From July 1, every restaurant, pub and food-service outlet in Australia will have to tell diners where their seafood comes from — a reform the commercial fishing industry has campaigned for over many years. Menus will need to identify whether seafood is Australian, imported, or a mix of both, closing a gap that has long applied to retailers but never to the plate in front of you.
The stakes are bigger than they first appear. More than 64 per cent of all seafood eaten in Australia is imported, which is why supporters argue the change matters so much: for the first time, diners ordering fish at a venue will be able to make an informed choice rather than guess at the origin of what is on their fork.
For Greg Finn, a multi-endorsed commercial fisher who works the waters around the Port Stephens estuary in New South Wales, the reform is about respect for a way of life. Licensed to catch everything from Australian bonito to long-spine purple sea urchin, Finn structures his week around the conditions and the market.
"Pretty much most of my days are structured around where's the best opportunity with the weather, the value of the fish, and what's in demand and what's seasonal," he said.
Finn dives for urchin in about five metres of water and treats the seabed like a market garden. "It's just food you're gardening," he said. "It's just basically going in, having a look at the bottom, reading the bottom, taking the better quality ones, and leaving the rest behind. And then they're there for next season." Around 300 tonnes of urchin is hand-harvested in NSW each year in a low-impact fishery, and in their natural habitat the urchins are a useful sign of a healthy environment.
Finn supplies chef Ludovic Poyer, whose family restaurant at Port Stephens was named the best seafood restaurant in NSW in 2024 by the Sydney Fish Market. For Poyer, seasonality is everything. "You got all those fish coming all year long and you don't want to eat the same fish all the time. You just don't," he said.
The industry's research body says the change is about fairness. Sean Sloan, managing director of the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, which coordinates research into more than 500 Australian fish stocks, said imported product is not held to the same rules as the local fleet.
"What this new country-of-origin labelling system does, it levels the playing field, because a lot of those standards that Australian fisheries and aquaculture producers are held to are not actually the same as standards that our imported products are held to," Sloan said.
Most Australian fisheries are now managed with strict quotas and regular scientific stock assessments. At Sydney's new $836 million fish market — the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere, trading up to 13,000 tonnes a year with about 15 per cent imported, mostly from New Zealand — retailers already label origin clearly, and the market led the industry in adopting the practice.
Yet the reform lands at a hard time for the people who catch the fish. Australia's commercial fishers face spiralling costs, expanding marine protection reserves and the growing political clout of the recreational sector. Veteran Port Stephens fisher Johnny Alessio, hauling crab pots on an autumn morning, was blunt about why anyone stays in it.
"It definitely is a lifestyle. It's not a good business decision. It's a sickness. You either got it in your blood or you don't," he said. "You also need to be very good at putting away your money, because you never know when you're going to experience a downturn."
For Finn, the pressure is personal. He had hoped to build a business to share with his son Sam, but Sam now works fly-in, fly-out in Western Australia's iron ore industry. "I simply don't have the confidence to keep him relying upon what my business may produce for him in the future," Finn said.
Both are hoping the new transparency tilts demand back towards local catch. "When you know it's been caught local, it's got less food miles, and it's got a longer shelf life," Finn said. "I think people deserve to know where their fish comes from. I think it's going to make a huge difference."