Having backed away from its planned strategy and environmental impact statement for recreational fishing in NSW, the Government at least supported a Legislative Council Select Committee on Recreational Fishing. Its report is now out, all 450-odd pages of it, as you’ve probably already read on this website or in the mainstream media. While the report is comprehensive, and contains many positive recommendations for improvements and action, there are still some concerns.
The first is around what a cross-party review can really achieve, particularly in the lead up to what’s likely to be a bloodbath of an election, with major parties … and particularly the Labor Party … trying to keep on side with the Greens. The best reviews produce independent and fearless reports and recommendations, based on evidence not opinions … think Royal Commissions, the Sydney Water enquiry, the Sydney Ferries enquiry … but parliamentary enquiries are often compromises. At the end of the day their reports have got to be agreed to by their Chairs and Members, and with this one that means Shooters and Fishers, Greens, Labor, Liberals and Nats.
That can lead to a product which has a bit both ways, where no one ends up completely happy. In a funny way the result can be like how a marine park is planned and established – good in some aspects, highly illogical in others. If you read the full Committee report, you’ll see evidence of this in the dissenting statements and minutes of meetings at the end. Putting it bluntly, Labor and the Greens got pro-fishing stuff knocked out and promoted the “greener” findings.
Still, Chair Robert Brown has done a good job given the refereeing he’s obviously had to do and there is a wealth of interesting material in the report. There are also recommendations to address issues that have concerned anglers for years, such as studying the real effects of C&R and pelagic trolling in marine protected areas, allowing angler access to drinking water supply dams and making “our” representative body more representative. We currently pay for the Advisory Council on Recreational Fishing (ACoRF) through our licence funds but the minister of the day selects the members. Anyone with the vaguest knowledge of pelagic fish knows that trolling through a marine park zone has no impact on biodiversity there. And the water coming out of our fish-risk dams is fully treated anyway… and there’s no real logic in which ones are angler-accessible and which ones aren’t. So really do we need more studies, or recommendations for studies? Surely just some “courageous” recommendations would be better, to wit: 1. Allow trolling in MPAs 2. Allow angler access to all dams 3. Reform how ACoRF is put together.
There’s also some weird stuff, such as looking at allowing pro fishermen back into our hard-won Recreational Fishing Havens (RFHs) and Marine Parks, and not creating new RFHs. The Sydney Fish Market (SFM) put forward its usual tired old “right of the non-fishing NSW public to eat NSW caught fish” and the Committee took the bait, so to speak, despite two studies showing how the size of fish had increased in Lake Macquarie and Tuross Lake since they became RFHs, and the SFM stating in its submission that it used to market 1,000 tonnes of fish per year from three RFHs alone – Botany Bay, St George’s Basin and the Hastings River. Go figure … and don’t forget $18.5m of our licence fees was spent on compensation for commercial fishermen taken out of the RFHs.
The Government has to respond to the Report by July 2011. Hang on; haven’t we got an election in March? Who’ll be responding? And who’ll fund or commit to all the further studies this report recommends?
John Newbery is Environment Editor for Fishing World.
