Dead Fish, Distracted Policy: How Bureaucracy Is Smothering Our Seafood Industry

While fishers are out on the water battling rising costs and shrinking access, government departments are busy drafting their next harvest strategy, convening another advisory group, or launching yet another “consultation process.” All the while, estuaries turn green with algal blooms, fish die-offs become more frequent, and no one in power seems willing to deal with the actual cause.

Let’s stop pretending the problem is fishing. The real threat to our seafood supply is a bloated bureaucracy that’s more interested in managing perception than protecting the resource.

Over-Managed by the Over-Grown

Commercial fishers in New South Wales have long adhered to rules designed to ensure sustainability — seasonal closures, gear restrictions, species reporting, and more. Most of us take pride in working the water responsibly. But year after year, new layers of regulation are stacked onto a system already buckling under the weight of its own red tape.

Meanwhile, the same bureaucracies that demand precision from fishers can’t even address the basics: polluted stormwater, decaying sewerage infrastructure, chemical discharge, and microplastic build-up. These are the real drivers of ecological harm — but they’re too hard, too expensive, or too politically inconvenient to tackle.

So instead, we get meetings. Frameworks. Modelling. Policy cycles. Glossy infographics. All while the actual health of our waterways continues to decline.

The Bloom and Bust Cycle

When dead fish start washing up — as they did again recently — the default response isn’t investigation or infrastructure reform. It’s media spin.

“Precautionary approach.” “Environmental variability.” “Adaptive management.”

These buzzwords don’t restore dissolved oxygen levels. They don’t stop excess fertiliser from pouring into our rivers. They don’t filter microplastics or remove pharmaceuticals from treated effluent, they just mask inaction.

And when the finger gets pointed, it’s rarely at the departments overseeing catchment health, urban planning, or water treatment. No — the usual scapegoats are the fishers. The one group still showing up and sounding the alarm.

Consumers Are Being Left Behind

Seafood-loving Australians deserve better than this. They deserve access to fresh, locally caught product that’s supported by clean water and a functioning marine ecosystem.

But that future is being quietly smothered under a pile of strategy documents and performance reviews written by people who’ve never held a net.

The irony? The departments and agencies claiming to “protect the fishery” are often the same ones obstructing real protection of the habitat. Estuary health is being sacrificed to save political face. And the public is none the wiser.

Fix What’s Broken — Stop Managing What Isn’t

Australia doesn’t need more management of fishers.It needs management of pollution.

That means:

• Fixing stormwater systems that flush toxins into our breeding grounds

• Upgrading sewerage plants that overflow and dump into estuaries

• Controlling agricultural runoff before it triggers more blooms

• Taking fisher observations seriously, instead of sidelining them for academic models

We don’t need more committees.We need courage — and leadership that faces the hard problems head-on instead of papering over them with bureaucracy.