Marine parks spark sea wars

AUSTRALIANS agree on the need to conserve our ocean stocks but the trend to marine parks is spawning conflict, with WA the latest battleground.

Commercial fishermen, from left, Damien Fairclough, skipper Bruce Cockman and Clinton Chitty harvest crayfish aboard the Night Stalker. Picture: Vanessa Hunter

AFTER a 14-hour overnight shift pulling up lobster pots in rough seas about 40km off the West Australian coast, the crew of the trawler Night Stalker has had a welcome reminder of the good times that once made the rock lobster business the millionaire factory of the sea.

Below deck, $50,000 worth of crayfish are packed into plastic crates, submerged in special holding tanks flushed with seawater. Hundreds of pots have been winched to the surface, each containing more than a dozen crayfish.

But the night's catch is high because of reduced competition.

Fewer boats have been working because exports to China are still blocked as a result of a trade dispute between the mainland and Hong Kong, through which Australian crayfish travels to avoid import duty. Everyone believes the trade dispute will settle soon enough to get fresh crayfish to Beijing for Chinese New Year.

For an industry that used to be Australia's biggest fishery but has shrunk by half, there are bigger uncertainties at play.

One is the looming debate over where the boundaries will be drawn for a new network of marine reserves to protect biodiversity in commonwealth waters, ranging from three to 200 nautical miles offshore.

The Labor government had planned to announce the proposed boundaries for the southwest zone, stretching from South Australia's Kangaroo Island at the mouth of St Vincent Gulf to the Abrolhos Islands, offshore from Kalbarri in WA, before the end of the year.

In the past few weeks Environment Minister Tony Burke has been holding last-minute round-table consultations with groups representing commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen and environment groups.

The deadline will be missed but Burke is locked into taking action early next year.

After the southwest, the commonwealth is due to announce the proposed zones for the north of WA, northern Australia and the northeast, taking in Cape York and meeting up with the southeast zone established by the Howard government. Environmental groups have made no secret of the fact they will want to revisit the southeast reserve, claiming it does not reduce fishing and provides little protection.

On paper, the offshore bioregional planning is a magnificent process that will put Australia at the forefront of marine ecosystem protection worldwide.

It is also fraught with the sort of politics that has turned the plan to save the Murray-Darling Basin into a nightmare for Labor.

In recognition of how sensitive the issue can be, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott tweaked the "I fish and I vote" nerve in Queensland to much effect during the federal election.

Last week, the WA recreational fishing lobby asked Burke for funding -- stopped by the Rudd government -- to be restored so it could consult with its constituency before any decisions

were made.

The commercial sector, already heavily regulated by state fishery departments, can see another wave of regulation coming.

It is already common knowledge that before Burke announces where the proposed fishing exclusion zones will be, he will announce arrangements to "buy out effort", which effectively means shrinking the already depleted fishing fleet and putting more boats on to a market that has no buyers.

On the other side, Australia's peak environmental groups have coalesced under one umbrella to push through what, for them, has been a process 15 years in the making.

If there is unity, it is that all three groups, the government, the fishers and the environmentalists, recognise fish stocks are declining and agree that anything that increases the number of fish in the ocean is a worthwhile aim.

The push to create sanctuaries in which healthy fish stocks can breed up and spill over into surrounding areas has broad agreement.

The dispute is over how big the sanctuaries will be, how many of them there will be and who will be allowed in.

Michelle Grady, of the Pew Environment Group and Save our Marine Life alliance, says claims that half the coastline will be closed to fishing for 200 nautical miles out to sea are rubbish. "Within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park only 34 per cent of the area is closed to fishing," she says.

"What we are looking at is a network of GBR-type parks around the coast. Within those parks will be sanctuary zones.

"The science is telling us those zones need to be big and in the right place, otherwise it will cost a lot and not achieve very much."

Environment groups have nominated 10 areas in the southwest zone in which they would like to see marine parks established to help preserve the cradles of WA's marine biodiversity (see map and graphic on page two).

"There is a lot more to marine parks than fishing," Grady says. "Ninety per cent of WA's marine stocks are found nowhere else in the world, a function of the region's isolation and unique current flows.

"We need to make sure the fundamentals of marine biodiversity are in place."

The conservation cause is boosted by the finding of the International Census of Marine Life, released this year, which found Australia and Japan had the world's largest marine biodiversity.

"The science is in on marine sanctuaries," Grady says. "It is a lot like building the Noah's Ark of the oceans.

"What we want to establish is a representative system, things that we know are the key things for keeping ecosystems healthy to give the oceans a fighting chance.

"We want to have large multiple-use areas and sanctuary zones with no take, not no go. They would not allow fishing or mining but recreation and shipping could still occur."

Grady says environment groups do not expect the same sort of opposition in WA as there has been elsewhere.

But that may be optimistic.

Kane Moyle, spokesman for state-funded recreational fishing organisation Recfishwest, says there has been little consultation with recreational fishermen.

"We are looking for a risk assessment against what the conservation values are," he says.

Moyle says while recreational and commercial fisheries are usually the first groups excluded from a sanctuary, on a relative risk assessment they are usually not in the top one or two threats.

"A lot of the agenda for the green NGOs [non-government organisations] is to push heavily to have large-scale sanctuaries in the southwest as a precedent for other areas," Moyle says.

"The advocacy of some groups is designed to get an outcome based on a percentage of area locked up rather than conservation values.

"It's a long way from the IUCN [International Union for Conservation of Nature] process that kicked it off more than a decade ago. We are now having a process that meets bio-advocacy rather than conservation objectives."

Moyle claims fishing is already managed through the states and a lot of what is being proposed is simply another tool for fisheries management.

Nor is he completely convinced by the science. "Just as there is a lot of science that exclusion zones work to increase fish stocks, there are similar claims to the contrary," he says.

Also in WA, tourism operator Rod Wilson of Sea Lion Charters says marine health has improved enormously since the creation of a state sanctuary at Green Head, where he has run charters for more than a decade.

Wilson, who collects data on the sea lion population as part of his licence to take snorkellers to the area, says the population has almost doubled since cray fishing was restricted.

Whatever the facts, the commercial sector knows it will carry the burden of any new regulations.

Says Peter Glass, president of the Shark Bay Snapper Fishermen's Association in WA: "The problem with marine parks and management of the ocean is compliance; compliance only applies to one sector and that's the commercial sector.

"There are only 400 [commercial fishermen] left on this whole coast now and 200 of those are serious, the other 200 are really just subsistence.

"We get all this governance and we are expected to pay for it as well."

Glass says commercial operators will pay because politically it will be too difficult for the government to increase regulation on the recreational sector. "It gives someone a good feeling and we are basically thrown to the wolves for that cause," he says.

"But if they came out and said they are going to do something about the recreational sector it wouldn't get past the first base politically. It's a big deal what we are facing and I think they are targeting the wrong people."

Glass says he is all for protecting the environment but he does not think marine parks are the way to do it. "Conservation doesn't mean you block areas off because all you do is transfer the effort," Glass says.

"People say you take that effort out but that is not what happens; you enhance one area to the detriment of another. I can tell you very little work has been done by the people who want a marine park. The bits they want will be our best bits because by default that's the only way they can identify that these are any good.

"What I don't like is you are expected to believe and pay for something as a taxpayer that is tokenism."

But after a decade of turmoil in the crayfish business, Night Stalker skipper Bruce Cockman is resigned to more change.

The WA rock lobster industry used to be Australia's biggest fishery, which at its height was worth more than $400 million a year.

Today, the annual rock lobster catch is worth less than half that amount and all indications from the puerulus count -- the monitoring of juveniles, which gives a three-year leading indicator of what to expect -- are there are several lean years ahead.

Onshore, the dockyards are stacked with boats for sale. Less than $500,000 will buy a commercial vessel that cost more than $3.5m to build.

Where the boats used to go out every day in hard-fought competition, skippers now take weekends off because each person is allocated a set amount of crayfish they are allowed to collect in a season.

"It has changed the industry dramatically," Cockman says. "We are just harvesters, we are not hunters any more."

Cockman believes properly managed fisheries are more important than marine parks. "The whole area should be treated as a marine park," he says. "It really gets down to what uses you can have in the area.

"If you lock up exclusion zones you put pressure on the other areas and then you have to buy out effort to reduce the fishery.

"What's the point of buying out effort? If the whole thing is managed properly you shouldn't have to have any exclusion zones. It should not be about making people feel good about drawing a square on a map somewhere they are never going to visit."

Perth businessman and former Perth stock exchange chairman John Poynton says the science is compelling that if you set aside parks for fish stocks to breed up things will improve.

"I think people now understand what is proposed is not as draconian as some had believed," he says. "But if it affects their livelihood people will have an opinion and people from outside need to respect that."

Geraldton-based fishing charter operator Jay Cox is suspicious of plans to close off the whole of the Abrolhos Islands and 40 per cent to 50 per cent of all the waters off the WA coast.

"The Greens just want to turn everything to 200km out to sea into a marine park," Cox says. "There is our livelihood gone straight away."

But after witnessing a "massive decline" in fish stocks in the past 35 years, Cox says he would be happy to see something like the Great Barrier Reef marine parks system that provides sanctuaries for fish to breed up and migrate out.

Biologist and conservationist Wendy Payne says the global view is that Australia is trying to act while we still have a fishery to protect. "The fishing industry is changing due to the environment and it is important that industry does change before we have a repeat of the [Atlantic] cod disaster, where fish stock collapsed.

"The challenge is to downsize it before there is nothing to save."

Her marine biologist husband Mic Payne believes more aquaculture is part of the future. "Pink snapper is eminently culturable and can be farmed in sea cages," he says. "You can grow them now but it is not cost-effective against the wild fishery."

For Tim Nicol, marine co-ordinator with the Conservation Council of WA, the state's peak environment group, the marine sanctuary system is necessary both to protect fish stocks and lift the profile of the region.

"Sanctuary zones are important in WA because of the types of fish, such as dhufish and groper, which are long-lived and need sanctuary zones for proper management," Nicol says.

He says many recreational fishermen are supportive because with the bag limit for some fish now as low as one fish they recognise the need for something to be done to make sure there are stocks for the future.

"There is some vocal opposition, largely on ideological grounds," Nicol says.

He says it is ironic the recreational fishermen who do object say on the one hand that reserves won't be effective and on the other that they will have a honeypot effect and attract poachers.

"We have to look at the Great Barrier Reef for a sense of what would happen with poaching," he says. "Most people obey the rules and you are still seeing two to three times the number of big fish in the sanctuaries."

The Conservation Council says the minimum size for a sanctuary to be effective is 20km by 20km.

If the federal government is able to stick to its timetable, the southwest region will be finalised in the middle of next year and the northwest, north and northeast zones by the end of the year.

Grady says Australia will be the first country to attempt such a large area of ocean mapping.

"Given the size of Australia's territorial waters it is a very important moment for marine conservation around the world," she says. "The government does need to make the hard decisions on marine sanctuaries and this is why the environment movement is running such a strong campaign on this."

The conservation movement's own polling indicates eight out of 10 people support large sanctuary zone protection.

But Grady says environmental groups are realistic enough to know people will make their decisions on marine park boundaries on the basis of what it does to their own watery back yards.