Email Submissions

• It’s un-Australian to take away simple free pleasures of ordinary people.  

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• It’s unscientific.  

  • For example, exactly what fish species is threatened in the Clifton Gardens pink lockout zone? Or ANY of the pink zones?

  • Where is the baseline data that might show improvement and lead to the repeal of pink zones or relaxation of blue zones some day? 

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• It’s disregards the patently obvious and enormously successful fisheries management tools such as bag and size limits, and commercial restrictions. E.g. massive science led recovery of kingfish and aussie salmon.

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• Lockouts include many safe rock fishing spots.  People will crowd alternative spots including less safe spots, jostling to get a line in. More lives will be lost than without lockouts.

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• Many pink lockout zones are safer spots for small boats and kayaks.  Now they will be forced to fish in fewer areas, many closer to ferry and other large vessel traffic. It’s an accident waiting to happen.

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• Transit of pink zones while rigged for fishing is a particularly nasty problem.

  • The boundaries of pink zones are not marked on the water. Many pink zones are in the way of getting to blue e.g. Little Manly.

  • Some pink zones are ridiculous obstacles.  For example, how does a small fishing boat coming out of Sydney Heads get to Wedding Cake Island without risking a fine while crossing the pink zone? 

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• Lockouts do NOTHING to address the top threats identified by science.  In fact they add to the risk of those bigger threats being ignored.

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• The proposals turn fishing activities into a compliance nightmare.  

  • If one travels in a small boat in one day to numerous blue zones the specific details of every zone have to be studied and known beforehand.  And we are trying to relax out on the water.  

  • There are spots where you can fish e.g. for luderick and drummer, but you can’t collect cabbage off the rocks.  If cabbage bait is brought in from elsewhere how could one prove it to an officer?

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• Economic impacts.  Complexity of regulations and access limitations makes fishing as a recreation too hard.  Hundreds of thousands of more casual fishers will simply give it up, or not teach their children to fish.  The marginal profitability of hundreds of businesses, from tackle to boats to accommodation etc, will be impacted leading to job losses and business closures.  It’s doubtful that eco-tourism will fill the void – it’s likely there’ll be no material change to the existing environment anyway from the lockouts.  If the lockouts do work to improve eco-tourism, lets test one site for a few years to obtain proper data for decision making.

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• Global seafood account. If people cannot easily access at least some fresh self-caught seafood they will inevitably eat less seafood (bad for health) and when the do they’ll purchase more imported seafood  which subtracts from global seafood available in poor countries where stocks are already overfished.  All this while our clean wild fish remain under-exploited e.g. the many millions of luderick swimming in the Bronte-Coogee pink lockout zone and others.