WA’s Western Rock Octopus Fishery: Proof Our Fisheries Don’t Need Foreign Validation

It is rare these days to read about growth in Australia’s commercial fishing sector. Too often the headlines are about cuts, closures and concessions. So when a fishery like Western Australia’s Western Rock Octopus Fishery grows by more than 250 per cent over a decade, supports over 150 jobs, and earns more than $30 million a year, it is something worth celebrating.

This is an industry that is doing everything right. The Western Rock Octopus Fishery is scientifically managed, locally researched and biologically sustainable. Our own scientists at DPIRD and FRDC have done the work, from mapping the stock structure to confirming that Octopus djinda (a newly recognised WA species) is in good health and well managed. It is one of the cleanest and most innovative fisheries in the country, using specialised trigger traps that protect juveniles and reduce bycatch to almost zero.

Yet, despite all that, the Western Rock Octopus Fishery still needs to pay an international body for “certification”, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), to tell us what we already know.

Why?

Why do we, as a nation with some of the world’s most rigorous fisheries science and management systems, need a foreign organisation to rubber stamp our own work? Why are we paying for blue tick labels when the Australian Government already funds the research, conducts risk assessments, and enforces compliance through AFMA, DPIRD and ABARES?

Certification may once have been useful to prove sustainability in poorly managed regions, but here in Australia it has become a costly exercise in virtue signalling. Our fisheries are already certified by our own institutions and by the facts. Every fishery undergoes ecological risk assessments, stock status reviews and compliance audits. None of that relies on a foreign certifier.

The Western Rock Octopus Fishery should be a national success story, a homegrown model for how sustainability and profitability can work together. Instead, it has been dressed up to meet international approval, as if we need external validation to believe in our own capability.

Australia’s fishers and scientists deserve better. Recognition should come from within, not from an imported logo. We should celebrate the Western Rock Octopus Fishery not because it is MSC certified, but because it is Australian managed, science led and community driven.

If our own government does not trust its scientists to certify what they have already studied and proven, that is not a reflection on the industry, it is a reflection on our priorities.