Submission To Parliament

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1. This is a much delayed Email mail-out from The Narooma Port Committee. The first item is the Recreational Fishing Inquiry. I enclose a link to the submission/public hearing day page: http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/Pro...25767E000BD393 The 1st day of public hearing sis of interest. Apparently one can go in as a member of the public and listen

2. Professor Bob Kearney is due to speak at the second day’s hearing, April 27th at NSW Parliament House meeting room 814-815. If you want to be entertained and learn some Science, 10:15am for about an hour it would be good to support Bob as he has been a tower of strength for the Recreational fishing cause

Tuesday 27th April 2010 .. NSW Parliament House, Sydney

3. Below are some points of interest that Bob Kearney drew up to be discussed

NSW Marine Parks issues for commercial industry and Rec Fishers

•The marine parks in NSW are not marine protected areas and no amount of misuse of information from other parts of the world on the benefits of marine protected areas, or of fishing closures in areas where fisheries management has been non-existent or has abjectly failed, will make them so.

•The ‘science’ that was used to justify the creation of existing marine parks has been proven to be deliberately biased and misleading to the extent of being fraudulent (for example the Marine Parks Authority claimed that referenced documents actually showed that the closure of whole beaches was necessary when the documents cited were based on predominantly rocky areas and did not even mention whole beaches). Marine parks in NSW demonstrably do not meet the Government’s commitment that they be based on sound science.

•The process of creation of marine parks in NSW contravened the State’s national, and Australia’s international, commitments to first identify threats to marine environments and then to base management on addressing these threats (EPBC Act, Commonwealth of Australia 1999).

•The current process deliberately avoids meeting the States commitments to ensure that management measures are proportional to the magnitude of the threat (Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment, Commonwealth of Australia 1992) (the open admission by the Marine Parks Authority that current parks are designed not to address the key threats, such as pollution and introduced species, which are acknowledged by the same agency to be the key threats, is proof of mismanagement).

•No data at all are given to enable assessment of the cost-effectiveness of marine parks and yet NSW is committed to ensuring that the management of marine parks is cost-effective (Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment, Commonwealth of Australia 1992).

•Current marine parks in NSW are nothing more than restrictions on fishing and yet no evidence is given that fishing represents a threat to the species being fished or to the areas that have been closed to fishing in marine parks. To the contrary, the public is continually being given misinformation that nurtures the incorrect assertion that the fisheries of NSW are overexploited. The underlying philosophy that the fisheries of NSW have been overfished and marine parks are necessary to protect fish and aquatic environments for future generations is fundamentally fallacious. In reality the fish of NSW are extraordinarily resilient to commercial fishing at even greater levels than currently operate in NSW. There are no targeted fish species assessed to be seriously overfished (to the extent that the species is in need of conservation) in the fisheries of NSW.

•The NSW Government continues to fail to address the progressive declines of aquatic ecosystems throughout the State (for example as evidenced by the repeated catastrophic fish kills in the northern rivers, but at the same time deliberately misleads the public by stating that marine parks will ensure the future of fishing, even these same northern rivers (see for example Verity Firth’s letter to the Northern Star 20/10/2007).

•Fishing closures in NSW have been in operation for more than 15 years and the data available show there has been very marginal change but no benefit.

•Declaring marine parks that do not address the known threats is contrary to the Government’s commitment to the precautionary principle (there is absolutely nothing precautionary in managing the wrong threat).

•The fishing industry of NSW wants all of the critical marine nursery areas protected against the real threats, not some percentage of them closed to fishing and the public incorrectly told that this represents ‘protection’.