National Parks and Wildlife Service
South Australia

Displaced commercial fishing

The State Government is committed to ensuring that marine parks will help protect South Australia’s marine environment, while minimising the impacts on our state’s valuable commercial fishing industry. Minimal displacement of commercial fishing should also result in minimal effects on allied industries such as processors, exporters and transporters.

To achieve this, the State Government has fulfilled its commitment that marine parks will have less than a five per cent economic impact on the state’s fishing industry by minimising the overlap of restrictive marine park zones with important fishing grounds. To date, reports have demonstrated that the state's marine parks impact on commercial fishing is less than 1.6 per cent.

Read more about the methods used to achieve this in the SARDI report on historical catches in the final marine park zones.

The State Government’s long-standing position has been to utilise the following sequential steps for managing displaced effort:

  • avoid displacement by pragmatic zoning
  • redistribute effort only where possible without impacting ecological or economic sustainability of the fishery
  • market-based buyback of sufficient effort to avoid negative impacts on the fishery
  • compulsory acquisition (as a last resort option).

More information is available in the Displaced Commercial Fishing Policy Framework.

The State Government allowed a period of almost two years prior to the restrictions on fishing coming into effect. This was to enable people to prepare for the changes and to provide time to complete effort buy backs. A Displaced Effort Working Group was also established.

PIRSA Fisheries and Aquaculture conducted a process to reduce commercial fisheries catch and effort in preparation for the fishing restrictions.

In addition, the Marine Parks Act 2007 states that if the statutory rights of an authorisation holder are affected by the establishment of a marine park, the government must pay fair and reasonable compensation to the holder of the authorisation. All applications for compensation under the Marine Parks Act 2007 will be considered, as per the government’s legal responsibility.