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.
