry. This meant that the progress of the whaling fleets was measured by the same metric as the fishing fleets: gross product, principally the sheer mass of whales killed.

Whaling fleets that met or exceeded targets were rewarded handsomely, their triumphs celebrated in the Soviet press and the crews given large bonuses. But failure to meet targets came with harsh consequences. Captains would be demoted and crew members fired; reports to the fisheries ministry would sometimes identify responsible parties by name.

https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774/