Regional & State Issues

Australia is importing seafood from poorly regulated sources while shutting down its own fishers. With only 1,200 wild-caught operators left, it's time for a Parliamentary Enquiry before the damage becomes irreversible.

No one fishing for a living wants to go back to the days of growth overfishing on Silver Trevally in NSW. The minimum legal length, effort reductions and spatial protections are real changes, and they have cost our businesses dearly.

When “overfishing” became the crisis of the 1970s, governments turned to market logic to save the sea. The Individual Transferable Quota promised order and sustainability, but instead it changed who could fish, who couldn’t, and who owned the ocean. The Birth of the Quota explores how a policy built on good intentions transformed an industry and the people behind it.

Key Tasmanian lobster grounds have been shut so foreign owned aquaculture can keep exporting clean on paper. Emergency antibiotics for salmon pens, an emergency ban for Aussie lobster boats. This piece asks why Australian fishing families keep paying for other people’s risks.

Commercial fishing is being pushed out of local estuaries in the name of “protecting the fishery,” while charter boats, fishing media and tackle retail are celebrated. The public is told this is conservation. It is not. It is a handover. This story asks a simple question: who gets the estuary, the people who feed the community or the people who film the catch.

Western Australia’s Western Rock Octopus Fishery is thriving, showing rare growth in Australia’s commercial fishing sector. But as it’s hailed as a sustainable success, questions remain about why we still pay foreign certifiers to validate what our own scientists already know.

NSW commercial fishing licensing: price signals over paper. How NSW commercial fishing licensing has shifted to rigid caps and shares, choking estuary flexibility, while rec rules stay simple. Mulloway caps examined.

Government climate policies claim to protect the planet, but in reality they are pushing Australia’s working fishers out of existence. “Net zero fishers” is becoming the true outcome of net zero emissions.

Offshore wind farms NSW have been cancelled or paused, a decision welcomed by commercial fishers. Projects off Newcastle and the Illawarra threatened fishing grounds, seafood supply, and left no clear plan for clean-up once turbines became inoperable. For fishers and seafood lovers, this is good news: the waters remain open, local supply chains are protected, and the ocean won’t become a dumping ground for abandoned industrial infrastructure.