The editor of the West Australian newspaper has defended the paper’s controversial front page, which featured a photoshopped image of children being chased out of the surf by a shark under the headline “Will it take this?”
It followed calls from the paper for the government to restart its controversial shark cull policy after two fatal shark attacks in five days.
The state’s premier, Colin Barnett, weighed into the debate on Wednesday saying: “There is fear in the community and it is having a rethink. These last two fatalities brought it to our attention and ocean swimming, diving and surfing are all part of the Australian and West Australian lifestyle, that is under threat.
“It is an incredibly difficult issue, a very divisive one and people have extreme views on this issue.”
The newspaper front page was met with accusations of sensationalism and fearmongering and has been compared to Jaws, with one reader on Twitter commenting: “You’re going to need a bigger stunt.”
Speaking on Fairfax Radio in Perth on Wednesday, the West Australian editor, Brett McCarthy, said the image was intended to encourage debate and to put the paper’s view that the government has a responsibility to do something to stop the increasing number of shark attacks. Exactly how the government achieves that goal is a secondary concern, he said.
In the first edition of The West Australian tomorrow: pic.twitter.com/9DtmwQNkaf
— The West Australian (@westaustralian) June 7, 2016
“I don’t think it’s about creating fear, I think it’s about provoking a debate, provoking a reaction, and encouraging a debate within the community over the issue,” McCarthy told 6PR. “One of the things that has been said to me time and time again … from our readers and people I have spoken to in the community is: is it going to take an attack on a child at one of our popular beaches for something more to be done?”
The shark cull, which saw baited hooks anchored around Perth’s beaches in order to catch and kill large great white, tiger and bull sharks, was scrapped in 2014 after a review by the Environmental Protection Authority found there was a “high degree of scientific uncertainty” on the impact it could have on the environment.
@westaustralian wow, just when you thought the West Australian couldn't get any worse... what a pile of sensationalist bollocks.
— Stu with a You (@StuRap) June 7, 2016
The state’s fisheries department still sets drum lines in line with its imminent threat policy, which was invoked to catch and kill a 4.2m-long great white shark near the Mandurah beach where surfer Ben Gerring was fatally wounded on 30 May, and to try and catch the shark that killed 60-year-old university lecturer Doreen Collyer while she was diving 1km off Mindarie, north of Perth, on Sunday.
The hunt for that shark, reported to be more than 5m long, continued on Wednesday. In a statement, the Department of Fisheries said it had taken the unusual step of deploying drum lines for the third day in a row because of the “unprecedented circumstances” of two fatal shark bites in metropolitan waters in one week.
McCarthy said the risk of shark attack was “now clearly a public safety issue”, one that both sides of politics had hidden from.
“Civil society demands that our taxes are used to keep us safe,” he said. “The ‘how’ of that is almost a little bit secondary ... I can’t see it in any other frame but a major public safety issue and they have to at least have a debate, at least look at options, because obviously what’s been done so far isn’t or hasn’t been working, so what more can we do?”
The options he flagged were restarting the shark cull, which sparked mass protests in its first iteration, or reopening the shark fishery in that part of WA and allowing commercial fishermen to catch great white sharks.
Barnett has ruled out another shark cull.
Reopening the shark fishery and putting the great white on the list of catchable species would require striking the apex predator off the national threatened species list.
They are protected under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC) and can only be removed from that act if they are no longer classified as being at risk of extinction.
The environment minister, Greg Hunt, granted a blanket exemption under the EPBC for the trial shark cull but now requires the state apply to his office every time it wants to issue a capture order under the imminent threat policy.
According to Professor Peter Harrison, from the Southern Cross University’s Marine Ecology Research Centre, a change in threatened species status, based on current population data, is decades away.
“There are no clear indications of the current population status of white sharks in Australian waters so on that basis there is no rational basis for its removal from the threatened species list,” Harrison told Guardian Australia.
He said organisations, including the Department of Fisheries in WA, had accumulated data that suggested the population was stabilising or maybe even increasing, but he said that data was not yet complete enough to prove anything.
However even if it was borne out by the evidence, a slight increase in the population of white sharks off the coast of WA alone would not be enough.
The white shark population declined 60% in the second half of the 20th century. Harrison said it would have to recover by at least that much to be considered safe. And, because the threatened species list is national, that population growth would have to be reflected nationally.
“The reason for having the threatened species list is that it is recognised that the species is at increased risk of extinction,” he said.
“It’s designed specifically to increase the species. Now that becomes a bit problematic in predatory species, particularly predatory species that occasionally harm humans … but they deserve the same protection and consideration as all other species, including small cuddly mammals in our terrestrial landscapes.”
