Recreational Fishers Will Be The Losers

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday February 26, 1994

Recently, I and a number of my friends were picnicking at Mackeral Beach when a group of professional fishermen arrived in aluminium boats and began laying out nets across the sandbank on the northern end of the beach. For us and our group who had been swimming over the sandbar frequently during the Christmas period this was an interesting exercise and we watched with high expectation.

Sometime later when the net was pulled, we were amazed to see the number of small fish that had become entrapped in the net. Small bream, whiting, flathead and leatherjacket were brought in with the net. A small proportion of the fish were of legal size the remainder were small and tossed back into the water. All were dead, some 300 to 400 fish on one pass of the net.

After the fishermen had left, our swim with flippers and goggles over the sandbar revealed "the killing fields". Dozens of undersized fish lay on the sandbar.

This must stop. Pittwater is a recreational area and a breeding ground for our fish stocks where professional netting has no place. If this uncontrolled netting goes on, we will have "dead water" from Bayview to Broken Bay.

Terry Rouhan,

Clareville.

February 21

Proposals by NSW Fisheries to restructure the State's fisheries by distributing tradable "Fisheries Property Rights"* to commercial interests on the basis of previous best and averaged fish takes, and to determine recreational fish limits by the decree of a four-person committee raise several serious concerns.

No ongoing research program to determine fish population-sizes has been specified and one is left wondering how the total allowable catches are to be calculated - hopefully not by summing previous best catches, since overexploitation of commercial fish species is a perennial and chronic practice. It is critical to have real population data for these determinations.

Canadian experience suggests, for trout and salmon at least, that cash inflow to the community from a kilo of recreationally caught fish exceeds by a factor of at least 10 the input from commercial catching, yet it is proposed that recreational fishers can only purchase available shares of any fishery with the explicit consent of the industrial fishing sector. Given the factional rivalry over the sharing of fisheries, this is an extremely biased proposal.

A complex monitoring system has been proposed, including the recording of inland fish-take before removal from the vicinity of capture. Given the paucity of inspectors, and the propensity for greed not absent in all fishers, this technique seems to be inadequate.

Public information on this issue was released in January with a February 28 deadline for public feedback. Given that it took six months to create, this time is insufficient for detailed consideration and should be extended by at least two months. * (Call 1 800 816083 for brochures.)

Colin R. Campbell,

Aranda (ACT).

February 21