DPI’s shark meshing review a joke - 27 March 2009

“The Department of Primary Industry’s report into the NSW Shark Meshing (Bather Protection) Program would be hilarious if not for the fact that the people of NSW are paying close to $1 million a year for nothing,” says Ian Cohen, NSW Greens MLC.

“The report begins from the flawed premise that the nets are going to continue and the report’s recommendations are all about supposed better management of the meshing program. Are the nets even working? The answer is a resounding ‘no’! The fact that the two most recent attacks occurred on meshed beaches demonstrate that pretty conclusively.

“If you look at the pictures of the Bondi and Avalon nets you can only laugh. How can Ian McDonald possibly tell the public that they work? These nets are a security blanket only.”

“The report admits that ‘lack of data about the number of bathers, in addition to reliable estimates of the numbers of sharks and various environmental and biological factors existing at the time of the attacks, precluded any valid quantitative conclusion about the likelihood of attacks’.[2.7.4] So how are we ever going to prove if the nets are working if there is no baseline to work from?” says Mr Cohen.

“The argument is sometimes made that the nets stop sharks developing territories –the fact that the report does not assert this shows that even the Department of Primary Industries doesn’t believe that one any more. So on what basis are these nets continuing?”

“By listing the number of sharks caught in the nets the report wants to suggest that each shark caught equates to an attack averted. The figures show 100 great whites caught from 51 beaches over 17 years of meshing (most in September/October when significantly fewer people are swimming). NSW has 721 beaches and 93% are not meshed. Why aren’t the great whites picking off swimmers on all those other beaches?”

“In the period 1974 - 2009 there were 12 attacks across 51 meshed beaches and 45 attacks on the 650 non-meshed beaches. Proportionally you’d say you were safer on a non-meshed beach — although we know that the number of people on NSW beaches is not evenly spread and that the number of people going to our beaches is increasing every year.

“Yet the report rightly notes that “on the basis of resident population alone . . . one would expect there to be a corresponding five-fold increase in the number of attacks over that time period. On the contrary there has been a relatively small increase (<30%) in attacks relative to those population increases over the longer term which, coupled with the decreasing catches in the SMP suggests there are relatively fewer sharks in the coastal waters of NSW than there were in the early to mid 1900s” [Report section 2.6.2] “Mr McDonald doesn’t want to be the one to take the nets down, he is more interested in the perception of public safety. You only have to look at the pictures and the real figures to see that it’s a joke, it’s unscientific and it’s a waste of money.” See the report with pictures of the Bondi and Avalon nets: http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/276029/Report-into-the-NSW-Shark-Meshing-Program.pdf