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What I seen of it in the 1980's was that the Japs were netting all our fish from the other side of Fraser Island and right up the coast and our mob were s-it on by our Federal Government, not to mention still are being shafted.
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There are two major factor that make Australia have much less fish abundance than other continents:
a) we have a much narrower and less expansive continental shelf; and
b) our waters are fed a much much lower level of nutrients as we a mostly comparatively desert like continent with few permanently running rivers carrying nutrients to the sea (and seem determined to make that worse by killing the few we have). Our waters are comparatively nutrients poor; and no adding fertiliser run-off to rivers from farming does not improve things (they are not nutrients edible by fish).
In essence we have more water than most but with very much less fish densities.
Foreign fishing (illegal or legal) while still an issue, is very much less so for Australia as, unlike most other countries, for the most part we do not have to share our borders and coastal waters with other nations and fight about who owns the waters and fish within them (think of the much greater difficulties in Europe, places like the South China Sea, South America and even North America where you have nations, states and even city Government trying to managed shared fish resources).