News > News Features - Australian Shark Fishing Proposal

Val Broomhead has brought the following email to our attention, highlighing the alarming proposals by the Queensland government to licence shark fishing in Australia. Incidentally, the film "Sharkwater" was also mentioned by Val and Richard in their recent Dry Meeting talk.

Last night, the Undersea team was invited to attend the Cairns premiere of the new movie Sharkwater, by filmmaker Rob Stewart. The film is an expose of the global slaughter of sharks, and is a call to action to save these misunderstood animals.

Sharks are apex predators, helping to control populations of prey species. Consequently, reducing the number of sharks may have significant and unpredictable impacts on other parts of the ecosystem. According to Stewart, these effects may even include diminishing global oxygen levels, thereby threatening the survival of our own species.

The film focused primarily on the threats from long line fishing and shark fin fisheries, which, along with other threats, have decimated 90% of sharks worldwide! Shark finning is a multi billion dollar industry, and its massive lobby power has allowed it to continue even in areas such as the Galapagos and the Cocos Islands, some of the last remaining sanctuaries for sharks.

To our dismay, the release of this movie coincides with a proposal by the Queensland government to establish a dedicated shark fishery in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, and in other marine parks in Queensland. Not only is the Queensland Government proposing to hand out specific fishing licenses for shark fishing, which will entrench the practice for years, they are planning to allow shark finning in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area and in the Marine Parks of Moreton Bay and the Great Sandy Straits with this new license proposal. This project, legitimising one of the most unsustainable forms of fishing on the planet, is unsustainable, unethical, and horrifying.

The proposal will create new licenses to fishers to catch unlimited sharks and also to catch sharks with nets over a kilometre long in our off-shore waters.

If you value sharks on the Great Barrier Reef and around the world, please help us to stop this shocking proposal.

What can you do?

We encourage you to see Sharkwater, and to tell all of your friends and acquaintances about it. It is incredibly informative, but also an inspiring piece of journalism. See the Sharkwater website at http://www.sharkwater.com/.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

The Undersea Explorer family