Demersal Fishing Ban

26 February 2026

Hon Dr Steve Thomas (10:45 am): I will make a fairly short contribution because I know there are plenty of members who would like to speak to this particular motion before the house today. I want to focus on a couple of key issues. Obviously, a disallowance motion on the regulations was moved in the other place—the place that shall not be named. I am not sure how the media thought that that was likely to have any other outcome than the outcome it has had; when the Labor Party has 46 out of 59 seats, any speculation of an alternative outcome was fairly ridiculous.

A disallowance motion is coming up for debate before this house, and I am not in any way trying to predict the outcome of that because I am not even certain how members will vote on that particular disallowance. I will just make the point that that disallowance motion is at least six sitting weeks away—17 sitting days—which means that, given our fairly paltry sitting schedule for the first half of this year, we will not actually get to vote on that motion before June at the earliest, I suspect. That effectively means that any ability for the Legislative Council to have an impact on the legislation and the regulations, and their impact on communities, will be delayed. The impacts that they are going to have will effectively be in place anyway.

That said, there are a couple of issues that I would like to put on the table for the minister's consideration. I think there are two absolutely critical issues here. The first comes from having a science background. I have seen similar situations before, when Hon Norman Moore did a fairly similar thing to the rock lobster industry in Western Australia, many years ago. These decisions are supposed to be based on science and, as a scientist, I think that is the only way that we can do it. But all science needs to be repeatable and provable, and I would say that the minister and the government, in my view, have an obligation to validate the science. Not only that, but they have to continue to validate the science because, effectively, they have put in a set of regulations that has resulted in boats in the recreational sector not going out for about 18 months—

Hon Jackie Jarvis: Twenty-one months, member.

Hon Dr Steve Thomas: Twenty-one months; I thank the minister. I did not bother counting!

The commercial sector is closed completely. If the science on which the government based those decisions is valid, it should be repeatable and it should be able to be validated. I think there is an obligation on the government to continue that process of validation—that is, every year, testing and retesting to make sure that the decision it made was done on valid science. There are discussions out there about testing being conducted in the wrong places. I do not want to get engaged in that. It might be that the Department of Fisheries has been testing these same locations for the last 20 years and it uses that as a measure and a scale; I do not know.

However, I think there is an obligation on the government to continue to process this and to validate the science that it has used. The science might be validated over time and the decision the government made might prove to have been the correct one. Most recreational fishers I know—including me—want our children and grandchildren to be able to catch fish in the future, and there is some sympathy in that regard. But if there is a problem with the science and it is not validated, the government will have had an enormous impact on the community—particularly the commercial fishing community. The one obligation of the government is to match the science, repeat the science and validate the science. That is what it needs to do.

The second component I think the government needs to talk about is the impact on the shark fishery in the western fishing zone. If the science that the government has used is valid and there are significant depletions of stocks of iconic species like dhufish, snapper and red emperor—which I actually think are probably the best fish of the lot—and people are fishing for those fish, it will obviously have a huge impact. The shark fishery in the western zone feeds the community for the most part. When people go and buy fish over the counter, or fish and chips, in most cases, they get flake, which most people do not realise is shark. They are actually eating shark. That fishery is critically important. According to the shark fishers I have spoken to, they think that complete bycatch in that system is about 7%. They think it is pretty well targeted and that the bycatch of those iconic species that they pull in is much smaller than that 7%. If that is the case, I ask the government to talk to the shark fisheries. There are not a lot of them because there are not many commercial fishers in the entire state. It is a very small number of people. Please talk to the shark fishers and validate or invalidate their position on the level of bycatch, in particular the level of iconic species the government is trying to protect—if that is the case. It might just be that ground could be given to the shark fishery.

The government needs to look at this in some detail. I think those two issues are critically important to the debate, which will ultimately not get down to the pointy end until several months down the track. It will probably be four months before there is a debate on a disallowance motion in this house. That will be too late for a lot of people. The reality is that those two issues are critically important, and they cannot wait for a discussion on a disallowance motion in the Legislative Council sometime in June. If there is not an answer to those things today, I do not mind that; a more fulsome answer will come in the fullness of time. I do not necessarily need the minister to stand up and say one way or the other, but I would urge the minister to validate the science that she repeatedly used. Every good scientist does that. I urge the minister to talk to the shark fisheries about the level of bycatch that might allow them to feed the people of Western Australia with Western Australian fish. Those two things are critical to this debate.