When Fisheries Become a Hobby: The Many Hats Problem in Australian Government
- Joshua Van Der Neut
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Across Australia, something subtle but significant is happening to fisheries governance.
It is not loud. It is not framed as an attack. It is presented as “modernisation”, “coordination” and “efficiency”.
But when you step back, a clear pattern emerges.
Productive, food-producing industries are being rebranded, absorbed and diluted inside sprawling mega-portfolios. And once that happens, they rarely come back.
This is not accidental drift.
It is structural.
Victorian Fisheries Authority Erasure Under Outdoor Recreation Victoria
From 1 July 2026, the Victorian Fisheries Authority will be dissolved into a new body: Outdoor Recreation Victoria.
On paper, this is an administrative restructure.
In reality, it is a signal.
By merging the VFA with the Game Management Authority and bundling it together with 4WDing, camping and broader “outdoor activities”, the Victorian Government is making a statement.
Commercial fishing is no longer being treated as a primary food-producing industry.
It is being reframed as a lifestyle activity.
This is the many hats problem in action.
When a productive industry is placed under an Outdoor Recreation umbrella, it stops being viewed through the lens of food security, supply chains and commercial viability. It becomes just another stakeholder inside a leisure portfolio.
The political incentives shift.
The priorities shift.
And eventually, the funding shifts.
The Budgetary Warning Sign
This did not begin with the rebrand.
In early 2025, the VFA reportedly faced a 44 per cent cut to frontline enforcement.
That is not coordination. That is hollowing out.
Specialised fisheries compliance requires specific expertise, local knowledge and on-water presence. When budgets are slashed and responsibilities broadened, what you get is not efficiency. You get dilution.
A broad administrative blanket replaces specialised capability.
And when enforcement weakens, so does the integrity of the system.
Knowledge Loss Masquerading as Integration
The merger assumes that a centralised digital “bush user” hub can replace decades of fisheries-specific institutional knowledge.
It cannot.
Managing fish stocks, quotas and commercial access is not the same as managing camping permits or 4WD tracks. Fisheries science and compliance are specialised domains built on long-term data, industry relationships and nuanced local realities.
Once that expertise is absorbed into a recreation super-agency, accountability blurs.
When everyone wears many hats, no one owns the outcome.
The Quiet Below and the Severing of Consequence
This isn’t just a failure of bureaucracy.
It is a severing of consequence.
In my novel The Quiet Below, I explore a world where those in power are so shielded from the impact of their decisions that the “grounded” people, those doing the actual work of survival, become invisible.
We are watching elements of that dystopia manifest in Victorian fisheries policy.
When a politician in an air-conditioned office decides that a commercial fisher is the same as a weekend jet-skier, they are untethering themselves from the coastline. They are detaching policy from production. They are severing decision from consequence.
In The Quiet Below, power drifts upward and outward until those making decisions no longer feel the weight of them. The burden is redistributed downward. The insulated never experience the impact.
The same dynamic is emerging in mega-portfolios.
When Fisheries is absorbed into Outdoor Recreation, the commercial operator becomes just another “user group”. The language changes first. Then the framing. Then the funding.
By hollowing out the industry and rebranding it as leisure, government ensures that when the industry weakens, shrinks or collapses, the sound of it hitting the ground will not echo inside Parliament.
It will fall quietly.
A Quiet Below is created, where those who produce food are expected to suffer in silence, away from the headlines of primary production and economic importance.
That is the real danger of the many hats model.
It does not just dilute responsibility.
It insulates it.
NSW and the Illusion of Control
Victoria is formalising its restructure. New South Wales has taken a different path.
In NSW, Fisheries sits inside an enormous portfolio stack. The current Minister oversees Agriculture, Regional NSW and Western NSW. Fisheries is one component of a vast machinery.
This is not a criticism of the individual. It is a structural problem.
No single human can competently steer the intricacies of commercial estuary quotas, stock assessments and compliance frameworks while simultaneously managing a $25 billion agricultural sector.
It is simply too much.
Thin Briefs, Thick Consequences
In NSW, the commercial fisher rarely speaks directly to the decision-maker.
Instead, they speak to a middle manager. That manager reports to a director. The director reports to a secretary. The secretary briefs the Minister.
By the time the issue reaches the top, it has been compressed into a few pages.
That creates an illusion of control.
A three-page brief feels comprehensive. But it cannot capture the lived reality of a Hawkesbury River prawn trawler, a share management restructure or the economic consequences of a seasonal closure.
When portfolios stack up, overconfidence in second-hand information becomes inevitable.
And something else happens.
The more hats a Minister wears, the easier it becomes to deflect.
“I don’t recall.”
“Can I take that on notice.”
“That is not part of my responsibilities.”
When Fisheries is just one slice of a mega-portfolio, accountability fragments. Responsibility becomes shared, then blurred, then diluted.
In a narrow, dedicated Fisheries portfolio, the Minister owns the outcome. In a stacked structure, there is always another hat to point to.
The National Shift in Commercial Fishing Governance Australia
Victoria and NSW are not isolated cases.
Across Australia, specialised fisheries departments are increasingly being folded into mega-portfolios.
In Western Australia, sweeping structural reforms have coincided with significant demersal restrictions. In Queensland, large-scale gillnet removals have reshaped coastal fisheries. In both states, Fisheries does not stand alone. It shares space with Agriculture or Rural Communities.
The trade-off is predictable.
When a Minister wears many hats, the niche producer loses to the mass voter.
Recreation outnumbers commercial operators. The political incentives are obvious.
Boat ramps deliver ribbon cuttings. Stock assessments deliver long-term stability.
Guess which one wins in an election cycle.
Why the Many Hats Model Fails
This is not about personalities. It is about incentives and structure.
Trade-Offs Without Clear Signals
When a Minister must choose between funding a new recreational facility or commissioning a detailed stock study, what guides that choice?
There is no profit-and-loss test inside government to reveal which investment creates real value. Decisions become political, not economic.
The option that buys more votes often prevails over the option that secures long-term food production.
Over time, that skews the system away from productivity and toward optics.
The Local Knowledge Deficit
The most important knowledge in fisheries is local and practical.
It lives on boats. In logbooks. In decades of accumulated experience. In subtle environmental changes only visible to those on the water daily.
That knowledge cannot be summarised into neat bullet points for a stacked portfolio Minister.
When governance centralises and portfolios expand, decision-makers develop an illusion that they understand the system because they have been briefed on it.
But summaries are not substitutes for immersion.
And when you lose immersion, you lose accuracy.
Bureaucratic Expansion and Disappearing Accountability
Amalgamations are always sold as coordination.
But larger structures often mean diffused responsibility.
When Fisheries becomes a division inside a recreation super-agency, it is easier for failures to be absorbed, hidden or reframed. Performance becomes harder to measure. Headcount grows. Outcomes become secondary.
Scope expands, clarity shrinks.
Intervention Loops
When a Minister wearing the Environment hat restricts a fishery, supply drops.
Then the same Minister, now wearing the Regional Development hat, must fund support packages, transition schemes or buyouts to repair the economic fallout.
One intervention begets another.
The system drifts further from its core objective: maintaining a viable, food-producing industry.
And because consequence is diluted by distance, the feedback loop weakens.
The Bigger Question
Are commercial fishers primary producers who contribute to national food security?
Or are they simply one more outdoor stakeholder to be managed inside a recreation portfolio?
Once an industry is reframed as a hobby, it becomes politically expendable.
Once consequence is severed from decision, drift becomes inevitable.
And once drift sets in, erasure follows.
Quietly.
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