Last month, Radio Australia reported that:

The Australian Navy has fired on a foreign fishing boat in the northern waters of Australia. The machine gun fire holed the boat above the waterline. The Defence Minister says the incident shows the tougher approach Australia is taking to foreign boats fishing in its exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

Tougher? Australia has been extremely tough on these fishermen, who are trying to fish waters that are traditionally theirs, but now fall within the Australian EEZ. These small boats have fished the area for hundreds of years and originally traded with Aboriginal people.

In 1989 under the Hawke Labor government, a reinterpretation of a 1974 Memorandum Of Understanding with Indonesia made fishing in Australian waters an issue. Over the next 20 years, increases in surveillance lead to larger number of these boats being detained or burned at sea. Now, for the expensively equipped, highly trained Australian navy, it’s like shooting fledging ducks in a swimming pool. Up to 600 Indonesian fishermen reside in Australian jails and purpose built detention centres at any time.

In February 2003 Mansur La i bu, a deckhand from a small village in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, died onboard a “hulk” anchored in Darwin Harbour. He shared a cabin that was three foot high, five foot wide and seven foot long with seven others in the wet season.

They were originally found in Australian waters six weeks earlier and “admitted” to catching about two kilograms of “red fish”. Unrepresented in court, they “say” what ever their captors want. These fishermen catch and salt the fine flesh of sharks and other marine life, like sea cucumbers and trochus, a type of shellfish. Fish are usually caught with handlines, while trochus shell and sea cucumber are taken by hand. Some boats even have nets. In April 2005, Muhamad Heri, another fishermen awaiting trial in detention, died of a heart attack. Now there is land-based detention.

Though we have shrunk our already tiny northern fishing fleet, the taxpayer bankrolls the navy, coastwatch and customs vessels in addition to courts, prisons and private security. Today, fishermen are rounded up by the world’s fastest purpose built hulk — the 98 metre Triton (pictured below). Launched last year, this armed high speed hulk is leased annually for $17 million — part of an annual budget of more than $389 million to stop illegal fishing. It can hold 30 or more fishermen without trial for up to 30 days and is rapidly filling the new land based detention centres.

But the question needs to be asked — for what gain and to whom? Academics who want their own private northern aquarium to conserve fish in?

Now we have started “shooting up” boats, how long will it be before Australia, like others in the region, kills fishermen at sea? Or will a new government negotiate joint management over northern waters with Indonesia and East Timor to work cooperatively and keep the real threat, the increasingly common industrial scale poachers, at bay? We may even create employment, restore our northern fishing fleet, and once again feed the urban fish lovers.