Recreational anglers are mobilising against a plan to allow commercial tunnel netting inside the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, warning that the gear is too indiscriminate to belong in one of the planet's most protected marine environments.
A petition driven by the Inshore Flats Project is calling on the Queensland Government to stop the establishment of a new tunnel-net fishery, arguing the method scoops up far too much of everything that swims. Tunnel nets work by funnelling fish along long mesh "wings" into a holding chamber as the tide drops, and the campaign says the scale involved is the problem.
"With wings spanning up to 1.6km, these are industrial-scale walls of mesh netting," the Inshore Flats Project says of the gear it wants kept out of the reef.
The numbers from the fishery's own trial work are what have galvanised anglers. Across 17 deployments, the campaign says, more than 30,000 fish from over 50 different species were caught. By weight, roughly 97 per cent of that haul was lower-value or non-target catch, with the intended species making up only about 3 per cent. More than 15 per cent of the total was baitfish — the small forage species that underpin the entire inshore food chain that sport fish such as barramundi, queenfish and trevally rely on.
A single set, the project warns, can take in excess of 6,000 fish weighing two tonnes or more in one drop. The trial sites read like a roll-call of the central and north Queensland coast: Bowen, Airlie Beach, Shute Harbour, the Whitsundays, Lucinda, Turkey Beach and Gladstone — all waters prized by recreational fishers and the tourism operators who depend on them.
For the flats-fishing community, the concern is not just the immediate kill but what a large-scale netting operation does to fragile shallow systems over time. Tidal flats, seagrass margins and creek mouths are nursery grounds, and anglers argue that hammering them with high-volume gear undermines the very fisheries that draw visitors to the reef coast in the first place.
The campaign frames the issue as a question of priorities inside a World Heritage Area. Supporters say the reef's inshore zone should be managed for long-term ecological health and the low-impact recreational and tourism economy it sustains, rather than opened to a netting method that returns so little of its catch as the target species.
Petition organisers are urging anglers to add their names through the change.org campaign and to learn more via the Inshore Flats Project, with the goal of pressuring decision-makers before any new fishery is locked in. The petition does not seek to shut down existing, well-regulated commercial fishing, but to draw a line at introducing tunnel netting into the reef's protected waters.
For now, the proposal remains a flashpoint between commercial and recreational sectors over how the inshore Great Barrier Reef should be shared. With trial data already pointing to heavy bycatch, the anglers behind the push argue the case against expansion is being made by the gear itself.