State and Commonwealth fisheries management agencies are accountable for achieving efficient and effective compliance outcomes. In 1999 the National Fisheries Compliance Committee (NFCC) identified risk assessment as a vital component of fisheries compliance programs through the publication of the Strategic Direction for Australian Fisheries Compliance and Framework for Fisheries Agencies paper.

The need to develop comprehensive and practical assessment procedures has increased in recent years to meet auditing requirements and reporting needs to stakeholders. The Governance component of ESD principles when applied to fisheries will necessitate demonstration of the ability to achieve best practice compliance to achieve the requirements of management plans..

Some agencies have commenced the development of risk assessment procedures, however they have not been developed uniformly. Other agencies are yet to develop procedures. The development and national application of uniform procedures will assist the achievement of best practice and provide fisheries compliance practitioners with the data to answer stakeholder queries regarding risks associated with key issues such as cost, efficiency, effectiveness, changes in practice, emerging trends, technology influences and cross jurisdictional impacts.

To make more reliable projections on future catches of abalone, catch data needs to supplemented with an appreciation of what is coming into the fishery. This requires information on in-water stocks to allow predictions of new recruitment to be confirmed and recruitment failures to be identified.
Commercial divers have unequalled access to in-water stocks, particularly in remote regions. Although commercial divers regularly dive areas of interest, and could provide a cost effective means of monitoring stocks, this has been difficult to achieve because:
1) the traditional process for collecting data is considered non-independent (compromised) in the hands of commercial divers, and
2) divers perceive caliper and slate technology as slow, an undue interference and insufficient in coverage to supply representative datasets.
What is needed is an efficient, cost effective stock monitoring process that utilises commercial abalone divers, around the time of their normal fishing activities, to give fisheries managers and quota holders critical in-water information for the management of stocks. Recent preliminary trials, where researchers utilised digital video surveys filmed by commercial divers, clearly provides the potential for such a process.
Whereas researchers need such footage as a data source, the video also provides a mechanism for divers to 'ground truth' their own perceptions of change on surveyed reefs and convey what they are seeing to licence owners. Most importantly, such a system gives divers a further opportunity to contribute to stock management and reduce licence fees under cost recovery regimes.
Presently, video is played back and measurements are taken on two software packages. This process needs streamlining so that access to frames and measuring of abalone is time efficient. Measures and images generated from such a process need to be stored in an appropriate database, where they can be accessed through simple interrogation.

Stock assessment methods need to be developed for blue mackerel for a range of economic, ecological, social and legislative/administrative reasons.

Perhaps most importantly, the large and valuable international markets for members of the genus Scomber, in conjunction with the apparently large stocks of blue mackerel off southern Australia, suggest that a commercial fishery for this species could generate significant export earnings. Furthermore, as the economic potential of this industry is well known, significant amounts of private and public funds have been invested trying to develop fisheries and processing facilities for this species. To date, the development of these industries has been impeded by the absence of the information required to establish appropriate TACs. In fact, trigger TACs in Commonwealth waters were halved recently as a precautionary response to scientific uncertainty regarding sustainable harvest levels.

Blue mackerel is also prized as bait by recreational anglers and reliable estimates of the quantities taken by this sector is needed to determine the total impacts of fishing and to make informed decisions about resource sharing amongst stakeholders (see Attachments 1-5). The need for data from the recreational sector is most pressing off the NSW coast.

There is also significant concern among recreational anglers that sustained commercial fishing for blue mackerel may affect the local abundance and availability of sportsfishes, such as tuna and billfishes. Australia’s recreational and charter fisheries for these sportfishes are economically important and provide a significant source of income for many regional communities (e.g. Port Stephens and southern NSW). If stocks of blue mackerels are not as large as commercial fishers claim, then the concerns of recreational fishers may be valid and further development of the commercial fisheries could potentially impact on the distribution, abundance and availability of sportfishes and the viability of the recreational and charter fisheries which they support.

Similarly, the removal of large quantities of a key prey species could adversely affect populations of other marine predators, including marine mammals and seabirds.

The species that prey on blue mackerel have considerable social and ecological significance. As a result, there is strong public pressure for Commonwealth and State governments to conduct research and develop management arrangements that will ensure that commercial harvesting of blue mackerel is ecologically sustainable. Commonwealth and state legislation, policies and strategies also require government agencies to ensure that the harvesting of fisheries resources not only provides maximum economic and social benefits to the Australian community, but also minimise impacts on other components of the ecosystem.

In the cost recovery frameworks in which most fisheries management and research agencies currently operate, acquiring funds to conduct research in support of small and developing (albeit potentially valuable) fisheries is problematic. The augmentative funding requested in this proposal is needed to ensure that the harvest strategies that are developed for blue mackerel off southern Australia reflect the social significance of the species as well as the size and potential economic value of the resource, and take into account the potential ecological effects of the expansion of the commercial sector.

The major impediment to the development of southern Australia’s commercial mackerel fisheries is the lack of quantitative information required to establish appropriate TACs. The most cost- and time-effective option for obtaining this information is to apply egg-based stock assessment methodologies, such as the Daily Egg Production Method (T.M. Ward et al. 1998, 2001; P. Ward et al. 2001). This project will (i) develop the methods for sampling adults and identifying and staging eggs that are required to apply egg-based stock assessment methods to blue mackerel and (ii) use the Daily Egg Production Method to calculate conservative estimates of minimum spawning biomass of blue mackerel off southeastern Australia.