South Australia's Strategic Plan for Fisheries and Aquaculture Research
The Strategy published in 1998 is recognised as a very useful document but one that now needs to be reviewed and articulated better. Currently, the plan specifies 10 broad research priorities for each of the 8 industry sectors. These priorities need to be more concise and better focussed to provide clearer indicators for funding of appropriate research. Consideration needs to be given to incorporating a Marine Environment R&D Strategy that conforms to the present initiatives in SA which are supervised by the Marine Managers Forum.
The document also needs to be more "outcomes" focussed and to specify performance indicators for its effectiveness.
The Strategy Document structure needs to be improved to present useful and comprehensible information to a broad range of stakeholders.
The website at
Final report
Marine scalefish sector - Seafood Services Australia food safety pilot project
With the establishment of state based networks it is increasingly important to ensure that the products and services developed and delivered by Seafood Services Australia are relevant to and driven by local needs.
The original SeaQual food safety guidelines for harvesting, processing and retailing seafood were developed specifically to meet the requirements of Victorian legislation. Since then there have been changes in the development of the ANZFA national food safety standards as well as a number of SSA initiatives including the seafood food safety risk analysis, development of a draft seafood safety standard and the development of a national seafood food safety emergency management plan. The National Seafood Industry Training Package, released in March 2000, identifies food safety as one of the core competencies for anyone working in the seafood industry.
It is now timely to review the SeaQual food safety guidelines to ensure that they are pragmatic and relevant to various fishing industry sectors. In particular it is important to demonstrate that developing a food safety plan can be done at any level in the industry. To date there has not been much effort placed in relation to food safety in small, multi species, multi method fishing operations.
Demonstrating that the SeaQual food safety guidelines are useful pragmatic tools relevant to the whole industry will be an important aspect in developing the customer focus necessary to achieve an internationally competitive industry. The project will use the SeaQual food safety guidelines for harvesting and the associated template to develop specific fishery type models to further enhance the capacity of fishing businesses to understand and comply with their customer’s and the legislative requirements for production of safe food.
Final report
Project products
Sustainable fisheries management through enhanced access rights and resource security - a industry paper for presentation at Fishrights '99
THE NEED IS FOR A REVIEW PAPER (or two smaller papers) WHICH REVIEW LEGAL AND MANAGEMENT BY RIGHTS IN AUSTRALIAN FISHERIES. IT WOULD HAVE TWO PARTS
PART A: LEGAL REVIEW
The legal status of fishery access rights in each state needs clarified as they vary between little or no rights, to statutory rights. The law can supply clarification on the rights held in a licence. It would be useful to describe these issues for all of Australia in a review paper for the FAO Conference.
PART B: REVIEW OF RIGHTS BASED MANAGEMENT IN AUSTRALIAN FISHERIES
There have been no reviews of rights based fishery management in Australia of late. Industry often see enhanced access rights as being a security issue, with sustainable considerations following behind. Alternatively government and community groups see sustainability as the paramount concern, not sufficiently recognising industry security.
The fishing industry need a review of alternative rights based fishing systems which may accommodate their desires to be more autonomous and responsible for achieving sustainable fisheries management. Enhanced right regimes are not "shelf ready" and must be developed between government and fishers.International fishery rights developments will be examined to see what takes place in other countries compared to Australia.
COMMON ISSUES - Significant impediments to the further development of rights based fishery management in Australia will be identified. These are the challenges for all parties in the development of sustainable rights based fishery management.
Final report
This project investigates fishing rights in Australia reviewing both legal and management aspects.
The implementation of limited entry in Australian fisheries in the 1970s and 1980s led to the development of new fisheries legislation. Since then, the perspective of the legislative framework has changed and broadened. In the 1990s, the critical challenge facing governments and the fishing industry has been how to strike a delicate balance between the public’s ownership of fisheries resources and the need for a more secure access rights. Very often, the debate has been focused narrowly on the issue of property rights
The project reviews fisheries legislation in Australia to determine the extent to which the legislative framework recognises fisheries entitlements as property rights. It is argued that the issue for industry is not so much whether fisheries entitlements constitute property rights in the legal sense, but the extent to which the legislative framework enhances such rights.
The application for the project 99/161 amended a previous one which was in two parts. Part I was funded by FRDC to provide review papers of rights in the Australian scene for the Fish Rights'99 Conference in Western Australia, November, 1999. Part II: was not included in current project.
Project products
Strategic plan for fisheries research in South Australia
At a time when increasing pressure is being brought to bear on the State's fisheries resources there is an urgent requirement for a coordinated, long term Strategy, to enable more efficient planning and conduct of practical fisheries research which will underpin further sustainable development of the fisheries Industry.
Maximum benefit must be extracted both from the finite amount of funding available for fisheries research and, from the considerable effort which is applied by research providers. To achieve this it is essential that appropriate research priorities are targetted transparently, and research programs are continuous and consistent in addressing those priorities.
A clearly stated and widely disseminated long term plan compiled with input from all stakeholders in the fisheries resource is an overdue requirement to effectively focus funds and effort on the common goal.