PERTH — Nearly eight months after Western Australia closed 900 kilometres of coast to commercial demersal fishing, seven of roughly 60 affected licence holders have been paid. The rest are still negotiating, and more than 20 of them have now gone to court.

The West Coast demersal fishery, running from Kalbarri to Augusta, shut on 1 January to protect stocks of species including pink snapper and dhufish. The state government set aside $20 million to compensate or buy out the commercial operators pushed off the water — around 30 wet-line boats and six shark boats, by the count of Kalbarri fisher Phil de Grauw.

A government spokesperson confirmed last week that "at this time, seven compulsory fisheries adjustment scheme applications have been settled", and defended the pace.

"Several license holders have requested compensation amounts well above market value of their entitlements, and work is under way to ensure those claims can be validated, and payments are in accordance with taxpayer expectations," the spokesperson said.

De Grauw, who has fished at Kalbarri for 40 years, does not accept that framing. He said the offers are built on licence value derived from an earlier buyout and ignore boats, equipment and forgone earnings. He is one of more than 20 fishers behind a class action, and about half the displaced West Coast fleet has engaged a Melbourne law firm to negotiate on its behalf.

"We made the decision to go for class action and get some lawyers involved, because we had no confidence that they were going to do the right thing here," he said.

He was blunt about what nearly eight months has done to the industry's faith in the process. "There's a massive distrust in what's gone on so far. You can see the injustice, but it also puts in a massive cloud of uncertainty for the industry."

De Grauw said he expects to gain little personally and is pursuing a fair outcome for the fleet. He also conceded the exercise is genuinely complicated — investors who lease units to operators, fishers who run attached retail businesses, and a wet-line fleet with wildly different boats and scales of operation.

"We can't pigeon-hole every fisher, we are all totally different ... there's a real mix of the types of fishing, the size of the boats, the scale, and different bits and pieces that put together what is the wet-line fleet," he said.

The negotiations changed hands in the middle of all this. The government ended its arrangement with a Perth barrister who had been handling the compulsory fisheries adjustment scheme, with Fisheries Minister Jackie Jarvis and the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development taking it over directly. The department emailed fishers to tell them so.

WA Fishing Industry Council chief executive Manue Daniels said there is hope that bringing it in-house speeds things up, but she wants more detail — and she is not softening on the sequencing.

"The fishery was shut down without the compensation process being sorted out prior," Daniels said. "This has been incredibly hard on the mental health of the fishermen that have been affected by the closure. They haven't been able to pay the bills. It's been hard on families and relationships."

She said a month's notice between announcement and closure was "not acceptable", and that the state had obvious alternatives. "At the very least, the government could have easily let them fish until the process of compensation was dealt with, or have the compensation process ready and everything done prior."

Shadow fisheries minister and Geraldton MLA Kirrilee Warr said the switch itself is now a source of anxiety. "A number of fishers have already contacted me concerned about how long the process has taken but are now stressed about how this change may cause further delays," she said.

Then there is the group the scheme does not reach at all. Former Dongara fisher James Oliver worked as a deckhand, bought a boat, leased his fishing units and supplied fresh fish into Geraldton markets. Because he leased rather than owned those units, he is entitled to nothing.

"The unit holders who own the units are entitled to compensation, and good on them, so they should be, but as a person who leases, nothing," Oliver said. He put the outlay at $33,000 in unit leases plus mooring, dinghy pen and commercial shed fees.

Oliver sold his boat to cover bills and now skippers for another operator between Dongara and Darwin. He called the government's handling "immoral" and said his concern is precedent rather than his own recovery: "Three weeks' notice by a government that's meant to look after you? Morally, it was all wrong."

Asked in parliament in March about assistance for businesses that leased licences, Jarvis said commercial fishers who lease must renew annually and "are encouraged to consider market conditions, including sustainability concerns, when choosing to enter such commercial arrangements."

The political heat has not dropped since the closure. The Nationals held a fishing forum at Lancelin that drew more than 120 people, and leader Shane Love said coastal towns are wearing the economic and social cost of what he called a knee-jerk approach to fisheries management. Warr has warned the government to expect further civil disobedience without a review. A petition seeking a parliamentary inquiry into the ban has passed 31,000 signatures.

None of that changes the underlying stock assessment. It does mean the state is now defending both the closure and the way it paid for it.