THE 113-DAY LOCKOUT - GIVE AN INCH, TAKE A MILE

Patonga NSW

In Part 1, we revealed the stark reality of the NSW commercial fishing calendar in 2025: 113 days when licensed working boats are shut out by law.

Whenever we share that statistic, the first question from the public is almost always the same: “Why? Is it to let the fish breed?”

It is a logical assumption. We have all been conditioned to believe that every restriction on commercial fishing is about conservation or stock rebuilding. But in the case of the weekend and public holiday bans that hit garfish, whitebait and estuary trawl, biology was never the starting point. The fish do not stop breeding on Saturdays and they do not stop swimming on public holidays.

The original reason was not about saving fish. It was about managing social conflict.

Yet that conflict is often framed in a way that hides what is really going on. The story is told as if it is “the public” versus “the commercial fisher”. That is a false choice. The commercial fisher is the proxy for the public. We are the only way the vast majority of NSW families, who do not own a boat and do not have the time or money to go fishing themselves, can access their own local seafood resource.

When you lock us out, you are not just stopping a business. You are locking out the seafood eating public.

To see how far the reality on the water has drifted from the story that was used to justify these bans, you only have to look at the Hawkesbury.

In 1999 there were more than sixty five licensed prawn trawl fishers working that river. Today there are fewer than twenty five. The fleet has more than halved. There are fewer boats, fewer crews and fewer nights worked than there were when the weekend closure was first sold as the only way to calm a crowded river.

The same thing has happened on the coast. Off Patonga Beach there were once several hauling crews chasing sea mullet, whitebait and other schooling fish. Those crews were part of the daily rhythm of the place. Today that number has dropped to almost zero.

The rules were written for a world where commercial fishing effort was dense and highly visible. That world no longer exists, yet the same old closures are still being held up as if nothing has changed.

The pressure on space has not come from a growing commercial fleet. It has come from a shrinking one. The weekend and public holiday bans that were introduced to manage conflict in the 1970s and 1990s are now being applied to a modern fishery with a fraction of the boats, tighter quota, stricter gear rules and massive chunks of water already carved away into Recreational Fishing Havens. The conflict story stayed the same. The facts on the water did not.

The Ocean Story: From Beach Trucks to Back to Boat

To understand how we ended up with ocean hauling weekend bans that catch garfish and whitebait, you have to go back several decades.

On parts of the coast, the classic image of commercial ocean hauling was utes and trucks on the sand. Crews would drive onto the beach, row the net out through the breakers, then use vehicles to haul the gear and the catch back in.

As tourism grew, beaches became busier. Families were trying to play cricket where commercial crews were once driving trucks. The obvious pressure point was not the fish, it was the shared space.

According to long time operators, industry figures actually tried to solve that conflict in good faith. They offered a voluntary summer arrangement for the worst of the holiday crunch. Keep trucks off the sand at the peak times. Work early and late. Give the tourists room to swim.

That was the inch.

Instead of keeping that agreement narrow and targeted at the real problem, the department took that inch and turned it into a mile of permanent regulation.

The beach story was converted into blanket rules for “hauling nets”. Those rules were then pushed out across methods that never touched the sand in the first place. In many cases the same style of weekend ban now applies to “back to boat” haulers who shoot nets from a boat and work entirely off the beach. Crews can be fishing well offshore, hauling garfish and baitfish in deep water, and they are still banned by a rule that was originally written to deal with a truck on a crowded surf beach.

The science has moved. The rule has not.

Eastern Sea Garfish is now under a conservative quota. DPI reports show the stock has rebuilt to a sustainable level and fishing mortality is below natural mortality. DPI has even admitted in its own TAC papers that the old garfish weekend closure is now “under review” and may no longer be justified.

Yet while they quietly question the garfish weekend ban, the same style of weekend closures on whitebait hauling nets remain untouched and unexplained. There is no whitebait specific harvest strategy and no recent stock review that says those lost days are still needed for the biology of the stock. The rule survives because it is convenient, not because it has been freshly proven.

The Estuary Story: The Weekend Takeover

On the Hawkesbury River and in other estuaries the story is different, but the pattern is the same.

The Hawkesbury is one of the closest working estuaries to Sydney, so it has always been highly visible to both recreational fishers and commercial trawlers. When the original weekend closure was brought in, it was targeted at the lower river where there was perceived conflict with recreational traffic. Downstream of the Juno Point closure line, trawling was still allowed on weekends, because even the department accepted that there was little or no conflict in those reaches.

Something changed in the early 2000s. Rather than reassessing the actual level of conflict, the weekend closure was simply extended upstream of Juno Point and pushed across the rest of the Hawkesbury Estuary Prawn Trawl grounds. The line that once separated the busy lower river from the quieter upstream reaches was effectively erased, and a rule designed for one stretch of water was rolled over the top of all of it.

For the Estuary Prawn Trawl fleet, the weekend closure was never about sand or surf. It was about recreational fishers and other water users wanting the river to themselves at peak times. The original argument went like this. Commercial trawlers should not compete for space with recreational boats on busy weekends. Take the trawlers off the water for those days and the conflict goes away.

Even if you accept that logic in the 1970s, it completely ignores what has happened since.

Over the last few decades the government has already forced a massive reallocation of space through Recreational Fishing Havens. These were not voluntary deals. They were compulsory acquisitions. Vast areas of productive water were stripped from the commercial sector and handed exclusively to recreational fishing, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

You would think that would have settled the “space” argument. Commercial fishers were expelled from entire systems in the name of resolving conflict.

But that was not enough.

After taking exclusive space through RFHs, the system then moved to take exclusive time in many of the waters that remain. In the Hawkesbury and other shared estuaries, prawn trawlers have now been locked out of weekend and public holiday fishing across almost all of their grounds, including areas upstream of Juno Point where there was never any proven conflict to begin with.

Give An Inch, Lose A Mile

It is the same pattern as offshore. Give an inch, lose a mile. You give up whole areas to try to keep the peace. Then in the areas that are supposed to be shared, you are told to stand aside again, this time by the clock.

The imbalance runs one way. On a Saturday, a recreational fisher is free to launch a boat, tow a wakeboard, anchor on a prime spot, and catch fish for private use. A licensed commercial fisher, working under quota, bycatch reduction devices and export accreditation, is banned from catching fish for the general public in the very same water.

We have adapted our gear, our methods and our work patterns to stay out of the way.

In the ocean, many operators have shifted to “back to boat” hauling that never puts a tyre on the sand.

In estuaries, most professional work is done at night, at dawn, or outside the times of peak recreational traffic.

The industry has given ground on effort, on areas, on gear, on seasons and on mesh size. Yet the weekend and public holiday bans inserted decades ago for social and political reasons remain largely untouched and are now wrapped in the language of “sustainability” and “ESD”, even when DPI’s own stock assessments no longer support that story.

We are repeatedly told that NSW commercial fisheries are some of the most tightly managed and sustainable in the world. If that is true, then it is time to ask why legacy weekend closure rules for garfish, whitebait and estuary trawl are still treated as sacred.

Because every time a working boat is tied up on a Saturday for an outdated rule, more imported frozen seafood fills the gap. And it is not the tourist with the 4WD or the owner of the ski boat who carries that cost. It is every family that relies on someone else to bring local fish to their plate.

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Keep an eye out for the next parts in The 113-Day Lockout series. We’ll dig deeper into how these closures were created, what they mean for local seafood on your plate, and the reforms we’re calling for. If you care about real NSW fish on NSW tables, don’t miss what comes next.