The solution to the increasingly tragic problem of sharks off New South Wales beaches is simple, according to the government department under whose authority the problem has burgeoned.
It is in fact twofold. First, don’t acknowledge the problem exists at all.
“There has been a tragic incident at Kylies Beach, Crowdy Bay National Park, this morning,” the department announced on Instagram on Thursday morning.
A “tragic incident”? A car crash? An earth quake? A meteorite landing on a person collecting sea shells? The announcement didn’t say, although astute readers might reach their own conclusions by drawing a connection to the name of the account under which the post appeared: “NSW Sharksmart”.
Having avoided defining what caused this “tragic incident”, the post went on to offer its novel solution: “Events like this can leave us feeling shaken, anxious and overwhelmed — and it’s important to remember that you don’t have to carry those feelings alone. If you’re struggling, please reach out for support. Talking to a friend, a family member, or a mental health professional can make a real difference.”
Try telling that to Lukas Schindler, the Swiss tourist who survived the attack, with a deep bite in his thigh. His girlfriend, Livia Muhlheim, didn’t survive. There are no reports yet whether Schindler has taken the Sharksmart advice and called Helpline for counselling.
That’s not the only official government advice that, had they taken it, might have at least reduced the toll of this shark attack.
In December 2016, after the beaches of nearby Newcastle were closed for 10 consecutive days because of an infestation of sharks, CSIRO shark “expert” Barry Bruce, the nation’s leading shark researcher at the time, said the people of Newcastle needed to “treat animals like that with respect”.
This is where Schindler went wrong. He reportedly tried to save Muhlheim when the 3m bull shark attacked her. Had he instead simply shown the shark due “respect” and returned to shore where he belongs, he would not now be recovering from a savage bite to his own thigh, probably inflicted because the shark was annoyed about his lack of “respect”.
His girlfriend would still be dead, of course, but that’s hardly the government’s fault, is it?
Is it?
Of course it is. The people who have inflicted this catastrophe on New South Wales (and their counterparts in all other Australian states and the federal government) have so much blood on their hands that it will take a lot more than a bunch of euphemisms and platitudes posted on social media to wash it off.
I have been writing about this topic for more than 10 years, ever since a spate of attacks in 2015, after which New South Wales Premier Mike Baird called a Shark Summit and put $16 million on the table for opportunistic “shark experts” to come up with solutions to a problem that had in fact been solved in 1937.
Having become frustrated that my writing was having no effect while the toll continued to increase, I bit the bullet and funded, produced, wrote and edited a documentary about the subject, The Heart of Sharkness, which was posted to YouTube in October.
If you would like a succinct summary of how this completely unnecessary tragedy unfolded, I recommend you watch the nine minutes from 13:05. I guarantee you will be astonished and disgusted by the deliberate decisions by Baird and others to avoid saving lives and instead appease environmentalists who had suddenly and mysteriously developed a nerdish affection for dumb, dangerous and unpredictable sharks.
This latest attack adds another angle to the negative consequences of the burgeoning shark population: the cost to our tourism industry.
Most Australians themselves know that Australia is too expensive now to holiday in. Flights to Bali and other South East Asian destinations are crammed with working-class people excitedly anticipating a week or two in the sun drinking cheap cocktails at a nice hotel and enjoying the relative freedom away from the overpriced domestic resorts, not to mention the over-authoritarian buzz-killing domestic governments.
Europeans too are discovering that Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam are far cheaper and freer places to visit.
The tragic attack on a young Swiss couple, one of whom is now dead, has now added to the reasons why Europeans should avoid taking their holidays in Australia, and instead go to places where the government doesn’t mandate “respect” for man-eating sharks.
I have occasionally mentioned in various pieces over the past ten years that the increasing toll by sharks would one day seriously affect our tourism industry. That day has now arrived. But like everything else I’ve written, nobody in politics or “shark research” has listened.
The actual solution is even simpler than the one offered in that offensive Sharksmart post on Thursday: reintroduce controlled shark fishing and install nets (the cheapest, most effective deterrent to attacks, invented in NSW in 1937) at all popular beaches. All of this is explained clearly in The Heart of Sharkness.
There is a special place in Hell for the officials and politicians who have ignored all the warning signs of our burgeoning shark population and instead introduced namby-pamby methods that pretend to reduce the number of attacks.
The only thing they have saved is their own careers. For anybody else unfortunate enough to be caught up in their ghoulish projects, there’s always Helpline.
