Mr TUCKEY(10.24 a.m.) —The circumstances relating to the Commonwealth's responsibility in assisting in the management of Australia's fishing is of extreme importance. Australian fishing resources, considering the length of our coastline and the sea surrounding us, are not very great. They certainly do not compare with some of the Gulf Stream fisheries and areas like that which are, by comparison, huge. However, the north Atlantic is under great threat because of overfishing. Consequently, conservation of our fish stocks and careful management and sustainable management is of the greatest importance.

The Commonwealth has responsibilities well outside those that once applied to state governments, particularly as the fishing effort goes further away from our shores. Also, the Commonwealth has responsibility particularly in the area off the Northern Territory, such as the Gulf of Carpentaria, and has had input there.

The Western Australian legislature has probably led Australia in fisheries management over the decades. There was a period, under the management of Mr Bernard Bowen—who now, amongst doing other things in his retirement, advises the Commonwealth in his role as a consultant—that probably was one of the most innovative periods. The concept of limited entry fishery goes back as far as I can remember—very early in the development of what we knew as the crayfish industry, which is now referred to as the rock lobster industry. It was recognised that this valuable resource—a very highly priced product—had to be managed.

Whilst originally that was resisted by free traders in the fishing industry, today it is clearly understood and has put a floor in the industry that has made its participants some of the most prosperous people in the country. The ownership of each individual lobster pot licence—the industry is controlled by the issuing of licences for a certain number of pots on each boat—which was once given out by the state, now trades at $30,000 each.

A typical cray fisherman in my electorate would probably have about 100. So he is a pretty wealthy fellow. He has a $3 million asset which he can trade in $30,000 units, which also makes it a very attractive means of asset building. Quite a lot of people today see them as an asset. I wish I had followed in some of my constituents' footsteps and bought pot licences when they were about $3,000 or $4,000—and I thought they were grossly overpriced then. However, it has built an asset into the industry whilst applying conservation measures.

A matter of considerable controversy and debate occurred in my electorate just a few years ago. In his closing statement, the member for Lyons (Mr Adams) referred to the substantial increase in technology that has been applied to the fishing industry. I wish to talk about that for a moment. Because of that, fishing effort increased dramatically. In fact, on the recommendation of the representative bodies of the industry itself, the government was asked to reduce the number of pots available to the fishing industry by 25 per cent.

This became a controversial issue, but the state government eventually had the courage to reduce the quantity by 18 per cent. Some people suggested that that would mean a massive loss to the industry, but there was none whatsoever. The fish catch continued at relatively the same level but, furthermore, the value of these pot licences that I have just referred to increased automatically, and the gross asset value of each fishing enterprise was unchanged. However, it has made a difference because it is creating the opportunity for sufficient of these animals to survive each year and go on with the breeding process which guarantees the longevity of this industry.

The industry has also expanded in many ways. What was once a process of catching, cooking, freezing and selling to the United States is now an industry which is much more highly technological and which has processes to keep the animals alive. They have discovered that they can put them into suspended animation by chilling to a certain degree. They are shipped overseas live at great financial premiums into markets in Asia, in particular. This has added significantly to the revenues of the industry. With the sorts of procedures that are now being used, they can keep the animals alive onshore well past the fishing season, which is very important in evening out supply and, consequently, in maintaining price.

I did make a few points about modern technology. Within my term of office as a member of parliament, for the majority of the areas where rock lobster in particular are caught—and most of the fishing is done in Western Australia—the reality is that the process has changed dramatically in that time. A lot of the technology associated with fishing resided in the minds of the fishermen. They had to do the best they could to relocate the reliable spots. Over time, there was some depth-sounding equipment available which allowed them to identify the particular depth and shape of the bottom which they were looking for in order to catch their fish. But, of course, that has progressed to a point where not only do they now know where the fish are, to within a matter of metres, through the GPS technology, but their ability to service that catch has speeded up.

The reality is that not only do they know where they want to go to put out the pots and can get there within a metre or two, but, having dropped them there, the following morning they can put the boat on automatic pilot, dial up where the first pot is and go to sleep, if they choose to, and their boat will take them to within a couple of metres of that pot. They do not have to spend considerable time searching for them, and they do not have to lay out five or six pots where one will do. They needed five or six pots in the past, simply to be somewhere near the target and, of course, to make them easier to find. Rolling around in a boat and looking for a float that in old-fashioned terms is about eight inches in diameter was a very difficult task. The ability to catch fish improved with the quality of the boats, the speed of the boats and all the technology that is now available, and so that did require there to be a reduction in pot size.

Similarly, within the direct responsibility of AFMA was the Gulf of Carpentaria—where successive governments, believing in free enterprise and all those sorts of things, granted excessive licence entitlements to trawl for prawns, which appeared to be a limitless resource. In the early days, we even had the Russians coming down with very large deep-sea trawlers and making huge catches, particularly of banana prawn, which is a schooling type of prawn. In the early days, there would have been enough of these animals in the net to stop a trawler. But that resource was very quickly used up.

The prawn resource is very much reactive to land weather conditions. In other words, the spawning occurs in creeks and, if you do not get the rainfall necessary to flush them out into the open sea, you get very limited catches. All this was very obvious, and AFMA and the other controlling federal bodies have had to go through a continuing process of buying back licence entitlements. The process they chose was not all that efficient, and it took a long time to get to a situation where we could see a reversal of the continuing decline of catches and the lack of economics in that area.

Quite a number of the boats that operate in the Gulf of Carpentaria are actually based in my electorate, particularly out of Geraldton, and it is very interesting to talk to the fishermen, who are very conservation minded and do understand that their welfare resides in proper conservation measures but who frequently criticise the processes that are used. There were a thousand propositions put forward for conservation, from restricting the period of catch to putting quotas on individual fishermen, which is quite a silly proposition. All that does is maintain a situation where the bad fishermen get as much quota as the good fishermen, which does not encourage the sorts of efficiencies we need in the industry. There were many different propositions, but the authorities in Western Australia eventually said, `The thing that catches the crayfish is the pot; so, if we restrict the number of pots in the water, clearly we are reducing the fishing effort.'

This proposition was not put in the Gulf of Carpentaria by the federal authorities, who wanted to issue licences based on the horsepower of the boat, the length of the boat and all sorts of peculiar things—when the fishing effort is, in fact, all in the trawl net. Constituents of mine have never been able to convince the authorities that the control ought to be purely on the net capacity of individual boats. They should be able to tow as much as their power and other things will allow; but, consequently, the restrictions should be on net capacity, because that is clearly what is catching the fish, and not necessarily the horsepower of the boat towing the net. Those are the matters that still need to be addressed, to my mind.

We do welcome these measures, in particular, the increasing of fines, and particularly as they apply to the pirates of the sea—the people who come into our areas of fishing resource to catch fish. Of course, if you are there illegally in the first place, you are not going to pay much attention to the conservation measures that we apply to our licensed fishermen, and that is the greatest threat to the future of the industry. So it is incumbent upon Australia to make sure that we prevent people entering our fisheries who are not licensed, because they add to the fishing catch but they will just catch as much as they can before they escape.

The member for Lyons mentioned our involvement, in the treaties committee, in looking at the southern bluefin tuna industry and the fact that that was brought almost to the brink of extinction by gross overfishing by foreign countries within what might be measured as Australia's nature resource. It is still a problem because tuna are such migratory species. They breed in northern waters, and at that stage are subject to control by the Indonesian authorities, then take themselves over nearly to South Africa and then back to Australia. At each stage, they are either within or out of the control of varying nations and are extremely vulnerable to overfishing, which is heartbreaking when one considers their value, particularly in the Japanese sashimi market.

We made very strong recommendations that Australia maintain a very tough line in negotiations with Japan on catching these fish in this area, simply because we would love to see the resource substantially increased. We now see the South Australians farming these fish—and there is a lot of sense in that. Nevertheless, the fishing technology that abounds on the high seas today is a major threat to the future of many fish stocks.

I have criticised purse seining in the case of tuna fishing. The old system of poling the fish, whilst highly inefficient, was a great contributor to conservation, because it guaranteed that some of the fish got away. That is pretty important—they have got to get away to breed. When you are able to identify a schooling variety of fish, such as tuna, by using an aeroplane and then sailing around it, putting a net around the entire school and zipping up the bottom to make sure none gets away, it is not very smart in terms of the longevity of the industry in which you are involved. But that is what purse seiners do, and that is to be condemned. We still have some in Australia, although they are primarily being used in fish farming, which is at least subject to catch limitations so that you just cannot keep going back to get the last school, but we have to be a bit sensible.

Drift netting is another method of fish catching to be condemned. It is too indiscriminate and it takes a lot of animals that have no commercial value but are drowned or finished when the net is rolled in. Long-lining, whilst a little more selective and seen as a fairly efficient method of catching tuna and those types of fish, is another method that can give too much capacity to the fishing fleet.

We do not see here some of the North Sea issues, where ships that we would probably consider cruise liners have a continuous trawling and processing effort and literally suck the bottom dry. We saw the collapse of the cod industry in the north Atlantic, something which nobody ever dreamed would happen. The Canadians fight a continuing battle to protect their salmon stocks, which are fish that all of us have been raised to believe were there forever. They are not, if people are foolish.

When people are fishing, for instance, in Antarctic waters, and the mere cost of getting there would be in the tens of thousands of dollars, I am not sure that, if there is a very substantial reward in terms of fish catch available to them, a $50,000 fine is going to worry them very much. Furthermore, it is going to cost us hundreds of thousands to send a ship down there to catch them. I think anything less than the confiscation of all the fishing equipment, including the boat, is insufficient. They know they are not allowed there. They know that they are doing damage. They do not care, because they do not even know if they are coming back. It is not their resource. I think we have to be prepared to attack that very seriously.

Research—and the member for Lyons mentioned some of that—is absolutely essential. We just simply do not know in many cases how long it takes certain fish varieties to achieve maturity and become breeding stock. That is of grave concern because you go on catching fish and you catch fewer every year but there seems to be plenty there. Then, as they found in the north Atlantic, you go back one year and there are none. In the north Atlantic, they had gone because, in the previous years, they had removed all the breeding stock and gone on catching the immature stock, leaving nothing to breed on. Fortunately, somewhere, there must have been a few of them because there is some recovery. Now they are fighting and scratching to get in there before there is substantial recovery. We have had the same problem with southern bluefin tuna. There has been some improvement in their numbers and immediately, in this case, the Japanese are demanding increased quotas when we are far from having anything like satisfactory recovery of fish stocks.

It is right to welcome this legislation which improves the ability of AFMA, the federal management authority, to do its job. It gives it a better opportunity to enter premises and other places to inspect what is going on and to catch people who are not dealing within the law. Anecdotally, it is very interesting. There is a limit on the size of a crayfish or rock lobster that can be caught in my electorate. As a hotel keeper many years ago, I had a visit from a fisheries inspector. He walked into my coolroom and started shaking the barrels of beer. I wondered what he was up to until he told me that the latest means of hiding them had been to screw the bung off the barrel of beer and pack it full of crayfish. The inspector came in and had a look around and could not see any shells around the place and thought it was right. But they eventually woke up. These are the dreadful things that people do to break the law.

Mr Griffin —Where did you put them?

Mr TUCKEY —I was fortunate that nobody had given me the temptation. But the realities are that this is the sort of silly thing that people do to destroy their own industry. I do think, particularly in the rock lobster industry in my electorate today, there is a clear understanding. In previous years when I lived in Carnarvon, where there was a substantial prawning industry, there was a case where one fisherman rammed another because he had moved into forbidden waters. Whilst that is almost piracy on the high seas, I understood their thoughts. They realised that when people broke the rules, everybody was a loser and that the rules are there to protect the industry more than to protect anything else.

We need this sort of regulation. I am not sure that the federal authority has achieved maximum efficiency in doing that. I have corresponded with them over the years with criticism, but in fact I support the moves that have been made in this legislation.