The Landings Lie: Stock Assessment Transparency and How Fisheries “Science” Is Gutting Australia’s Seafood

Walk into a fish shop anywhere in Australia and you can feel the shift without reading a single report. Less local wild catch. More imported product. More uncertainty about where it came from, how it was produced, and what standards sat behind it. Meanwhile, the official explanation is increasingly predictable: the stock is depleted.

Sometimes that is true. Rebuilding is sometimes necessary.

But there is a national pattern that has become too convenient to ignore, and it starts with one deceptively simple move: treating landings as if they are a direct measure of abundance.

Landings are not biomass. Landings are behaviour.

If fewer operators target a species, landings fall. If access is removed, landings fall. If costs rise and a species becomes uneconomic, landings fall. If the legal size changes and most of the catch becomes unretainable, landings fall.

Without stock assessment transparency, you can make all of those things look like “the fish are gone”.

Stock assessment transparency is the line between truth and narrative

A real stock signal is the product of multiple, properly standardised indicators, not just a chart of annual tonnes. At minimum, an honest public explanation should show:

• who is fishing (participation)

• how much they are fishing (effort)

• how effective they are (standardised CPUE, not raw catch)

• what is discarded (and what is assumed)

• what is removed outside the commercial channel (recreational, charter, cultural, illegal)

When those are missing, buried, or assumed away, “precaution” becomes a cloak that can be used to justify almost any outcome.

Silver Trevally is the cleanest case study NSW has produced in years because the official material shows how fragile “landings down” becomes the moment you put the rest of the picture on the table.

Silver Trevally: when landings are shaped by rules, access, and participation

Silver Trevally is a classic example of why landings can be made to tell the wrong story.

The first red flag is structural change. Major rule settings and access shifts can break the link between landings and abundance. If the system treats those changes as a stock signal, you can manufacture a “decline” on paper.

The second red flag is discards. When size limits change, discards become a bigger component of total fishing mortality. If discards are not transparently measured, published, and updated, public claims about “total impact” are built on sand.

The third red flag is targeting behaviour. Trevally is often avoidable in trawl operations. Operators can shift away from it when markets, costs, access, or regulation makes it less viable. That means a gradual decline in landings can simply reflect operators moving on.

Quota concentration and low participation: landings cannot “tell the whole story”

Once Trevally quota settings came in, around 60% of landings became attributed to one boat. Your operational point goes further: that concentration likely existed even before quota because other operators had already shifted away from Trevally, leaving a small number of boats carrying the catch.

You also point out a reality that rarely makes it into public narratives: less than 10% of the Northern Zone trawl fishery operates full-time in the fish sector. Most businesses may still hold Northern Zone shares, but many are primarily working in the ocean prawn sector.

Put those facts together and the conclusion is unavoidable: landings cannot tell the whole story. They might be measuring the stock. They might also be measuring participation collapse and targeting substitution.

That is why stock assessment transparency must be non-negotiable, especially when a depleted label is on the table.

The elephant in the room: structural reforms and effort displacement

Across Australia, whole fisheries have been reshaped through buyouts, restructuring, access changes, and cost pressures. When fleets rationalise, landings fall. When areas close, landings fall. When effort is displaced, landings fall.

If assessments rely heavily on landings and catch rates without separating those structural changes from abundance signals, a policy-driven reduction in participation can be misread as a biological decline.

This is not a technical argument. It is common sense. You cannot claim a stock has collapsed when you have also removed the people, the access, and the economic viability required to catch it.

Blue Swimmer Crabs: change the ruler, then act surprised when the numbers change

Blue Swimmer Crab shows how easy it is to create a landings shock by changing size settings.

If most of the retained catch sits close to the minimum, raising the minimum size will reduce legal landings. A sudden decline in landings after a size change can be entirely consistent with stable abundance. It can also be consistent with abundance changes. The landings chart alone cannot tell you which.

So when landings are used publicly as evidence of depletion, but the size distribution, discard rates, and CPUE are not front and centre, the public is not being shown the truth. They are being shown a narrative.

That is exactly what stock assessment transparency is meant to prevent.

Mulloway: landings can fall while CPUE tells a different story

Mulloway is the textbook warning label for landings-based narratives.

Landings can fall over time while CPUE trends do something different, especially when closures, access removal, or targeting shifts reduce the ability of the commercial fleet to operate normally.

If decisions are justified using landings while leaving CPUE out of the public explanation, the community is effectively being asked to accept a conclusion without the one indicator that helps separate “less fishing” from “less fish”.

The consumer is paying for this, every week

Australians are eating more imported seafood. That is not a moral judgement. It is a reality.

The question is why. And one driver is obvious: when local wild-caught supply is reduced on the back of incomplete public evidence narratives, consumers do not stop eating seafood. They substitute. Often into product streams where they have less visibility and less confidence than they do with local wild-caught seafood.

So yes, the seafood consumer has suffered. They have lost availability, paid more, and been pushed toward imports, while being told it is all “for sustainability”, even when the public evidence chain is incomplete.

The controversial conclusion: if it looks like a machine, stop calling it a mistake

At some point, repeating the same pattern stops being an accident.

When stock narratives are built on landings, while participation, effort displacement, and standardised CPUE are missing from determinations or not central to the decision story, you create a system where outcomes can be steered and defended as “precaution”.

Then add the uncomfortable part: the system is heavily funded. Taxpayer money and industry money flows into research, assessment, and advisory processes that shape who gets to fish and what Australians get to eat.

If the outputs of that system consistently justify the removal of local supply while the hard questions stay unanswered, people will draw their own conclusions. They will start using words that agencies hate: capture. conflict. corruption.

I am not accusing any individual of wrongdoing. I am saying the incentives, the opacity, and the consumer harm now justify an independent inquiry with teeth.

Australia needs a Royal Commission, or an equivalent national commission of inquiry, into stock assessment governance and fisheries decision-making, including:

• mandatory publication of participation and effort metrics by sector

• standardised CPUE presented centrally in public determinations, not treated as optional

• explicit accounting of discards and the assumptions behind them

• quantified treatment of recreational, charter, cultural and illegal removals, or formal uncertainty loading when they are not measured

• full transparency on how publicly funded research is commissioned, reviewed, and then used to drive regulatory outcomes

If a system has the power to strip local food supply from Australian communities, it should be held to a higher standard than “trust us”.

That standard has a name. Stock assessment transparency.