Net Zero Fishers: The Real Goal Behind the Climate Scam

Australia’s fishing industry is being told it must “decarbonise”. Renewable diesel trials, emissions targets, and buzzwords like “net zero” are suddenly everywhere. But none of this is about saving the planet. It is about control, redistribution of wealth, and removing independent operators who stand in the way of centralised systems.

For years, governments have chipped away at commercial fishing under the banner of sustainability. Marine parks, species bans, buyouts, and endless red tape have slowly strangled one of the oldest and most self-reliant industries in the country. Now, the same bureaucrats who created the problem claim that climate change is the reason fishers must change their fuel, change their engines, and change their way of life.

Across Australia, entire fisheries have been shut down or restricted beyond viability. The once-thriving East Coast Trawl fleet has been slashed through zoning and quota manipulation. Queensland’s gillnet closures wiped out family-owned operations overnight, all under the banner of “Great Barrier Reef protection”. In Western Australia, abalone divers have faced crippling limits and licensing freezes. South Australia has seen prawn and sardine operators burdened with new spatial closures that favour corporate processors. In New South Wales, decades of share management schemes, buyouts, and marine park expansions have created a death by a thousand cuts for small-scale fishers.

The result is not a more sustainable industry. It is a smaller one. The policy trend across every state leads to the same outcome — fewer licences, fewer fishers, fewer boats, and less Australian seafood on Australian plates. That is what “net zero fishers” really means.

Meanwhile, imported seafood floods supermarket shelves, much of it from countries with no catch reporting, no labour oversight, and no environmental regulation. Governments call this progress. They pat themselves on the back for closing fisheries at home while outsourcing the environmental damage overseas.

Renewable diesel at five dollars a litre is not a solution. It is a test of submission. Governments know it is unviable for small operators, but they push it anyway. The idea is to make the business of fishing so difficult, so expensive, and so wrapped in compliance that only corporations or government-backed entities can survive. That is not environmental reform. That is consolidation of power.

The same global agenda that has devastated agriculture is now being turned on the sea. “Net zero” has become the excuse for every policy that restricts freedom, kills small business, and transfers wealth from the working class to multinational interests. The oceans have become another front in a much larger war on independence.

Fishers do not need to be lectured about stewardship. They have lived sustainability for generations. They understand seasons, tides, and the natural balance far better than anyone writing climate policy in an office in Sydney or Canberra. What they need is the freedom to work without interference and the right to feed their communities without being treated as a threat.

The path Australia is on will end with an empty coast, silent harbours, and imported fish replacing what once came from our own waters. “Net zero” is not about zero emissions. It is about zero resistance. And unless Australians wake up to what is being done in the name of climate, the last independent industries we have left will disappear under the same green curtain that hides the truth.