Fisheries Officers take industrial action over personal safety concerns

FISHERIES officers across NSW have begun industrial action over safety concerns after a number of violent incidents where they were shot at, threatened with knives and baseball bats and had cars driven at them.

The officers are demanding they’re issued with protective equipment such as stab-proof vests and capsicum spray.

Fisheries officers are now avoiding certain areas and individuals at the very time fears have emerged that crooks, poachers and organised criminals, like outlaw bikie gangs, have taken over the state’s rivers, oceans and estuaries and are now plundering valuable species like abalone and rock lobster.

Without direct police assistance on operations the officers are now refusing to complete inspections of commercial trawlers at nighttime.

The Department of Primary Industries, which employs fisheries officers, attempted to force them back into dangerous night work earlier this week by applying to the NSW Industrial Relations Commission but the Commission refused to make such an order.

The officers also want the same powers as fisheries officers in other states to check boat and car registrations, conduct surveillance, undertake investigations, and real time GPS tracking of the entire commercial fishing fleet.

They also want to see the introduction of a ‘fit and proper person’ test for commercial fishing licence holders and their crew within six months.

A fisheries officer is going to get killed if the NSW Government doesn’t take action, according to Troy Wright the assistant general secretary of The Public Service Association which represents fisheries officers.

“Fisheries officers are being shot at, run down, having fishing knives pulled on them, someone’s going to get killed,” Mr Wright said.

“Fisheries officers have no way of knowing if a boat or car we inspect is going to be filled with bikies from outlaw motorcycle gangs, they’re blind compared to fisheries officers in other states.

“People say they care about the marine environment but the 100 or so fisheries officers in this state are now saying publicly our oceans, rivers and estuaries are being plundered and there is nothing they can do.

“In other states, fisheries officers have access to car and boat licence records like Police, they can find out if people are violent offenders and avoid dangerous situations, they can see if someone has a history of crimes against the environment -- in NSW we can’t do that.

“It's harder to get a RSA certificate to pull schooners at the local pub than it is to get a commercial fishing licence, you can get one and start taking thousands of kilos of fish by filling out an online form with no 100 points of ID, with no background checks.

“In Victorian or Queensland to be a commercial fisher you need to to pass a fit and proper person test, so if you have a prior history of crimes against the environment, or violent crimes you won’t get a licence,” Mr Wright said.

“It’s an absolute joke, to flick a line in at the local wharf mums and dads have to pay for a licence and have it with them, but to run a commercial fishing operation you can have 15 people all pulling out hundreds of fish who have zilch paperwork.

“Fisheries officers have no powers of investigation, they can’t even use binoculars or a camera, in other states they can apply to a magistrate to put a tracking device on a boat, here they can’t do that, why?

“We know drug traffickers have infiltrated the commercial industry, miles off the coast in the dead of night we need to board boats, yet unlike other states we don’t have a GPS vessel monitoring system for our commercial fishing fleet, one day fisheries officers will board a boat and they'll get killed.

“This is why the NSW fishing fleet is so appealing to drug traffickers to pick up cocaine shipments off the continental shelf,” Mr Wright said.

“In 2020 a fishing trawler called Coralynne was caught carrying 1.8 tonnes or $850 million worth of cocaine it had picked up from a larger ship in international waters. If fisheries officers had boarded this boat they might have been killed.

“Fisheries officers can’t even run a rego check on a boat they physically pull up alongside.

“In Queensland they track every boat via GPS, so they know where each boat is, who’s the skipper and what they’re doing.

“It’s not just miles off the coast, fisheries officers are intercepting poachers with thousands of dollars worth of abalone and rock lobster at all hours of the night, and these crooks won’t hesitate to hurt them if it means avoiding jail time,” Mr Wright said.

“Fisheries officers need more defensive protective equipment, stab proof vests, capsicum spray so if someone comes at them with a fishing knife they can put some distance between them and if they close that distance they can spray them so they can escape.

“Fisheries officers often can’t call police for backup as they are tracking poachers in the dead of night on remote beaches or miles offshore on trawlers. I’m telling you someone is going to get killed.

“They need cars with crimson flashing lights and a siren and power to effect vehicle stops,” Mr Wright said.

“There’s big money in poaching, every abalone is a $50 note, and all you need is a wetsuit and a knife and you can lever a couple of 100 off the rocks in a few hours, it's big money.

“Go for a bushwalk on the south coast and you’ll see where illegal fishers have removed the abalone shell and guts, but they keep the meat which attaches to the rock, they’re highly prized in asian cuisine.

“If you care about our state’s fish stocks, especially of endangered species like abalone and rock lobster, you need to hear this distress call from Fisheries Officer’s because if they’re ignored you might wake up to the news one day soon that these species are extinct,” Mr Wright said.

 

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