ThursdayFriday
April 29-30, 2004
102 Fishery Sciences
(auditorium)
Margot SachsePrincipal, Alternative Management Strategies Project, Australian Fisheries Management AuthorityFisheries Property Rights Down Under: The Australian Experience |
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In Australia, all fisheries are managed through limiting the number of participants in a fishery. This is implemented through the use of fishing permits or licenses. A permit provides fishers with a property right to harvest fish in a specific fishery.
Under Federal Government legislation, there are two types of fishery rights. One is a short-term right, which is a fishing permit granted for periods of up to 5 years. The long-term right is a Statutory Fishing Right, which is created under fishery management plans. These rights can be granted in the form of gear units for fisheries managed through input control or in the form of individual transferable quota for output-controlled fisheries.
One of the major challenges of fisheries management is the allocation of these rights. The method of allocation is crucial, as any dissatisfaction is likely to trigger litigation. In this presentation, I will describe the various methods of allocation used in Australia and will highlight examples of the process used to allocate these rights. I will also detail various successful allocation processes and how a recent successful legal challenge to the allocation formula used for school and gummy shark quota has been managed, including some lessons learnt from these experiences.
Margot Sachse began her career as a technical assistant with Northern Territory Fisheries in 1983. As a relatively shy 17 year old, her first task was to ask northern prawn fishery (NPF) fishermen (politely) to complete daily logsheets. In the following 14 years, Margot turned the task of extracting reliable information from fishermen into an art form resulting in the NPF having one of the most comprehensive and reliable catch and effort databases of any fishery world-wide. In 1993, Margot moved to head office of the Australian Fisheries Management Authority in Canberra and transferred her logbook skills to the fisheries of southern Australia.
In 1997, Margot took up a position as the compliance officer responsible for planning all compliance activities in relation to the NPF and the southern shark and non-trawl fisheries. She put into place a catch monitoring program in the southern shark and south east non-trawl fisheries and implemented the Inmarsat vessel monitoring system across the NPF fleet. The latter involved interacting extensively with all stakeholders to modify the management arrangements to obtain the best outcome from the satellite monitoring technology.
Margot was appointed to the position as Manager of the gillnet, hook and trap fishery (formerly southern shark and south east non-trawl fisheries) in 2000. In this role she led a small team that changed the management system for the southern shark fishery from input to output controls on 1 January 2001. Recently, Margot became the Principal Investigator of the Alternative Management Strategies Project for the southern and eastern scalefish and shark fishery (SESSF). This project will conduct an audit of the current management measures in the SESSF and develop a comprehensive set of alternative integrated management strategies.
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