A new Bill has just been drafted in NSW Parliament: the Fisheries Management Amendment (Protection of Human Life) Bill 2026. Like many bad-faith bills, it has a misleading name doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but look beyond the cover page, and it is not fit for purpose.

The Bill is being sold as a safety measure, but if you read the content carefully, it's something else entirely: a poorly drafted, captured process that platforms those with vested interests, excludes experts, and won't make anyone safer.

Here's why it fails to make anyone safer:

• The "expert" panel has no science requirement. The Bill creates a new Coastal Safety and Fisheries Advisory Council to guide shark policy, but doesn't require a single member that actually deeply understands shark behaviour. The one single 'science' seat can be filled by someone with general marine environmental experience. Meanwhile, four guaranteed seats go to surfing and board-riding groups, plus seats for commercial and recreational fishers. This is not a genuine expert panel, it is a stakeholder committee masquerading as an expert panel, deciding policy on a subject most of its members have no formal training in.
• It bakes in a severe conflict of interest. Commercial and recreational fishers,  appointed as members of this "safety" council, have a direct financial stake in the outcome, and no beach safety experience. Allowing people who benefit from killing sharks, yet don't understand beach safety or shark behaviour (outside of their narrow fishing frame of reference) to set policy on shark safety is not expert governance, it is regulatory capture and it is dangerous. By legislating this in a Fisheries bill, with so many seats for fishers, there will only be one outcome: more fishing (despite there being no evidence this delivers safety outcomes).
• It overrides everything else by fiat, not evidence. The Bill inserts a clause stating the shark control program operates "despite" the rest of the Acts objects. That's a dangerous legislative override clause used to skip the part where you have to justify your approach with evidence. 

If you're going to legislate for public safety, the bare minimum would: put people with relevant expertise in charge of advising on it, require them to report on whether it's working, and don't let the people with a financial interest in the answer write the report. This Bill does none of that. It's a bad process, producing a bad bill, that won't stop a single shark bite.

What you can do right now:

Email Jacqui Scruby directly and tell her this Bill is not fit to go to Parliament in its current form, and Fisheries Acts are not the right place to be legislating beach safety. 

Email: jacqui.scruby@parliament.nsw.gov.au

Suggested subject line: This Bill won't make beaches safer — fix the process before introducing it

Suggested points to include (in your own words, personal emails carry far more weight than copy-paste ones):

• If safety is the genuine priority of this exercise, this should not be in the Fisheries Act at all. It would be best to write a new Act sitting under DCCEEW, not Fisheries. A "safety" program managed under Fisheries, mandating a panel stacked full of fishers, can only lead to one outcome. That outcome won't be beach safety, it will be fishing.
• The advisory council must require multiple seats with genuine shark behaviour/biology expertise, and must not be stacked with stakeholder seats, many of which have vested interests. 
• Members with a direct financial interest in the outcome (commercial/recreational fishing) should not sit on a body deciding shark safety policy.
• The blanket "despite the objects of this Act" override clause should be removed. Good policy should be justified by robust evidence, not exempted from it.

Every email matters. This Bill is still in draft. Now is the moment to stop bad process before it becomes a bad law.