Page 3582 - Week 11 - Thursday, 16 November 2006
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this bill and agrees with its intention of ensuring that the ACT is in line with other jurisdictions.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (10.46): This, of course, is a bill after the Greens’ own heart. I have great pleasure in speaking to it. We have long expressed concerns about unsustainable fishing practices in the seas around Australia. While successive federal governments have trumpeted their achievements in fisheries conservation and industry sustainability, the dismal reality has been that the target populations of one fishery after another have declined, many of them to ecologically and economically unsustainable levels.
Before directly addressing this latest legislative initiative, which I wholeheartedly support, I would like to place it into a broader perspective and highlight some features of the Australian fisheries management regime that have contributed to the present sad state of the abalone and crayfish fisheries. From this wider perspective I would like to suggest ways in which this legislation, or legislation similar to it, can be adapted or adopted to safeguard other fisheries which are also in danger of becoming economically and ecologically unviable.
Taking first the global perspective, an international study reported in the media this month painted an extremely grim picture of the state of the world’s fisheries. This study was the biggest and the most all-embracing effort yet to understand the productivity of the oceans and predict future developments. It combined historical data on fish catches, some of it going back a thousand years, with analyses of marine ecosystems and experiments to bring marine life back to protected areas.
New Scientist magazine reports that the study showed the same pattern emerging at every scale of observation. That pattern is that rich ecosystems with many species can survive overfishing and other threats reasonably well but, once the biodiversity is lost, the entire system, including fish stocks, goes into exponential decline. According to New Scientist, many fishery scientists have been sceptical of the idea that damage to a few non-fish species could be a threat to major fish stocks, but this study demonstrates for the first time that commercial and ecological health go together in the ocean.
One take-home message from the report is that every species matters, not just the ones humans like eating or the ones humans like to feed to the animals that they like eating. This measure is transferable to terrestrial environments and is a reason why ecologists usually talk about effects on ecosystems, food chains and habitats, rather than pretending that one species can be hermetically isolated from the myriad roles it occupies in the intricate web of life.
In Australia we have watched smaller fishing fleets and family operators go out of business as unsustainable catch and bycatch quotas have resulted in the decimation of targeted fish stocks. The government response to plummeting fish stocks has usually been a series of set percentage reductions in the applicable licence quotas. This has resulted in smaller operators getting driven out of business, as only the larger corporate operators are left with economically viable quotas. Sadly, this rewards the very interests which caused and benefited most from this unsustainable exploitation.
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