Environmental Group's Bid To Protect Grey Nurse Fails

October 18, 2007

Release from: Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

An environmental group has failed in a legal bid to force the NSW Government to impose 18 no-fishing zones as part of efforts protect the endangered grey nurse shark.

The Nature Conservation Council (NCC) of NSW claimed today's dismissal of its application to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal could mean grey nurses would become extinct within 10 years.

The NCC wanted the tribunal to order the State Government to set up sanctuaries in areas including Sydney's Maroubra Beach, Montague Island, off the South Coast, and South West Rocks on the Mid-North Coast.

Tribunal president Justice Garry Downes acknowledged evidence that as few as 500 of the sharks survived off Australia's east coast.

But he maintained commercial fishing permits along the coast would not be detrimental to the species' survival.

"We have concluded that the wildlife trade operation constituted by the Ocean Trap and Line Fishery (OTLF) and operated in accordance with the minister's conditions will not be detrimental to the survival of the grey nurse sharks," Justice Downes wrote in his decision.

"To the extent that the grey nurse shark population off the east coast of Australia is subject to threats to its survival, and it is, we think that these threats are the consequence of the biology of the sharks, of the fact that they are critically endangered and of the fact that they are subject to sufficient deaths each year from causes outside the OTLF to threaten their existence."

NCC executive director Cate Faehrmann said the group had exhausted its legal resources and it was now up to the NSW Government to ban fishing in the 18 zones.

She said a ban would not have a large impact on commercial and recreational fishing.

"We need to have complete banning of fishing in these areas so that the sharks do not consume hooks and get strangled from swallowing hooks," Ms Faehrmann told reporters.

"Currently there is an unacceptable rate of grey nurse shark deaths from human behaviour."

Population modelling shows there will no longer be an effective breeding population in as little as 10 years if the current rate of decline in grey nurse numbers is not halted, the NCC says.

"We need to stop that. We need to take responsibility for it if we're to see the grey nurse shark not become extinct within the next ten years," Ms Faehrmann said.

The NCC wanted the tribunal to overturn a Federal Government decision made last June to allow a major commercial fishery to operate in grey nurse shark habitats in NSW waters.

However, in his judgment, Justice Downes said the tribunal did "not have the power to consider the position of grey nurse sharks generally".