Thanks for the tone of your response Maggie. I am sure when you investigate just where we stand on a whole raft of issues, both environmental and fisheries management you will come to appreciate what we are about and that we are offering a genuine alternative to current government policies. Our policies are rec fishing friendly, environmentally sound and anti overfishing...particularly commercially.
But lets talk trout!!!
If you were to purpose design a sustainable fishery. You would have a huge habitat area, a harvesting of stock each year in line with the spawning recruitment and methods in place which stopped expoitation of the "brood stock".
Without quoting the studies involved (but they are available on the reef crc web site)
here we have a commercial fishery which is limited to shallow water (due to needing the fish to live), prefers smaller fish and can (& finally is about to be) limited by TAC down to about 1500 tonnes (pre live trout boom numbers).
You have a very healthy brood stock which reside in deeper water, are subject to much less pressure, are controlled by bag limits and are soon to have seasonal spawning aggregation protection.
On top of this you have research which suggests that insufficent habitat exists on unfished reefs for annual spawning recruitment ie unfished reefs have a predominace of large male trout which prey on juvenille trout. Fished reefs, with less large male trout support a larger number of juvenilles each year.
Once the TAC on trout comes into force, latent capacity is removed, brood stocks are protected by bag limits, deep water and lighter pressure and the commercial fishery is limited to lagoons this is almost the perfect example of a well managed and sustainable fishery.
If you want biodiversity protection, have pink zones. The green zone thing, as you already pointed out, is a sham a PR stunt and a con job on the Australian public about how great the Howard Government is doing protecting the GBR.
Regards
KC