Peter, they're not your fish. Legally (and perhaps somewhat arguably) they belong to the quota-owners... quota has many of the characteristics of "property".

Theirs...

and I have to put something else here because otherwise the comment is too short.

Actually, yes, I was from Qld. Are you from Tasmania if the steers need beanies (only one each? sorry...)?

Yep, TAC goes up, everyone (with quota) can catch more. Seafish has had a lot of SPF quota for a long time, not sure if they trade a lot. More likely to lease if they get close to their quota.

AFMA gave away your fish (and mine...) a long time ago in ITQ fisheries...

Actually all academic now - I saw the senate passed the bill.

And another thing Peter, who allocated all of our over cleared over grazed salt degraded farm land to people such as yourself? I've met many farmers who enjoy a spot of recreational fishing that are critical of my industries impact but criticism of THERE impact is met with outright denial. Personally I can see a good argument for the government resuming or enforcing reforestation of at least 30% of existing farmland to restore animal habitat, reduce salinity and provide public recreation areas.
Will you put your hand up for such?

For the jack mackerel quota Peter, Seafish is more or less the major holder of quota. Some small amounts have been caught out of southern NSW in an attempt to start a fishery in those waters but these efforts were set back by a fire in the processing plant in Eden. The major fishery has been of Tasmania and Seafish is the only purchaser of jack mackerel so they have a monopoly on the price paid for the fish, which considering it's low value and (by world standards) low volume, doesn't provide the same incentive for quota trading as quota for species such as rock lobster, abalone or southern bluefin tuna.

Geez I've got a mate down in Kinglake in Victoria with an ab licence... strewth. He's been at it for well over 25 years and his licence cost him $80 I think he said. Like winning Lotto every year. Last time I looked - years ago it was worth just under $500K. Now that's the sort of fish I'd be annoying. Still reckon it tastes like inner tubes though.

Maybe with the Abel Tasman/Magiris they would have been wanting to buy up some of that unused quota.

Anyway I hope they get to the bottom of this schmozzle and take some measures to make sure this sort of to-ing and fro-ing doesn't happen again. There've been some obvious improvements in management over the last decade when I was involved at the margins - probably not in NSW I suspect, strewth they were hopeless - and it would be a pity if this was to set all that back.

Accurate aging of orange roughy may be difficuilt but the scientific consensus is that they live for a long time and are very vulnerable to fishing. The fishery ended not so much from managers shutting it down but because in this case fishermen couldnt find any more fish-we caught them all.
Sea temperature? They live around 1000 meters deep, waters which will be immune to sea temperature rise for a little while yet and this is the first time that I've heard this explanation, by a scientist from California?
They are able to select the fish they catch, Seafish have been using a pelagic trawler in recent years with very little non-target bycatch, let alone sharks or pink snapper which occur in continental shelf waters away from the areas jack mackerel swim in.
Quota management for fisherys such as jack mackerel and other fisheries which catch only a single target species is the cheapest and most effective management tool available. Trying to control fisheries through input controls alone has been tried for years and demonstrated to be costly, innefective and exspensive

Hi Joe,
the lack of a stock assessment for orange roughy and the failure of the CSIRO to age earbones does not a consensus make. Orange roughy are fished off Ireland and the fishery off New Zealand is larger than any other Australian fishery and has not collapsed. There is no reason why Australia could not have a roughy fishery that caught the fish when they were available Orange Roughy are also temperature sensitive - avoiding waters warmer than 4.5c - according to Sharp.

Seafish Tasmania are yet to demonstrate that they can select catches and avoid catching dolphins and seals with pelagic trawling which is only a worry under quota, when they have to dump fish for which there is no quota and when they use huge trawlers.

It is again ironical that under previous license conditions that there was no danger of dumping fish - so in the southern shark fishery other species landed were actually of high value because of their condition compared to fish caught in trawl nets.

No trawl seine longline or gillnet fishery catches only target species with every shot - but under quota highgrading fish (dumping smaller fish that are worth less on the market to fill quota with more valuable fish of the same species) and dumping of fish for which there is either no quota or the quota is too expensive is illegal - so fishermen cannot admit to it. Dr Parcival Copes who has been involved in Australian fisheries management has written extensively on this.

Your claim about 'input controls' being expensive - uses a word coined by those advocating quota management The management that predated the commonwealth intervention of the early 1980s could more accurately described as fleet management - which became catch management - so input controls mis-describes those forms of catch management prior to quota management. Prior to catch management that came with Commonwealth management industry evolved cost effective and efficient ways of handling fish - especially shark that I fished in and have been involved with - which had to evolve ways of targeting smaller fish and created the largest industry inspired no fishing zone when Victorian shark fishermen set up State waters as a no go zone for shak boats while interfering with the small ( in weight) shark catches landed by other bay and inlet, trawl, and recreational fisheries in State waters

General purpose fishing licences were less than $500 pa as the fleet could be inspected at the wharf. With seperate licenses now issued for each fishery and quota required for each species landed and the creation of 'fisheries' for bycatch - the southeast non trawl consultative committee for bycatch of the shark fishery for instance - the costs are now $25,000 plus pa - depending on the amount of quota.

The slight of hand used to cover these cost increase was to impose costs on the fleet with intensive management before quota. In shark it was a freeze on licenses, a consolidation with fishermen forced to buy each other out to keep enough net to be viable, a license freeze, quota for bycatch species and billing industry for endless Management Advisory Committee and stock assessment meetings in Canberra, Brisbane, Melbourne, Hobart and even Ceduna - meetings which would last up to three days when all the various committees met too, Industry paid for the bureaucrats, scientists, conservation group observers, room hire costs of paperwork etc. Of 240 original boats in 1988 less than 60 boats were fishing and only 40 had a full set of nets in 2000 - immediately prior to quota.

This is all catch management - research and management designed to reduce catches - but described by managers as input controls.

The worst of this management was the freezing of the transfer of licenses post 1993 industry buyouts. This stopped young skippers - the best and the brightest - from buying their own boats and forced them to fish for owners - creating a 'catch history' which quota was allocated on - quota they had to but for between $0.5 -1 million to keep fishing. The allocation process itself was dodgy - SA fishermen able to swap school shark history for gummy shark history and allocations - a 23% cut in gummy shark quota after the first year 'based on new scientific evidence' that school shark were a significant bycatch.

As fishfolk are not scientists they have no standing in the specially setup 'self referencing' tribunal to hear disputes. Under siege in the media from scientist and marine conservation groups' little credit with the public who see complaints by fishermen as 'self serving' - and they were not qualified. Even the clear sharing of school shark stocks with New Zealand was studiously ignored - more than one hundred tagged fish that travel as part of vast schools, recovered from either side of the Tasman. These sharks, school sharks and a gummy equivalent called rigg, were also sold on the only market for shark flesh in the world - Melbourne - with the New Zealand catch increasing as the Australian catch declined.

Industry even employed its own scientist to review the genetics who found at least 30% of the NZ stocks of school shark were shared with Australia in 199 - but many more tags have been recovered since then - and this was studiously ignored by quota committed scientists and managers both in State and Federal Governments fisheries agencies

There are and were fishermen who benefited from quota. Those who got the 'nod' it was coming and fished as hard as they could while various fisheries ministers issued statements calling on the fleet to reduce its catches building catch histories which 'pumped' their quota allocation. Those who access to capital to buy quota and those who once worked for AFMA as employees or contractors how had the 'inside running' on how the system works, and some who even served on the AFMA board. Fishermen who were vocal against quota and imposed management suffered from at least the perception that this would count against them.

I cannot relate other fisheries in the same detail but have no reason, from what I have read and related to me at the wharf, to suspect that they are much different under the build to and implementation of quota - and all suffer from scientists 'campaigning' to stop 'overfishing', for marine parks etc. none of which inspires confidence in their objectivity.

Abolishing AFMA and federal management for all but distant water fisheries and abolishing quota and tying the resources of marine science to the success and reliability of commercial fisheries is the only way I can see of stopping this ridiculous crippling of what was always one of the world's smallest fisheries in the world's third largest fishing zone.

Limiting the seasons fished, capping the size of boats used and the gear used and swapping quota for non tradable licenses on an industry agreed formulae would enable young deckhands to again to afford to become fishermen and restore fishing rights to the areas fished so industry can defend itself when others threaten its fishing grounds and nursery habitat - such as what is happening in Gladstone right now.

Australian fisheries suffer chronic over management - not 'overfishing' - with the public paying very high prices for locally caught fresh fish and paying similar prices for cheap fish dumped on the Australian market and often misnamed due to the lack of basic legal consumer protection - Nile perch and Mekong catfish come to mind.

Andy Saunders commented:

"Seafish Tasmania are yet to demonstrate that they can select catches and avoid catching dolphins and seals with pelagic trawling which is only a worry under quota, when they have to dump fish for which there is no quota and when they use huge trawlers" Why do you say that?

Because it is demonstrably true,

Hi Andy,

Without quota management this trawler likely could not and would not have come here to fish coastal waters. it is the first time in any fisheries debate that I have encountered advocacy for a single company - nationally or internationally

You say

They've been operating (Seafish Tasmania) in the fishery for many years, I understand.

So how do you know what the bycatch for their boats was?

It is recorded that they Seafish Tas have caught both seals and dolphins.

You say;

Minimal bycatch, including of other quota species. "No trawl seine logline or gillnet fishery catches only target species" - this boat uses a different fishing method. Pelagic Trawling has a greater risk of catching seals and dolphins - otherwise why the studies and reports?

This boat presents a greater risk because it nets are so much bigger

You say;

You're right about gillnet/Danish seine and bottom trawls. But the bycatch is either commercial non-quota species (which the fisher will happily sell), non-commercial bycatch (sessile sponges, "rubbish" fish etc - bad) which will be discarded - but this isn't a factor of whether the management is quota-based or not, or non-target quota species. In the last case, either the fisher has that quota (so happy accident - will land/sell), or doesn't (so either *should* arrange to lease quota post-catch, or if lazy/sloppy/think quota can't be had will discard). Lease rates are *always* less than the landed price, so the catch still has value even if not the full value.

With respect Andy you are quite wrong. In shark previously the dead bycatch was almost nonexistent and everything was sold or went over the side was well alive - mainly port jackson and swell sharks - piggies and skunks. More goes over in trawl and if it is not alive it get eaten pretty quickly - and as I said before compared to the mortality needed to set up and maintain farming- or what is lost to pollution daily - it is not significant.

Under quota systems here if you cannot get the quota for a species you have to dump it or get fined. When it first came for shark a SA fishermen - who supported quota - landed a few hundred kilo's of mulloway with the intent of giving it to a local hospital. He was fined. In shark a mate who was fishing until a couple of years ago hit 2 ton of the supposed rare school shark for which there was no quota and after spending all night getting them out of the net they had to dump them - his deckhand quit and he was out of the fishery not long after.

Quota for many species is not easy to find - it depends on the time of the year. You say it is never worth more than the fish to lease quota - but given the profit from landing fish is around the third their value quota can be greater than that. Elephant shark are being dumped and snapper at the moment can only be landed a few hundred kilo's at a time. It is a stupid and wasteful system.

If this large pelagic trawl caught 100t of school shark - well within the water column range it works - and cannot get quota it to will have to dump them, won't they?

You say;

Yes, there is a trend to consolidation ("the big-boys survive"), but it isn't entirely from cost-recovered management fees. Plenty of other factors at work - running costs for a big boat are proportionately less, often catch is in better condition so price realised may be better etc. In the days of non-quota fisheries a lot of management costs weren't recovered, don't mistake that for the costs not actually being real.

Fascinating rhetoric. This is no 'trend' - this is exactly what managers have done their best to achieve - and do not mind bending rules and loading cost onto owner operator boats that they cannot defray through taxation to the extent of corporate vessels to get there. The plan by economists and fisheries managers was to consolidate fleets and they used costs and catch cuts to force quota trading and that consolidation. They pumped $60-100 million of taxpayers money into SE fisheries to buyout licenses - but not the quota - a few years ago. Some just took the compo and bought another license, way cheaper ,and went back fishing. it was a pointless wasteful exercise.

For coastal fisheries the catch condition on small boats is usually better simply because the nets were smaller - less risks of fish in the net being spiked, bitten and ripped - do not have as many fish in them and they get back to port quicker - and the advantage of smaller catches is that maintaining high quality they can get top value from their buyer - this proposal for the Abel Tasman is for $1 per kg fish to be sold in Africa? Then the remaining economic valuing from selling the fish locally is lost too.

and you say,

The thread running throughout your comment (and apologies to other readers, it has little to do with the small-pelagic fishery of the main article) is that the SESSF fishery is *not* overfished, rather over-regulated. If so, wouldn't there be plenty of fish out there to catch? And wouldn't that mean that all the quotas (TACs) would be near fully-caught?

Again you have a problem understanding how it works - which is far enough. The remaining orange roughy quota is not likely to be fished because it is not enough to be worth enough to justify a trip - and its been that way for a while. Roughy rarely turn up as a bycatch and have to be targeted in specific places at specific times.

An example of uncaught quota was when shark first went there are west coast guys pooled some quota for the month before Christmas for shots they knew would be good. it blew hard and they could not fish it. Managers then used it as an excuse to cut quota - based on thinking similar to you articulate.

Before quota fresh fish fisheries, like shark, were capped by the market. I was looking to leave a boat in 1982 and needed a good catch. The deckies got $10 a box of shark and a good catch for was 100 boxes. Anyway the boat I was on caught 120 boxes but on the wheel coming home I saw a lot of other boats leaving the same 30 x 30k school of gummies. The catches flooded the market and the price dropped to $4 a box for deckles and proportionately for skippers. Next trip it was quiet again. Those who were not usually shark fishermen got 'burned' and the rest rode the dip.

There are a limited number of buyers in fresh fish fisheries this capped the catches of the southern shark fishery. During WW2, when shark livers were worth money it sustained catches of 20,000t or more for livers alone and away from polluting factories on Tasmania's NW coast remained a good fishery, as flesh drove it again with livers still being sold up to the early 1960's. Management chose to stay blissfully ignorant of all these facts.

You say,

And yet (with some exceptions) they aren't. In the comments above are some examples of previous over-fishing (gemfish, orange roughy) - yet the science is pretty clear - those stocks are much lower.

The science is not at all clear. The science behind none of these species took into account environmental variations - yet the comings and goings of the east coast current can have a dramatic affect on fisheries - king prawns are there for a few years and then gone and so-on. The range of the fish being counted is not established either geographically or within the water column - it is too often 'assumed'. The state of nursery grounds and their productivity - which varies naturally to - is ignored.

The catch per unit effort data uses a unit of each shot of the nets. Where is the stock assessment for orange roughy? Why was AFMA silent as the Montara slick flowed over the southern bluefin spawning ground? Best wind AFMA up and concentrate on regionalised state based management. Let Tasmania decide on what it does with this trawler.

It is not so much the scientists but the system - they are financially rewarded for finding problems - and not if fisheries are going OK.

When nothing is caught the mathematical modeling often goes haywire and there are to many factors other than fishing that can lead to whole let alone individual shot (single setting of net of hauling of gear) trip zero catches. In shark the nets are used to find sharks and then shortened when the boat or a group of boats are on a school - so the catches have more to do with the experience of the skippers and boats working together than stocks. Then there is the weather it can be blowing when the tides are slack running to hard when when its calm - and that has to be combined with the full moon - excellent to fish up to but in eastern Bass Strait and around the islands the tides run too hard to use gillnets just a few days after.

Trips end to when deckhands or skippers are sick or injured. If all of these 'not fishing events' are read into the CPUE data it would make any fishery look like it is in decline - which is what is happening. I have tried using catch per fishermen decade which seems more accurate and adjusts the catch for the number of boats actually fishing and the amount of time actually fished. It also maps the changes to efficiency you allude to - but will have great trouble actually trouble quantifying.

So the data isn't the best and the assumptions in complex models are often not sound and trying to work out how many fish in the sea at a given time can rarely be more than an educated guess. Protecting and restoring fish nursery grounds on the other hand provides and opportunity to actually replace the numbers of fish caught.

You say;

Yes, in general it was the advent of more efficient techniques that meant the ancient small-boat fisheries could be over-fished, but you can't make technology go away, and even small boats take advantage of it now. I bet you have a GPS plotter, good sounder etc on your boat, better nets and a bigger engine than your grandfather (assuming he was in the same business) had?

Again this is a generalisation. Such rhetoric. Some of the best boats were built 30 or more years ago - but the equipment they use is the latest. Radars made anchoring and shifting anchorages safer, sounder helped avoid reefs and have always lead to preferred fishing grounds and nets better - when they are working - but at the end of the day it is the skill of the skipper and the competency of the crew that catch the fish - not how modern the gear is - though getting home quicker is always attractive.

Giving the fleet grounds to fish across several fisheries will work. When fisheries are not capitalised if the fishery goes 'off' for whatever reason people work on land, have a break, fish another fishery. Economically when catches are not reliable the fleet never has stayed out losing money - though it a common fantasy among fisheries economists.

Managers have to deal with with there is, not what it might have been ages ago. Effort/input controls failed conspicuously in too many fisheries to ignore.

I am not sure if you know what you mean about effort/input controls - anyway fleet management (pre 1984 for trawl) did not fail in shark,, danish seine, trawl scallop or cray. AFMA and similar state management has been a complete failure for the public - among the highest prices paid for fish on earth - unnecessary and widespread unemployment, decreased safety at sea the industry and the environment that generates fish catches is almost totally neglected.

No AFMA fisheries manager is worth a gram to a ton compared to those who were based in the state and moved around the wharves, knew fishermen and fishing. Canberra is on a man made lake in the mountains and could not be further away socially of physically. Your definition of past management failure is presented without facts but reliant on the unreliable science we are all stuck with - counting fish is like that.

The failure in management is to believe, as AFMA does, that to manage fisheries you just have to regulate catch - that managers can ignore the quality of the water - predict coming seasons and set catches - ignore pollution a seismic testing, sewerage in fish nursery grounds and contamination from rivers like the Murray which is a far more likely cause of penguin colony collapse in Adventure Bay than predation by New Zealand fur seals currently being blamed.

Finally you say;

Funnily enough, in fisheries that go to quota (and are well-managed - the SESSF is not one of those as many TACs are not realistically/scientifically set and it's one of the most non-targetted/multi-species fisheries in the world), the fishers often end up preferring quotas."

Really? Try asking the same fishermen if they would swap quota management for low cost fleet management with more attention to protecting fishing grounds and state managed and the answer would be obvious.

Long and contradictory posts do not a good discussion make.
All the data available on orange roughy states they swam between 3 and 7 degrees water, this was where they were caught during the fisherys hayday, why they suddenly became averse to water above 4.5 degrees is a pretty mysterious claim to make. Fishing did decimate the stocks, there may be signs of recovery in Australia, but the stock is not anywhere what it was yet and those fish are swimming in areas suppossedly too warm for them. New Zealands claim to increased stocks is based on surveys in areas previously not fished.
You continue also to make the long discredited claim that the Abel Tasmans net is "so much bigger", it is not. For the thousandth time, its net is no bigger than the pelagic net already trialled by Seafish in recent years which caught no significant bycatch of other species, especially not school shark. The main bycatch was some warehou and blue trevally as stated in the research report available on the web. Google "Tasmanian Jack Mackerel".
Your account of the problems of managing the southern shark fishery with a quota system is generrally true, however returning to "fleet controls" will not lead to the reinvigorated fishery that you imagine. Zones one and two Western Australia are managed with input controls succesfully but its taken 30 years to rebuild and there are still far less boats than there once were, licenses are expensive and oin the hands of a few, thats a reality which won't change soon.
And whats a shark fisherman doing criticising a mid water trawler for catching seals and dolphins? I was a shark fishermen too, and I know about the sea mammal interaction issues in THAT fishery. Indeed AFMA have just announced new restrictions in th southern shark gillnet fishery to protect sea lions, its on there website. If shark fishermen want to tottaly avoid catching seals and dolphins they'll have to start baiting up longlines again, in which case they'll need a good source of bait. Possibly from a mid water trawler

You'll get yourself into strife there too Joe - albatross and turtles ... quite a few by all accounts fall for longlines.

Albatross and turtles fall mostly to tuna longlines,the snoods of which are very long and remain closer to the surface for longer during setting. Demersal shark lonlines have snoods of 20-30cm and sink very quickly with the mainline, too fast for albatross generally to eat. Turtles with their sharp beaks stand some chance of biting through monofilament snoods. It is an issue which needs to be addressed and is being addressed by fishermen. An engineering firm ouit of NSW won an award last year for a device which sets tuna longline baits via means of a kind of pipe to depths too great for albatross to be caught, I've thrown away the magazine I read it in and can't be more specific at this stage sorry.
Quite a few birds and bat species are killed by wind turbines too, but I'd rather see a solution to that issue worked out than ban wind turbines outright

Hi Joe,
you asked more than a dozen questions and factually incorrect statements - which is OK in debate - but I answered properly and at length to better inform you and the readers - and supply references.

For Peter Ormond I hope I answer your questions too in replying to Joe - tell me if not and I think you will find the Sharp and Gauldie reference published in a French scientific journal has far greater scientific 'weight' and more comprehensive in its analysis that anything published in Australia. I only have a paper copy and would need your postal address to get it to you - contact Sarah Lawler perhaps.

Joe - I am relying on a reference from Sharp and Gauldie for the temperature range orange roughy can tolerate - what is your reference?

Sadly you are clearly willing to slander the fishing industry in support of quota - even backing those appalling SA sea lion researchers.

They were given free passage on months to monitor sea lions by SA shark fishermen who wanted to limit their interactions with sea lions - and came back after they caught very few and then asked shark fishermen to shoot near a sea lion colony saying 'it was for research'.

They then used that 'catch' of a few seal lions, some of which were let go alive, to boost the overall catch and multiplied these few catches across the largest gillnet sets possible to push the mortality to 375 sea lion per year! Vast No Take Zones for shark fishing established - for five boats - and the catch of a single sea lion 'triggered' their implementation. This loaded massive costs on the entire shark fleet unnecessarily. You of all people should at least ring those fishermen in SA and get their story first before slandering them. I did. They now work in Bass Strait a long way away from their families - but you do not seem to care less - yet you 'squeal' about people who oppose the bloody great trawler. Sorry for being a bit upset but your words are sound like treachery to me.

Your advocacy for total management by scientists and bureaucrats has brought the discussion to the point I am trying to make - that the supposed conservation benefits of setting catches and dividing them into tradable units brought this bloody great trawler here - to fish 'Coastal Waters' that have easy access to ports and markets when it is design to fish waters that do not.

This report is an underestimate of the interactions for the company you advocate for http://www.afma.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/R2005-0996.pdf - but does possibly highlights to hypocrisy of the position you advocate on behalf of Seafish Tasmania. Pair trawling pelagically was trialed by fishermen in the 1980's in Bass Strait but abandoned as uneconomic and too likely to catch dolphins and seals in particular. You could easily find who they were and talk with them too.

It has always been hard to know who is in the fishing industry or actually consultants, AFMA advocates, employees or scientists - but it is clear that Australian Fisheries Management Authority and these people are ideological advocates of large corporate own vessels to replace the existing small boat fleet - and use rhetoric much like you have.

Gillnets came into the southern shark fishery in 1973 so boats in Victoria's could avoid catching larger school shark, the basis of the fishery, in Victoria alone because the department of health in Australia and New Zealand claimed they had too much mercury for human consumption. Fishermen were trying to catch only smaller school sharks that were not covered by the ban - instead of all sizes and large school shark that longlines catch. Victoria is the sole 'paying' market for flake Australia - if not the world. It was based on fishing a tiny portion of the vast migratory schools of school shark and later gummy sharks that pass through Bass Strait - close to the Melbourne market.

In truth New Zealand, wanted a greater share of huge market for flake and used the mercury 'ruse' - the bans did not apply to New Zealand caught fish landed processed on the Melbourne market - and saw the fishery spread to Tasmania and SA where mercury bans also did not apply.

In response to the mercury ban the Pinzone bothers adopted gillnets that had been used by the Mitchellson's and Hobson's on the first gillnet boat Rhodondo. They discovered a almost unfished resource of gummy shark (said conservatively to be sustainable at 2000t pa but now cut heavily to 'protects school shark' - and NZ corporate fisheries). Longlines disappeared from the Victorian fishery for shark. They also pioneered the use of 'chilly bins' - giant 'eskis' with sea ice that greatly improved the quality of fish for transport - replacing un-insulated 'tin boxes' on tray trucks and the Victorian industry thrived and survived - until AFMA.

Under the catch management build up to quota AFMA's desperate bid to industrialise fisheries and did not impose restrictions on longlines for a long time. With Quota came and a huge Norwegian longliner turned up, funded much like the bloody great trawler, and seabird catches were so bad that it had to take an observer. Longlines - unlike gillnets - can be run on an 'industrial scale' and were encouraged by AFMA that took no action against this boat bar creating more bureaucratic and science jobs with observers.

Fortunately this boat went broke and disappeared - but the damage it did to seabirds and the reputation of the fishing industry was predictable and unnecessary. Shooting longlines at night stops seabirds catches. For day shooting Australian fishermen were awarded for using fish oil to stop seabirds taking to add to a large number of other methods some of which you mention - but AFMA refuses to enforce them.

Herein lies the con. AFMA has sold its systematic collapse of self sustaining and unsubsidised inshore fleets and the tens of thousands of job losses as 'essential for ecological sustainability' and 'economic efficiency'. In fact it has achieved the diametric opposite. If you reckon they were subsidised prior to federal management in the early 1980s - ask those who told you show references - you may have been lied to.

AFMA was really about subsidising massive boats that reduce labour costs by building a bloody great bureaucracy of managers and scientists slandering the small fishermen and charging them for the 'privilege.

This gradually made it cost so much to fish under that only corporate boats that could better 'write off management costs', employ cheap foreign labour as the northern prawn fleet has. This management shielded operations like Seafish Tasmania from competition. The small boat fleet that lands better quality higher value FRESH fish - more reliably serving local markets with the species that the public wants by working the many lee shores for all weather conditions and using a wide variety of ports in which it creates hundreds of jobs.

This AFMA management sold to the fishing industry by picking 'winners' - fishermen who would both financially benefit - or perceive they would - from being awarded quota for fish they did not catch or paid at times millions of dollars each 'to get out' by taxpayers since 2000.

Now, unbelievably, some fishermen advocate for AFMA while slandering the excellent hard working fishfolk that did the hard yards building reliable fisheries on abundant species, creating infrastructure and markets right down to running fish and fresh fish and fish and chip shops.

Governments were easily sold quota management as a chance to double tax fishermen - in economic ignorance of the taxes paid by the hundreds of small businesses the supported the original fleet.

Fisheries scientists have jobs 'for life' doing stock assessments for every fished species under quota and a massive bureaucracy has grown around evaluating their 'sustainability' all of which costs a huge amount and is passed on through fishermen to the price of fish and the public.

All of this was needless in the world's third largest fishing zone with the worlds tinniest coastal fisheries, on catch per square kilometre, threatened by pollution and habitat loss in bays. estuaries and inlets and not well managed fisheries .

And as this 'bloody great trawler' ploughed into Australian waters the con becomes increasingly exposed to a public that already pays way too much for ITS fish and the massive recreational lobby that have been used to pay for much of the bay and inlet fisheries buyout.

Coastal fisheries operated efficiently with stable long term management that enables self regulation and long term investment - and when they had fishing rights - especially prior to quota. they have have lead so often in protecting the marine environment from blockades to protect seagrass in Botany Bay. They now lead in coalition with the greens again a massive fight to stop industrialisation of the Great Barrier Reef.

In your part of the world Joe - in a ongoing campaign to regulate seismic testing from 1997 to the present - especially after seismic testing in search of somewhere to 'store' greenhouse gas wiped a major portion of Tasmanian scallop beds in 2010. A noted successful ban on coastal seismic testing was won in Victorian MPAs by Port Campbell crayfish folk - especially the women - who stared down the the oil and gas industry and gained support from the Greens in federal parliament and has seismic testing banned in Victorian MPAs.

The abolition of federal management agencies like AFMA for coastal fisheries management is essential for the Australian economy and marine environment.

Seafish Tasmania could avoid all this grief by refitting the Able Tasman to fish toothfish in distant water territories and basing the boat in Tasmania. The last catches for be landed fresh and be a fine eating fish for the Tasmanian and Australian fresh fish markets.

Bob, maybe try and cut back on your comment length.

I asked why you said Seafish Tasmania are yet to demonstrate that they ... avoid catching dolphins and seals ..., when they have to dump fish for which there is no quota and you replied: "Because it is demonstrably true"

Please demonstrate it, then. That is, give evidence (not your opinion only) of them NOT avoiding seals/dolphins (you'll struggle because they are all over SED trials and other avoidance measures), and give evidence (not opinion) of them dumping over-quota catches (because they have never caught their full quota of SPF, and despite your opinion, I've seen no evidence of them catching anything more than incidental quantities of other quota species).

"So how do you know what the bycatch for their boats was?" Because I read the reports (they have high observer coverage). Why do YOU think any different?

"This boat presents a greater risk because it nets are so much bigger" Oh really? Why do you say that? - Seafish says the opposite, and I believe (just my opinion) that they might have a good idea how big their own nets are..

http://www.afma.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/R2005-0996.pdf

....which says, in effect, no dolphins, lotsa seals around, SEDs work but need some more tuning, Seafish is very cooperative.

Your point?

Nothing hypocritical about my position because I never claimed that seal bycatch wasn't an issue, just that it was an issue that could be worked through, indeed the paper's authors stress the support and commitment of Seafish and Gerry Geen in particular to substantiating the bycatch numbers and working for a solution to such.
My references for roughy? Primarily the excellent book "Australian Fisheries Resources" plus numerous references available on the web, the majority, well all of them actually which state that roughy prefer 3 to 7 degrees.
Management came into the school shark fishery because catch per unit effort at the end of the 1980s was 3 times the effort required in the 1960s. As I acknowleged there are certainly issues with the best way to manage the southern shark fishery and arguably gear controls may have been a better method but it is inarguable that there was too much effort and fishermen had to go. It's the same everywhere, fishermen oppose regulation but unless we can demonstrate in a substantial way the proof of our arguments, and shark fishermen have not, then the scientists research carries the day.
Quota management did not bring this trawler here, it was brought here because smaller boats were unable to access the resource effectively or efficiently.
The NPF employs cheap foreign labor? News to my mates who work in it

They are still catching seals and dolphins and the excluder devices don't work. From a previous effort from the big genadier trawlers where they killed 81 seals. http://adl.brs.gov.au/brsShop/data/frdc_final_reportv2.pdf
Now contrast this to the treatment of SA shark fishermen who lost inshore fishing grounds and what those same researchers - with the help of the international inhumane to fishermen society called for observers on shark boats - all ten of them - and closed areas in WA - despite no records of sea lion catch but now these same scientists are claiming that the sea lions drown in the nets and do not come up when they are hauled. Or they fish too far out to catch them perhaps?

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2012/s3595298.htm. Fur seals must be too common to worry about. Strange world. The term best available science could also be applied to the nearest qualified ?()I**&*? . What about the best objective peer reviewed science that uses controls or independently correlated observations from reliable observers - enough to convict someone in a court of law.

Your google finger must be broken - i will track down the dolphin paper - if you want to help just key in the salient facts - trial pelagic pair trawling Flinders and Maria Island dead dolphins.

Bob, 11 years of SED development since then (which was really the start of SEDs), in a different fishery?

Bob, you're the one trying to make some dolphin point, yet you want everyone else to do the searching? Onus is on you.

You're really got a thing about sharks, don't you? No-one else here seems to care...

Andy - here is the dolphin mortality link http://www.imas.utas.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/149648/R05_0996_Final-Rep.pdf

I have already written why CPUE is dodgy - because the unit is single shots and you are comparing a longline fishery in the 1960's to a gillnet and longline fishery in late 1980's.
If you use Australian Fisheries by Roughly I think - as a reference - or talk to older shark fishermen - the WW2 fishery was huge for cod liver oil replacement - producing 500,000 gallons of liver oil for one supplier to the army at 22 shark to the gallon - you do the math - and in Tasmanian school shark have long been used as fertiliser in the apple industry right up to the 1960's with a record in stevens book on shark of catches by poling of 4t per day but no totals. The fishery did not collapse - and they just back off when land whole fish for flake and went along until the mercury ban - then swapped species.

If you have a religious belief in what you have been told and your selective reading I can add nothing to add to your or my knowledge - but if you want to really know where the broader data is just keep asking - but you are very wrong in saying that the fishery was overfished at any time.

Funny thing - just a few years ago now scientists had fishermen shooting shark nets in a star pattern for stock assessment thingamies - and to pay for it they gave them 3 free off quota shots. And the 3 sets of shots that were done yielded all time records catches all over 10 t for the shots - but the scientists said it was a statistical anomaly. The CPUE could have increased because the sharks were really abundant - it happens with migratory species that travels in school many kilometres long and wide with world wide distribution.

...which says "No interactions with dolphins were observed or reported over the entire study period"

From: http://www.imas.utas.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/149648/R05_0996_Final-Rep.pdf

no marine mammal bycatch reported until late
2004, at which time 14 dolphin mortalities occurred in two separate incidents east of
Flinders Island.

By mid-2005 a further three incidents involving dolphin mortalities as well as three
separate incidents involving seal bycatch had occurred.

If the original CPUE data was dodgy and the stock was as abundant as you claim that would translate into an improved CPUE today, which would translate into a higher quota being issued. The present CPUE data is bearing out the scientific assertion that stocks were overexploited.
3 one of shots that killed the pig is a statistical anomaly, thats school shark fishing. You land the net in the right place at the right time you fill the boat up, the same shot 2 days later might yeild nothing because the school has moved on. If shark fishermen were getting 10 ton shots all year, then that would indicate a far greater abundance

Hi Joe, as we share school shark stocks with New Zealand that catches between 1-3000 t pa - they weight fish differently - and I cannot see the point of limiting the Australian catch to around 200t pa when the fish are that abundant at times that more than that amount is dumped annually - while Kiwi fish are sold on the Melbourne market. Check the tagging and survey work by Olsen - started in the 1940's and the very odd report by West and Stevens (of Tasmania) on [pupping grounds where they attribute declines to overfishing of female school shark and ignore the vast environmental changes that compromise school shark pupping grounds - like Westernport Bay losing more than 175 sq k of seagrass beds and the entuire northern coastline of Corner inlet being seawalled - not to mention Port Phillip bay increasing its catchment population - sewerage and industrial waste volumes - significantly since the 1950's

Given that the known school shark nursery grounds in Tasmania, including Pittwater, and in Victoria Westernport, Port Phillip Bay and Corner Inlet are in poor condition there is much we could do to increase our contribution to the southern hemisphere stock.

I would strongly advise you give the SA fishfolk enough respect to actually speak with them before you make pronouncements about species and an interaction you likely know very little about - I am sure you would expect the same consideration from them.

You tag yourself as a fisherman but speak like either and environmentalists, fisheries manager or scientist who has no respect for fishermen and a very narrow view of fisheries - assuming that only the catch of fish affects fish stocks. I am surprised that you would not prefer to own and responsibly run you own boat and catch what you are capable of given the restraints of weather - reasonable gear controls and closed season to protect spawning stock.

I think the thread we have started has finally been exhausted and thank you and others for debating these issues.