Holding a national forum for fisheries managers (across a range of levels) from all jurisdictions has been identified as a way of increasing the skills and understanding of the Australian fisheries managers' community and improving communications between the various jurisdictions on management matters.
The workshop will also provide an opportunity to further develop (and road-test) the outputs of AFMF's Fisheries Management Sub-Committee on the AFMF task of 'Developing Cost Effective and Efficient Management of Small Scale Fisheries'.
Final report
A national fisheries management workshop was held at the South Australian Aquatic Sciences Centre in Adelaide on 26/27 March 2014, which brought together fisheries managers from all Australian jurisdictions. The idea of holding a workshop was promoted by the Australian Fisheries Management Forum (AFMF) (composed of the Heads of Commonwealth and State/Territory fishery management agencies), which had identified that there was no forum for fisheries managers to exchange ideas and build networks. The task of putting the workshop together was undertaken by AFMF’s Fisheries Management Sub-Committee (FMSC), with funding support being provided by the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (FRDC).
The workshop was the first fisheries managers’ workshop since 1995, when the last of a successful series of fisheries managers’ workshops run during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s was held on Rottnest Island, WA. In promoting the idea of a workshop AFMF noted that while there was significant cross-fertilisation between researchers through the Australian Society for Fish Biology and other forums and through National Compliance Committee for compliance officers, there was no forum specifically for fisheries managers. As fisheries management had increased in complexity, and society was placing additional scrutiny on fisheries managers, there was a need for fisheries managers to meet as a group of professionals to exchange ideas and initiatives.
In considering a theme for the workshop FMSC noted that there was significant interest in the issues surrounding small-scale fisheries (SSFs) and that many if not most issues with SSFs were common across all the jurisdictions. Furthermore, FMSC had been tasked by AFMF to consider matters around SSFs and provide advice back to AFMF on the development of cost effective and efficient management of SSFs. Thus a workshop provided an ideal opportunity to explore the issue of SSFs and to look at issues and approaches in the various jurisdictions to see if there were any learnings that could be incorporated into FMSC’s advice to AFMF.
