Recreational fishing fees are back on the agenda for South Australia, amid plans for new fishing advisory council
MANDATORY recreational fishing licences – forcing people to pay to cast out their lines and nets – could make their way to SA under plans for a review of the sector.
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MANDATORY recreational fishing licences – forcing people to pay to cast out their lines and nets – are back on the agenda in South Australia under plans for a review of the sector.
Licensing for non-commercial fishers is expected to be among the first issues discussed when the State Government’s new Recreational Fishing Advisory Council meets early next year.
The recreational fishing community is divided on whether licences are a good idea but insists that money raised should be used to replenish depleted species stocks and provide much-needed boating infrastructure upgrades.
The SA Fishing Alliance will be among groups represented on the council and its chairman Graham Keegan expected the issue to be discussed early next year. His group’s members were split on the prospect of introducing mandatory licences.
“The main thought coming out of the angling community, is ‘tell us what we’re going to get for it’,” Mr Keegan said.
He said the idea had merit but only if the funds used were distributed across a range of projects, benefiting saltwater and freshwater fishers alike.
It could benefit projects such as building new boat ramps and upgrading others and restocking estuaries such as the Port and Onkaparinga rivers.
Primary Industries and Regional Development Minister Tim Whetstone did not rule out introducing recreational licences when Labor’s spokesman Eddie Hughes asked about the State Government’s agenda during Budget Estimates.
“It should be noted that this advisory council will be speaking on behalf of those 277,000 rec fishers; it will not be me speaking on their behalf,” Mr Whetstone said.
Danny Simpson, of RecFish SA, which will also sit on the council, said there was a growing acceptance among anglers towards a licence scheme, similar to those implemented in Victoria and NSW.
In Victoria, a licence costs $36 a year, or less for shorter periods, netting millions of dollars for the sector.
“We believe it will bring benefits to fishing in SA and the easy way to understand those benefits is to look to Victoria and NSW,” Mr Simpson said.
“The fishing programs there are fantastic, well developed and receive massive support.
“They do a huge amount of stocking in freshwater environments to support fishing and they’ve just undertaken a massive buy-up of commercial fishing licences in Port Phillip Bay.”
His organisation is already running a permit system for fishing in some SA reservoirs, including the Warren, near Williamstown, and Bundaleer Reservoir at Spalding.
“We’ve sold 2000 permits in the last year and we’ll be returning all that funding into managing and improving those sites for recreational fishing,” Mr Simpson said.
There was also support among the Riverland community for the introduction of an inland recreational fishing licence to support a Murray cod stocking program in the River Murray. But John Thomas, of fishing forum Fishin SA, believed the majority of fishers did not want to pay for licences.
He said the argument that the scheme had worked in Victoria was redundant because SA offered far fewer places for freshwater fishermen to make quality catches.
“It’s a very different structure in Victoria and a totally different geography,” Mr Thomas said.
“The ‘salties’ aren’t too bad on the idea of buying out nets, so if an RFL (recreational fishing licence) was to partially fund those buybacks, probably most would be OK with that,” Mr Thomas said. “But then you have people saying ‘no, we should not have to pay for people who have wrecked the fisheries’.”
Mr Whetstone said the new council would provide advice on “initiatives and big-picture policies that impact on the recreational fishing sector”. He said though introducing recreational fishing licences was “not a Marshall Liberal Government policy”, the new council could be used to discuss the idea.
Salisbury East mother Rebecca Gay regularly goes fishing on the Eyre Peninsula and Largs Bay and Brighton jetties with her partner Dimitri and children Devin, 9, and Dimitroula, 6. If licences were introduced, she said the money raised should go towards more compliance officers.