OZschwitz: If fishing wasn't made illegal by the statists, there would be no 'abandoned ghost nets' in the Antarctic waters

The Rudd Government has pulled plans to publicise the discovery of massive illegal fishing nets in the Antarctic while the ship that found them, Oceanic Viking, is under a different spotlight.

Bottom-set gillnets are presenting a new crisis in Australia's regional waters. Laid by foreign fishers, they form a ''curtain of death'' on the deep-sea floor.

But plans to expose the quantity of illegal nets found by the customs vessel on fisheries patrol have been sidelined.

Oceanic Viking found nets totalling 130 kilometres in length on Banzare Bank in the Southern Ocean earlier this year, sources told the Herald yesterday.

Use of the nets is outlawed by the 25-nation Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, but rich pickings of Patagonian toothfish are leading illegal fishers to set them anyway.

The Government had planned to publicise the finds at a meeting of the commission in Hobart this week. But while the Oceanic Viking was caught up in Indonesia with Sri Lankan asylum seekers, the Opposition began to ask why it was not doing its fisheries job.

In April the vessel found nets of five to nine kilometres in length but did not have the gear to pull them up. So it called on a licensed fishing vessel nearby, owned by Austral Fisheries of Perth, which recovered 29 tonnes of toothfish, a bycatch of skate, and about 10 kilometres of net. The rest was ripped up and sunk.

Glenn Sant, the global marine program leader at TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring network, said the discovery was devastating for the marine environment in the commission area.

''These nets are actually an invisible curtain of death for everything that swims into them,'' he said. ''The nets kill indiscriminately, and if they are lost they keep killing as ghost nets.''

A spokesman for the federal Fisheries Minister, Tony Burke, said he had no comment on the discovery, but the sources said a joint announcement by customs and the Australian Fisheries Management Authority was ready to be made this week.

The Opposition fisheries spokesman, Richard Colbeck, asked who was patrolling and protecting Australia's fisheries while Oceanic Viking was caught in the asylum seeker ''mess''.

Mr Burke said Australian officials would take up with the European Union the discovery of Spanish fishermen in the Tasman Sea with the same type of nets.

The Spanish are exploiting a gap in the fisheries zone boundaries of Australia and New Zealand, where endangered sharks migrate. Nets have been set for two seasons, an environment assessment by the Spanish Government disclosed.

''As fish stocks are increasingly depleted worldwide, fleets such as Spain's are scanning the farthest seas for stocks left in unguarded patches,'' Mr Sant said.

A Spanish Government assessment concluded that the nets would have very low impact on deep water corals and sponges.

LNK

OZschwitz: If fishing wasn't made illegal by the statists, there would be no 'abandoned ghost nets' in the Antarctic waters

OZschwitz: If fishing wasn't made illegal by the statists, there would be no 'abandoned ghost nets' in the Antarctic waters

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