Dear Members and Friends,

Welcome to the MRFA Annual Report 2013. Thanks for taking the time to read our 2013 Annual Report.

Just 12 months ago we were all sunfished out!  Our redirection, rejuvenation and consolidation have placed us on solid foundations. In rebranding we are accountable only to our sponsors, financial members and ourselves. Resigning our membership from Sunfish Queensland and changing our name has been a very expensive exercise. Our public liability insurance costs are outrageous at $1511.84.  We also incurred many one off costs which are reflected in our treasurer’s report. At the moment we are in the red regarding expenditure versus receipts for our net free proposal. A spike in membership should bring this back to balance.

Without the substantial financial assistance of Tackle World, Shakespeare Street and Reef Marine we would not exist. For this and their constant moral support we shall always be grateful.

Three major projects have consumed close to one thousand volunteer man hours this past year.

Our Net Free Proposal Seaforth – St Helens ( with consideration to extend the boundaries Cape Hillsborough to Cape Conway subject to community support north of the O’Connell River), Angler Education and the third, Communications.

NET FREE PROPOSAL

Win-lose or draw, we at MRFA have done everything possible within our human and financial resources to make this dream of ours become a reality. Special thanks are due to Mick O’Donnell of Seaforth who rallied the troops at Seaforth and led the charge on that front. We acknowledge the financial assistance of $1000 from the Seaforth Progress Association which was used in the preparation of flyers and other promotional material.  Cr. Alison Jones and Ahri Tallon have provided valuable assistance to me in the preparation of our submission for government and other agencies.

We acknowledge and greatly appreciate support for this project by Mackay Tourism, The Yuibera Traditional Owners and the Mackay and District Amateur Fishing Clubs Association.



As with all projects we have a line drawn in the sand.  If we have not made satisfactory progress by our given date, we will   suspend activities, redraw battle plans and roll it out big time when the next state election is called.

 Some nonprofit recreational fishing groups market themselves apolitical – not us, being apolitical has not produced the goods for recreational fishers in the past. Governments only have one currency – votes.  It’s bloody marvelous how responsive state and local government and the opposition are when the whistle is blown for a new election.  I promise that the boot will be on the other foot! There will be a scramble for votes. We will do the talking and they will be listening. At the next state election we will have something to trade, and it’s called members votes.

We have data based well over 1000 people in the community who have signed our net free petition, and we promise them, if they took time to do that for us, we will use the numbers to the best of our ability.

ANGLER EDUCATION  

Once again special thanks to Glenn Fahy, and Mick Connolly for another year of exceptional work invested in junior fishers. One only had to be in attendance at our Family Fishing Day at Shoal Point on Easter Sunday, 31 March, where 200 children registered to see how well oiled and organized our Angler Education team is.

Our joint venture project with Tackle World Mackay hosting the ‘kids only’ fishing competition in the Pioneer River on Sunday the 4th of August was an outstanding success.  Prizes to the value of $4000 were up for offer with 184 children registering for the event.

Our Schoolfish project – sponsored exclusively by Reef Marine continues to prosper with 340 students going through the program this past 12 months.

On behalf of the management committee we extend thanks to Glenn and Mick and their willing helpers.

COMMUNICATIONS

One innovation that should improve our public image and increase public awareness is our grand new website www.mackrecfishersalliance.org. Without the assistance of Ahri, who also maintains our email communications, this would never have happened. 

MEMBERSHIP 

The good news is, since 1-4-13 we have added two hundred and sixteen (216) new people to our membership data base.  These are singular names and do not include spouses, partners or children. If you factor those in the numbers would be closer to 350.

MEDIA ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

We express sincere thanks to The Daily Mercury, The Midweek newspaper, ABC Radio, Meech and Kim,  David Perkins ( Perko )   Hammo,  Channel 7 T.V. news, Nine T.V. News.

Current financial situation as reflected by our annual treasurer’s report, a loss of $861 which had the potential to be much greater, has been recorded. The outlook for the future is dependent on there being continued support from sponsors and members. The immediate future should be secure.

  

COMMITMENTS  AND CHALLENGES  FOR 2013-14.

Our #1 priority has to be succession planning.  Some of us are getting too many miles on the clock(including yours truly).  If we don’t inject new blood and skill new executives,  most of our knowledge and contacts will go to the grave with us.

Our Net Free Zone proposal will remain on the radar screen and our Schoolfish and other kids fishing ventures will continue to operate on  auto pilot under the careful guidance  of our coordinators.

We plan to work in partnership with commercial fishers and processors to address the appalling staffing level of Mackay Boating and Fisheries Patrol. As we print this report staffing numbers are three, the same as when I came to Mackay in 1974, when the population was 28000. If we had the same number of police in Mackay now as 1974 there would be a public outcry! A more appropriate staffing number for Mackay is eight.

Thanks everyone for your loyalty and continued support.  

Lance.

B n B Article Sept 2013

Cairns Bed n Boat


Who Ya Gunna Vote For?             

Well, another election is upon us and it’s time to put the thinking caps on. Deciding who’s going to get to run the country for the next few years is an important task, who do you want to get the cheque book?

That choice is entirely yours of course, but let’s examine some issues relating to recreational fishermen first, and see if a picture paints itself. Ideally we’d have time to ask pollies questions, and print their answers, but this time, the clock won’t allow it.  You’ll have to ask them yourself, and so you should.

 

Commonwealth Marine Parks

From a Federal perspective, there is no bigger issue on the table than the massive new Marine Parks (MP) constructed around the country, and more importantly to a lot of this readership, the Coral Sea Marine Park, which covers almost a million square kilometres.

Half that park is now ‘green zone’, one quarter is ‘general use’ and the other quarter is ‘special use’ which restricts rec and pro. The whopping green zone is a long way off the coast and the great majority of rec fishers would never have gone there to catch a fish in their life time anyhow, and that’s exactly how Labor is selling it.

But there’s more to consider. Clearly, the amount of fish taken from way out there by our sector would be so miniscule as to be almost immeasurable in context with the size. So why ban us? Banning someone implies that something is wrong with what they were doing and obviously there’s no grounds for that.

So perhaps the zoning is to stop commercial fishing, which it definitely will. Do we want that? CAREFISH made a study of the commercial effort in the Coral Sea and found it to be no big issue. The large percentage of commercial harvest there is long line tuna, and the amount taken is very small.

We don’t often pat the commercial fish industry on the back, but we found no cause for alarm in that pelagic fishery, and found no shortage of existing management tools at the government’s disposal if the tuna were being fished too hard.

I’m sure that most of us like to buy fresh tuna at the local Japanese Restaurant; I know I do, and the only place that can come from is the fish market. Already in Cairns we’re finding minced tuna in sushi and in my opinion it is not nearly the quality of tuna fillet. I’m told it’s an imported product which annoys me as well.

When the plans are enacted next year, there will be NO access to local fresh caught commercial tuna from Mackay north, so we best get used to the imported minced version, thank Labor for that.

I’ve talked to LNP’s Tony Abbott, Sen Warren Entsch (Leichardt) and Sen Richard Colbeck (shadow Fisheries) about this and they assure me that the ‘Management Arrangements’ (which govern what activities are permissible) in the Park will be reviewed with the focus being on ‘sustainable use’ rather than ‘lock it up’. I think this is as much as we can hope for, and good on them for applying common sense.

The other issue with the whole Marine Park chapter in our lives is the amount of so called ‘submissions’ received by gov. Tony Burke claimed almost seven hundred thousand ‘submissions’ were considered and those overwhelmingly supported the MP’s.

CAREFISH wrote a couple of carefully considered submissions throughout the process and invested a large effort in doing that, involving the community, commercial fishers, and environmental groups. We made study of the existing regulations and also investigated the harvest from surrounding countries etc.

We are outraged that a ‘tick in a greenie website box’ from another country “Do you want to save the Coral Sea? Tick here” would be called a ‘submission’. We understand that well over 90% of so called ‘submissions’ were from outside Australia and in fact only around one thousand actual individually  written submissions were received. That process should be reviewed and be made more transparent.

Super Trawlers

Super Trawlers were another focus of Federal mishandling. I have sympathy for the owners of that ‘Margiris’, in as much as they were given permission to operate here, but I have no sympathy for a government that thought it would be fine with the vast majority of Australians who jumped up and down when they found out about it. 

What a bungle? Back flipping going on everywhere! A very pertinent question you should be asking your campaigning pollie is “where does your party sit with all this for the future? Can you give us assurance that this mess won’t happen again?” 

I’m not hearing encouraging messages coming from any politicians at the moment, and have a queasy feeling that we haven’t seen the end to this story yet. Now is the time to get commitment.

Rotation of Green Zones in the GBRMP

This pops up a lot. You can be certain that the fishing would be better in the GBR green zones, (and I like getting amongst a good bite as much as everyone else) but that attraction is also envied by COMMERCIAL FISHERMEN who push and push to get back into them.

It’s obvious to me that Reef Line Fishers have fished the wild stock down substantially, especially coral trout. Somewhere near 3 million Qld trout per year was taken out and flown to the Chinese markets in Hong Kong peaking in the 2001 era. Almost all of it was from the GBR.

Industry and gov finally recognised that the stock was being flogged (wow!) and imposed a cap (TACC) on the take at about 1.5 million fish (1350t av 0.87kg/fish) and the gov paid huge compensation to them for the restriction via SAP/RAP. But the stock was already fished below this capacity and has therefore continued to fall by about a hundred tonnes a year since. This is called ‘depletion’ and they are just as much your fish too, so you should be concerned. 

I my opinion, and that of almost ALL marine scientists studying this, the higher amount and size of fish in the green zones keep a flow of juvenile fish going into the zones outside the green zones where they are harvested by both commercial and recreational fishers (at a ratio of about 10:1 ie 750t pro:80t rec according to our studies in 2012). This overflow is called ‘recruitment’ and has taken some years to mature and should NOT be messed with.

If a public debate is opened on GBRMP zoning, then it would be opened to ALL SECTORS including dive tourism AND environmental. Personally, I do not relish the prospect of fighting the likes of PEW on another zoning battle, look at how the Coral Sea MP debacle panned out with masses of greenies demanding ‘not a millimetre less than 100% green’.

Rationalising Commercial Harvest

If you want to ask federal pollies for something, ask them to support the state to reduce commercial harvest and effort to sustainable and profitable levels. The first step to determine the correct levels in the various fisheries is by independent ‘Harvest Strategies’. The higher World Heritage and GBRMP values carry both national and international importance, and are therefore a federal and state

priority issue.

The state can not afford to do this alone and no longer have the human resources to facilitate it anyhow, with many Fisheries Qld personnel now gone, thanks to successive premiers tightening belts. In our opinion, Fisheries in urgent need of state AND federal attention follows…

Live Trout  Coral trout have been hammered for nearly two decades. The current TACC (total allowable commercial catch) is 1288 tonnes which in our opinion is twice what it should be. This must be reduced substantially. Also the fish should be left to recover from commercial harvest during the spawn months.

Trawl We think trawl is currently about right as far as effort goes, but there is heaps of over capacity which is latent at the moment, and that could be activated, to everyone’s detriment, if a new big player or players got involved. Over one million ‘effort unit’s’ need to be removed from this industry to keep it operating at current sustainable and profitable levels, (not seen for a long time).

Inshore Fishery, Net and Crab Both these have been flogged for many decades, much to the detriment of the recreational and tourist’s fishing experience, and commercial profits. Where on the east coast has a huge ‘barra’ signature anymore? The state has a $9m buyback of gillnet endorsements right now and aims to reduce them to around 200.

There were almost 1400 back in 1997 which was complete madness. But even with successive reductions, total annual harvest has not altered. No longer is the local netter seen rowing his tinnie out 50 mtr and smoking his pipe, but rather ex trawlers with huge refrigeration space, and hydraulic drum net haulers fitted, are more and more the norm. Drum net haulers are even seen on much smaller boats now increasing efficiency per endorsement enormously, as they can carry so much more net and require so much less manpower pulling them in.

The NT has 14 gillnet licenses total and is rewarded with an outstanding rec and tourism sector, with huge ‘net free areas’ installed, and there’s no shortage of fish in their restaurants. Anyone who can add up to two should be able to see where the major ‘benefit to the community’ lays. 

Small ‘Gill Net Free Areas’ As in NSW and NT,  NFA’s have been called for for years by us and others around ‘high recreational value’ urban areas and gov are well aware of them. Will they support them? You should ask them! Ask the AF+LP too if you’re thinking of voting for them, you might be surprised at their answer.

Crab is another industry in peril with way too much allocation. Something has to be done. That industry has been trying to finalise its own ‘management plan’ for nearly twenty years!

One of the big issues with net and crab (and trout) is that the operators can go into any area they want. This disrupts the local bloke that may have a ‘community conscience’ and leaves the towns waterways alone. Competition boils this pot quick smart, and everyone loses out.

Management by regions is the only way to rectify this. A region might be either Cairns, Townsville, Whitsundays or Mackay etc and the locals can focus on their own patch with much more clarity and chance of forming successful formulae for their region, rather than the current state wide approach, which is clearly dysfunctional.

Dredging

The proposed industrialisation of ports along the Qld coast needs study on many levels and we only have to glimpse at the astonishing Gladstone shemozzle to gauge our level of concern. The fish disease there has now been found in a great many species including shark, ray, sea snake, gar even turtle and crab according to the locals who have lost their entire seafood industry, and that is disgusting.

 There are some massive projects in the pipeline for the coast and something like 42 million tonnes of dredging is proposed for the next few years, a bizarre amount to comprehend.

Apart from the obvious environmental disruption, the spoil has nowhere sensible to go ie either into the GBR waters creating vast sediment chaos, or as landfill causing an even greater acid sulphate mess. And these new areas will have to be maintained to certain depth levels, so maintenance dredging will be an ongoing legacy to be dealt with forever.

Masses of suspended sediment are no friend to many marine species starting with seagrass at the very core of the food chain. Surely NO-ONE wants to see another Gladstone, and serious thought should be given to this subject.

So, what does your aspiring politicians say about all this? Ask them!

Paul Aubin

[email protected]

0418772751