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Further implications
Shark attacks and shark conservation are issues that arouse strong feelings. Recently there had appeared to be a growing accommodation within the Australian community to the view that sharks need to be accepted as a natural hazard to swimmers and surfers in Australian waters and that what is required are measures that reduce the risk humans face, without endangering the sharks' survival. Culls, baited drumlines and shark nets were falling into disfavour.
The use of baited drumlines for a three-month period in Western Australian waters in 2014 was a response to seven fatalities in the three years from 2010 - 2013. Despite the level of public distress these deaths caused, the deployment of drumlines met with widespread public disapproval and the lines were removed at the end of the three months and have not been used since. However, popular attitudes vary.
The recent deployment of shark nets in northern New South Wales is also in response to a spike in shark attacks in the area which has lead to vocal demands for their introduction. A number of media outlets, including The Australian, appear to have run campaigns critical of the New South Wales premier, Mike Baird, and his initial refusal to install nets in the area. Interestingly, now the nets have been deployed, though they have been presented as a trial measure to operate for only six months, the premier, when pushed as to whether the nets would stay, has stated, 'I'm not going to give you a position now but obviously we haven't put them in with the intention of trying to take them away.'
The position is a particularly complex one in New South Wales. The state has employed shark nets on the popular beaches of Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong beginning with their use to protect Sydney beaches in 1937. Though their effectiveness is disputed within the scientific community, they are popularly believed to have largely prevented fatal shark attacks in the areas where they have been deployed. In addition to this, shark nets are also used along the Queensland coast. Thus, those on the northern New South Wales coast are able to see themselves as denied the protection being offered to beachgoers to the north and the south of them. Some clearly found it particularly galling that others in their own state could swim on netted beaches, where theirs were being neglected. It was possible to construct what was happening as part of the supposed favouring of the city over the bush and Baird was presented as a metropolitan politician out of touch with the needs of rural constituencies. (This was an accusation to which the premier was particularly vulnerable given his decision to ban greyhound racing and then his reversal of that decision, in part in the face of rural opposition.)
The change of policy re shark mitigation in northern New South Wales seems part of a larger pattern of populist responses to issues, perhaps sparked by Australian government's concern about international developments such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the United States. Positions which seem to cater to the views of urban, educated elites are coming to be seen as a political liability.