The Australian fishing industry began to enter a new phase about 1958. The great advances in fisheries management, research and development which were made in the 1960's were preceded by a period of intense questioning which brought the post war period to an end. Many of the initiatives of the Controllers of Fisheries were re-examined and the role of the four partners - the Commonwealth Fisheries Office(CFO), CSIRO Division of Fisheries, State Fisheries organizations and industry organizations were substantially altered. The Commonwealth Fisheries Office lost influence and Commonwealth initiative reverted briefly to CSIRO due to -
.... the failure of the Development Trust Account to have early success and the stigma of the heavy losses on the Southern Endeavour;
.... the collapse of Australian Professional Fishermen's Association left the CFO without direct contact with industry. The support of the wartime consultative committees and later the APFA had given credibility to CFO claims to leadership of the industry;
.... the impact of Geoffrey Kesteven's return to CSIRO from FAO. The Division narrowed its programme providing the necessity for the States to build research units. This resulted in consequential strengthening of their administration with a group of young professionals.
In June 1958 William McMahon, Commonwealth Minister for Primary Industry, said he was "very concerned at the present economic conditions of Australian fisheries". The European and Japanese fishing industries had now recovered from the war and the new technology largely produced for the war had boosted fishing capacity. Imports of fish into Australia were rising largely due to higher quality and better convenience than the local product. Production per head of population had fallen from over 10 lbs pre war to about 7 lbs. The fresh fish and canning industries that had flourished under wartime protection wilted when the protection was removed and the customer had a wider choice. The industry had been rejected by the Tariff Board on several occasions but the Trade Minister offered them another hearing if they could make a prima facie case. McEwen acknowledged that import licensing records had shown an increase in frozen fish imports but he expected them to now fall back to the levels applying in 1957. Despite post war import controls canned fish imports had grown from 60 million lbs in 1945-6 to 180 million lbs in 1957-8 and fresh and frozen fish from 2.6 million lbs to 23 million lbs over the same period. The government assisted the industry by classing it as a primary industry for the purposes of taxation in the 1958 budget.
The anomaly facing the industry was that fishermen, particularly trawlermen were complaining that they could no longer operate at a profit but housewives now regarded fresh fish as a luxury. Despite the efforts of the Commonwealth Fisheries Office and the new Development Trust Account to extend and expand the traditional fisheries market forces were constricting the industry to those fisheries where Australia had real comparative advantage - the high value shellfisheries. Crayfish was the first fishery to expand under this new stimulus as overseas markets sent the prices up and the value of exports rose from US$1million in 1948-9 to US$8.5 million in 1958-9. The number of crayfish pots in use in Tasmania increased from less than 1000 in 1939 to over 6000 in 1959 even though the number of pots per boat was strictly controlled.
The questioning of the great optimism for a major fishing industry commensurate with the length of the coastline, first publicized by the Tariff Board in 1941, could no longer be ignored. The highly protected environment created by wartime controls had deferred consideration of the matter but in the freer market of the late 1950's Governments could delay no longer. In Tasmania the Benjamin Report stated "the fishing industry is passing through a crisis and the future is somewhat obscure"
The role of State Fisheries Departments was questioned in Victoria by a lengthy Parliamentary Enquiry and in Tasmania by the Hobbs Report into inland fisheries and the Select Committee into the scallop fishery. In Western Australia and South Australia the growing importance of crayfisheries promoted internal re-evaluations and Queensland appointed an Inspector of Fisheries on a permanent basis for the first time. The Hobbs Report was in turn reviewed by the Benjamin Committee and followed by another report by D D Lynch. The Licensed Fishermen's Association sought an Enquiry into the industry but the Government refused.
The concept of maximum sustainable yield - the quantity of fish that can be annually and sustainably harvested from a population of fish- gained acceptance internationally in the 1950's.The role of the professional fisheries scientist in the administrations was firmly embedded by the resolution of the Commonwealth/States Fisheries Conference held in June 1961 that a formal stock assessment be a prerequisite to a fisheries management and decided that the universal objective of management will be to maximize the yield from the resource and maximize returns to fishermen. The policy change was profound but implemented without conscious consideration of Ministers. It was a measure of the influence of the new professional leadership that such a change came about without political debate. Nevertheless from this point onward there was an expectation that management measures would be introduced only after some quantitative assessment of the state of the exploited stocks.
Initial Impact of Commonwealth Fisheries Act
The Commonwealth responsibility for fisheries reverted to the Country Party in January 1959 when Charles Adermann from Queensland became Minister for Primary Industry. A succession of his colleagues, including Doug Anthony, Peter Nixon and Ian Sinclair, held the post in every subsequent non-Labor government
.
It took several years for the practical impact of the proclamation of the Commonwealth Act (in 1955) to be felt by the industry and State administrations. Prior to 1955 States had a de jure responsibility for fisheries in adjacent waters offshore for as far as they could establish a nexus between the fishing activity and the peace order and good government of the State. The consequence of this situation was that fisheries management tended to be parochial and for fishermen to stay close to their home State. The crayfish debates over fishing in Bass Strait (see Chapter 2) had established Tasmania's "authority" over the fishery but now that authority seemed to be confined to the territorial sea. Victorian boats with Commonwealth licences came closer to Tasmania than ever before. The refusal of the Commonwealth to register fishing gear added to the problem and the Victorian boats could use unlimited numbers of pots. In addition the Tasmanian Department of Agriculture had lost two cases against fishermen landing crayfish during the closed season when magistrates found that the catches were made outside territorial waters pursuant to a Commonwealth licence and were not subject to Tasmanian legislation. Tasmanian fishermen felt the Fisheries Division was now powerless to protect "their fishery" and questioned whether the Tasmanian case had been argued forcefully enough with Canberra and the other States. As all the State Fisheries Departments began to experience these and similar problems the need for regular consultation with the Commonwealth became imperative.
CSIRO Changes Direction
This decade saw remarkable changes in the staffing, role and reputation of the CSIRO Division of Fisheries. By 1968 all of the major figures in the Division were gone - Thompson retired, Fowler retired (and died died on January 23, 1961), Blackburn, Thomson and Wood resigned).
CSIRO reviewed its fisheries programme after the Commonwealth/State Conference in 1960. Dr. Humphrey justified oceanographic research on the grounds that it was needed to provide some of the answers to questions posed by fisheries studies and that in future fisheries biologists would not carry out oceanographic work. He stated that "the broad policy of CSIRO was that research work should be of national importance. This did not mean that all effort should be concentrated on narrow and immediate problems, the past scientific problems arose when scientists tried to solve problems set by nature. It was most important that over a period of years all scientists should add something to his science." In discussing the planning and administration of fisheries research Dr. Kesteven said that his view of the Division of Fisheries work was to "furnish an account in static and dynamic sense of the location, composition and magnitude of fisheries resources. The primary objectives of the work would be the distribution of the resources chosen for study, forecasts of the consequences of certain courses of action by the industry and systems of prediction of resource behaviour." In order to address these problems it would be necessary to set priorities. Some staff objected to the suggestion that their work may become strictly applied and that academic lines of research accrued prestige to the Division. Kesteven countered with the view that such work was not prescribed for the plan he had outlined, on the contrary he expected officers to be good scientists. The meeting also recognized that in the past there had been poor relations between the Commonwealth and State Departments but this was now improving. Care must be taken to ensure that State Departments are always informed when the Division was operating in the State and the Department was the proper channel of communication with industry.
Kesteven Returns
Cedric Setter the chemist who had worked in the CSIRO Division of Food Preservation before joining Thompson's group during the War was appointed Commonwealth Director of Fisheries in February 1960. Whilst with the Controller of Fisheries he had been in charge of the Central Fisheries Office in Melbourne and had remained with the Fisheries Office under Anderson. At almost the same time his war time colleague, Dr G L Kesteven, returned to CSIRO as deputy to George Humphrey and to take charge of fisheries research. After working in the Fisheries Division of CSIR from 1942 and serving as a Assistant Controller to Thompson during the war, he had spent the past 13 years with FAO.
The appointment of George Humphrey as Chief of the CSIRO Division of Fisheries and Oceanography opened the way for Geoffrey Kesteven to return to Australia. The two were personal friends and Kesteven had urged Humphrey to seek the direction of the Division after Thompson. Humphrey was an academically oriented chemist whereas Kesteven was devoted to the application of science to the management of fisheries keen to see the results of research incorporated into management measures. Kesteven was prepared to return CSIRO to the management role they had towards the end of the War. This attitude was to lead to confusion of the roles of CSIRO and the Commonwealth Fisheries Office and ultimately with some State Departments.
A conference of Commonwealth and State officers in Melbourne in December 1960 established a co-ordinated programme of research to be led by CSIRO. The programme entitled "The Southern Pelagic Fisheries Project" was the first substantial initiative by Dr. Kesteven. This programme drew all the fisheries research in south-eastern Australia under CSIRO influence and moulded the newly appointed young fisheries scientists in Kesteven's image. His attitude to management was set down in May 1961 in a paper to the Commonwealth and State Fisheries Officers conference which agreed :-
-to repeal obsolete regulations,
-that stock assessment is a pre-requisite to management,
-that Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY)is the agreed objective of fisheries management together with maximizing returns to fishing.
This major policy change was consolidated by a series of seminars supervised by Kesteven which began by educating senior administrators attending the Commonwealth/States Fisheries Conferences (and later leading industry figures) to such terms as MSY, fishing effort, fishing mortality etc. Later, with Cedric Setter, he promoted the need to examine the economics of fishing which lead to "limited entry management".
Together with the system of uniform statistics, another Kesteven initiative, the 1961 resolutions provided the formal endorsement for the transformation of the CSIRO fisheries research programme from the biologically orientated projects to the more statistically based assessments. CSIRO announced at the 1962 Commonwealth/State Conference that it would restrict research to tuna,southern and western crayfish,Australian Salmon and whales. Barracouta and trawling research was to be dropped and staff was to return to Cronulla. As a consequence the Division lost three senior officers early in 1963. J.M. Thompson who had been with the organization since 1945, resigned and managed the Manly Aquarium. A.M. Olsen who had also joined in 1945, left to join the new Alginates Company in Tasmania and E.J.F. Wood who had joined the organization in 1937 also resigned.
An insight to Kesteven's outlook is seen in an article entitled "Professional; v Amateur, a biologist looks at the problem" and "Fishermen and Scientists Work Together". Eventually it became obvious that Deputy Chief of the CSIRO Division of Fisheries and Oceanography was an inadequate and inappropriate platform from which to launch a reform of Australian fisheries management. Kesteven left Australia in January 1968 to return to FAO.
A Fisheries Council and Standing Committee
Hobart hosted the annual conference of Commonwealth and State Fisheries Officers for the first time in December 1959 and urged that immediate steps be taken to establish an Australian Fisheries Council along the same lines as the Agricultural Council that had now operated successfully for 26 years. (Other major decisions were a recommendation that all the south-eastern States and the Commonwealth introduce a 3.25 inch minimum mesh size for trawl net cod ends, the Commonwealth should allocate £100,000 from the Trust Account for loans to fishermen to improve boats and gear, and a film be made to stress the importance of conserving crayfish stocks.) The next Conference was held in Canberra in September 1960 and formally recommended that an Australian Fisheries Council be established. In opening the Conference the Commonwealth Secretary for Primary Industry J V Moroney reminded the officers that "he had mooted" the formation of an Australian Fisheries Council in 1958 but that there were doubts about "sufficient policy matters requiring decisions at Ministerial level." New South Wales could not recall many problems which would need consideration by Ministers but it would be good for Ministers to get together. The Directors of Fisheries resolved that as the industry had expanded with greater need for Commonwealth/State co-operation in development and management the Minister for Primary Industry should invite State Ministers to an ad hoc meeting to consider the formation of a Council and Standing Committee.
During discussion of the other agenda items Tasmania raised:-
.... the need for more publicity on Commonwealth licensing;
.... the need for Commonwealth registration of gear, particularly craypots. (This was resisted by Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland, Victoria as unnecessary and an undesirable extension of Commonwealth activities and by Commonwealth legal officers who said it was impractical;
... patrolling of Commonwealth waters to stop the sale in New South Wales of undersize crayfish caught in Tasmanian waters. This was supported by New South Wales and Victoria but Western Australia said all patrolling was a State responsibility.
The meeting heard the first discussion of export regulations initially to guarantee the quality of cray tails. Kesteven referred to a CSIRO review of its fisheries research activities and the need for information and to collate what had already been attained. He proposed a standing committee to form a co-operative programme in south-east Australia (later called the Southern Pelagic Project Committee). The meeting unanimously agreed. A Statistics Committee was formed with the responsibility for establishing a comprehensive and uniform system of fisheries statistics throughout the country. The Conference also moved to improve the quality of fisheries inspection by agreeing to run annual training courses for fisheries inspectors. The conference also discussed two matters which had already become regular items on the agenda and were destined to occupy many hours of discussion in succeeding years. The first was the threat to Australia's freshwater biota posed by the importation of exotic aquarium fish and the second was the desire for uniformity in the common names of fish. A list of "standard common names" had been published in 1947 after the 1960 conference another list of "uniform common names" for 60 species was published.
Kesteven and Setter now back in control set about integrating Australian fisheries by fostering consultation and uniformity. At the end of November 1960, three special conferences were held in Melbourne to further the matters raised in September. A meeting of the Southern Pelagic Committee recommended a market measure program and tagging programs for tuna, crayfish and barracouta. The Statistics Committee also met and recommended a uniform system of standard statistics. The third meeting was aimed at achieving greater uniformity of southern crayfish management measures.
As the 1959 and 1960 attempts had not resulted in the formation of an Australian Fisheries Council and Standing Committee on Fisheries a special meeting of the Commonwealth and State Fisheries Conference was held in Perth on the 30th May 1961 primarily devoted to the matter. The Chairman, Mr. A.J. Frazer, began the meeting by inviting Frank Hicks to open the discussions in the light of his long association with the Standing Committee on Agriculture. Hicks concluded his comments by recommending that Fisheries follow similar lines to Agriculture in establishing a Council and Standing Committee. The meeting agreed that the Council should consist of the Commonwealth Minister for Primary Industry and the six State Ministers responsible for Fisheries with the Commonwealth Minister having the power to co-opt the other Commonwealth Ministers with some responsibility for fisheries matters. The functions of the Council were again spelt out and that it should meet every two years in each State and in Canberra by rotation. The meeting suggested that Standing Committee should consist of the Chief Fisheries Officer in each State and the Commonwealth Director for Fisheries, the Chief of the CSIRO Division of Fisheries and Oceanography and a representative of the Department of Territories. The Standing Committee should have the same functions as the Fisheries Council but in addition it should secure co-operation and co-ordination in fisheries development, management and research throughout the Commonwealth. It should advise the Commonwealth and State Governments directly or through the Council on matters pertaining to the initiation and development of research on fisheries problems and to secure co-operation between the Commonwealth and States with respect to quarantine and disease control. The meeting also recommended that the Standing Committee should meet annually and that the Chairmanship should be rotated in the sequence of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania but in recognition of the role of F.W. Hicks in the Standing Committee on Agriculture he should chair the first meeting.
This conference considered an important paper by Kesteven on the nature of fisheries management and the role of regulations. With little discussion agreed :-
-to repeal obsolete regulations,
-that stock assessment is a pre-requisite to management,
-that Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) is the agreed objective of fisheries management together with maximizing returns to fishing.
Some Departments had already begun to implemented such a policy the remainder accepted the direction without demur. The requirement to seek maximization of production as the principal objective of fisheries management and to require objective research as a prerequisite for changes to regulations had far reaching repercussions for the nature and cost of Australian fisheries management. Tasmania's style of management was reflected in the State's view that such prerequisites were not necessary. (The new policy was apparently never discussed by Ministers possibly they failed to recognize its importance. But they readily agreed that officers should discuss such matters at a seminar in 1962. )
When Ministers met in August 1961 they agreed to the officers resolution and it seemed that after many years of struggle, principally led by Tasmania, a Fisheries Council along the lines of the Agricultural Council would be established. The Commonwealth Minister, Mr Adermann, said: "The responsibilities of the States and the Commonwealth are clear in such matters as the management of fisheries and territorial and extra-territorial waters.". However Federal Cabinet vetoed the proposal on the 22nd May 1962, nevertheless Ministers would now begin to meet regularly and when the Council was eventually established almost a decade later there was little change in the nature of the Ministerial discussions.
When the officers next gathered in March 1962 they did so believing they were now the Standing Committee on Fisheries,. With F.W. Hicks of Tasmania as Chairman, they agreed to uniform common names for another 40 species of fish. Under the influence of Kesteven CSIRO had decided that it should narrow its research program and concentrate on tuna, crayfish, Australian salmon and whales; conference agreed.
Key elements of the plan to better integrate Australian fisheries administration were uniform names for fish and uniform and comprehensive statistics on catch and effort. Fisheries officers met for the second time in 1962 in Sydney in September and again discussed uniform statistics and a range of other matters. Coordination (integration) in south-eastern Australia was to be achieved through the Southern Pelagic Project Committee. In 1964 the Ministers were asked to expand the terms of reference of the Committee and to rename it the South Eastern Fisheries Research Committee. New South Wales interpreted the changes as an attempt by CSIRO to direct its research and influence its management. They vigorously defended their independence
"We are not agreeable to submit, and have our research programmes directed by this proposed centralized control" T P Murphy MLA.
and despite support from other State Ministers, the Conference allowed the matter to drop. But NSW were sufficiently flexible to allow Conference to accept the inclusion of scallop research under SPPC - NSW had no scallop fishery. Another attempt to reform SPPC failed at the 1968 Conference. NSW opposition to integration, particularly under CSIRO leadership was a persistent and effective counter to efforts at integration for many years.
With the departure of Kesteven CSIRO fisheries research programme began a long slide. (The February edition of Fisheries Newsletter carried an advertisement for the sale by tender of the Warreen). George Humphrey was blamed for diverting the Division's attention towards oceanography. The 1968 Commonwealth/States Fisheries Conference drew to the attention of Ministers
" the fact that the expanding State expenditure and activity in fisheries are not being matched by an equivalent increase in CSIRO's fisheries research."
But as that organization declined the volume and importance of fisheries research being conducted by the State Departments was rapidly increasing.
After 1964 meetings were held annually until 1968. The Conference was provided with an opportunity to discuss the new management technique of limited entry licensing in 1965 when South Australian fishermen requested it for the tuna fishery. However the Ministers confined their discussions to whether there was enough known about the fishery to be concerned for its future. The introduction of input controls had a much greater impact on fishermen and politicians than had the concept of maximum sustainable yield three years earlier.In 1967 and again in 1968 State Ministers pressed the Commonwealth to establish a fund for research education and development along the lines of those operating in several States. Such funds were generated from licence fees and financed special research projects. These discussions were part of general campaign by the States to get the Commonwealth to shoulder a fairer share of the financial burden of management of fisheries. By 1968 the Commonwealth had agreed to reimburse the States for the actual costs associated with licensing and patrolling and had established the Fishing Industry Research Trust Account by matching the amount the States raised form the industry for research.
After many years of trying and one false start the Federal Cabinet finally agreed to form a formal Australian Fisheries Council and Standing Committee in November 1968. Ministers had been meeting regularly since 1962.