So you want to eat fresh-caught Australian fish?

Contamination of Australian seafood imports with a wide range of antibiotics, first detected in March 2006, has just been reported (ABC AM 3/8) worldwide. So why do we import fish when Australia has the third largest territorial fishing zone? It’s because zealous “green management” has reduced our catch to the smallest in the OECD. We now import an ever-increasing amount of the fish we eat.

Here are some fishery production figures (in metric tonnes) from 2003:

Source: Jennifer Marohasy, Let’s Import Our Fish

If you are reading this you will most likely believe in “overfishing”. Your angst about fishing stocks has no doubt been fed by the media after seeing dozens of scientists identifying overfishing as a threat to the Australian marine environment.   The simplification of marine management to regulating fish catches alone sets up a free market solution to this problem. A “sustainable” catch is set by “scientists” for each species, divided into units or quotas and traded to concentrate of ownership of fishing rights in the more ‘efficient corporate sector.  Marine science has grown exponentially to provide the research for individual species management — and lead the conservation campaigns to save our oceans in a kind of ‘insider trading’ — promoting a problem and then profiting from it. The commonwealth fisheries ministers are Abetz and McGauren, who are hardly “greens”, have allowed thin science and extreme marine conservation to flourish even at a cost of hundreds of jobs in Tasmania.  McGauran is electorate-centred on the issues facing Lakes Entrance, Victoria’s largest fishing port, where the throughput has fallen by more than a third due mostly to commonwealth catch cuts when it should have been rising to fulfil demand. Other ports that once thrived are sadly empty because scientists said that the fish stocks “may collapse” according to their “theoretical models” — not because they actually did collapse. So you want to eat fresh caught Australian fish? Good luck. There are no seafood naming laws and there is no legal way of distinguishing one fish from another. While the Australian wild fishery is subjected to the “extreme green treatment” imports are neither labelled as to their country of origin or the fishery they come from.  It was not long ago that marine scientists in the USA said there were three problems with coastal fisheries. Pollution, pollution and pollution. There are many Australian industries on bays and estuaries, where fish breed, that would be pleased if the problem was overfishing, not pollution.   Send your tips to boss@crikey.com.au or submit them anonymously here.