Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, I would like to ask you about one specific thing. I know you appear to have some amnesia over the issues around the celebrated Monday night but I am sure you will have no difficulty with this question. This is a fundamental question about how well we manage our fisheries. It was very interesting to listen to Senator Macdonald; I think he diminished himself a little bit by saying he knows no more than other fisheries ministers. I can recall when he was the fisheries minister, and he was very good. We were not always on the same side of the debate, but he won most of them because he simply knew so much about it. I can recall him saying, 'Look, Nigel, this is how it operates,' and giving me a lecture—whilst it was quite unnecessary—on the fact that we had moved forward from the dinosaur age of input controls.

For those who do not understand the difference between input and output controls, it is the fundamental difference in two fisheries practices. Input controls probably were still the flavour of the month 30 to 35 years ago, and that was how we did it. We basically managed fisheries through inefficiency. We said, 'We think you're catching too many fish, so you're only allowed to use half your nets.' If we thought that was a bit difficult, we said, 'Make the holes in your nets bigger.' If you looked like you were pulling the boats too fast, we'd lower your horsepower. If you had a very smart skipper, we'd make sure he only had an IQ of five. There were a spectrum of efficiencies you could put on a boat and they were called input controls. We controlled the size of the boat and the net, we might say you could only fish for two days of the year and all those sorts of things.

But after a while we thought about that, and there are linkages in that system that people can get around. 'We'll make a certain horsepower motor, but we can do things to gearboxes to make the propeller turn faster and make the boat go harder.' So, to make sure all of those were out, we went back and said, 'What's our motivation?' Our motivation is to control the number of fish that are caught, so why don't we just do that? We will just say you can only catch this number of fish. So modelling happened, people developed, we all grew and the world knew then that output control fisheries were the way to go. At about the same time—25 years ago—people started output control fisheries, and slowly we have gone from input control fisheries in Australia to primarily output. Certainly the Commonwealth fisheries have a policy of going to output control. It is the best way to manage a fishery. It basically does not matter if you want to throw rotten socks in the water and kill fish. It does not matter how you go about doing it as long as you do it in a way that only kills or takes this many fish, and primarily for human consumption. They say, 'Go and do that.'

So we have had a bit of a change. We had a huge amount of confidence that that was the very best way to manage our fishery, but we seem to have sent a bit of a signal. The only issue about this boat that is different from the other boats that exist in the fishery is its size—in fact, its freezer capacity. It is not towing bigger gear. We have established it is not killing more fish than the other ones. It is not doing anything different in that regard apart from it being bigger because it has a huge freezer capacity to process stuff at sea. In effect, what we have said is that we are going to prohibit this vessel from being here because it is more efficient. That is an input control. That is the first input control I have seen introduced into Commonwealth fisheries management in the 35-odd years that I have been involved and had an interest in Australian fisheries.

Minister, I wonder if you could indicate whether this new decision to provide an inefficiency in a fishery to ensure that that vessel is unable to fish in Australian waters is a new direction for Australian fisheries management.