Reserving the marine

For the foreseeable future, Australia's oceanic national parks have no management structures, no protection, no guaranteed fishing zones and no prospect of getting any of these benefits in the next few years.

And now, after 10 months of procrastination, the Abbott Government has committed to prolonging the uncertainty by launching yet another profound waste of money and time called the Commonwealth Marine Reserves Review.

Designed around a web survey, the review will be a "genuine" consultation process over 6 months, as opposed to the comprehensive, face-to-face consultation process that Labor undertook over 4 years.

Over its four years of real and serious community and industry consultation, the then Labor Government held250 public and stakeholder meetings, attended by over 2,000 people – including 138 meetings specifically with recreational fishing organisations or individual recreational fishers.

Labor enabled 210 public comment days and considered around three-quarters of a million public submissions.

Oceanic National Parks, effectively managed, are critical to marine biodiversity. They allow the whole biosphere to regenerate. The island nation of Kiribati recognised this when it announced in June the creation of a no-take zone the size of California over some of the Pacific Ocean's best tuna grounds.

Australia recognised this in 2012 when our marine parks were first declared. For the most part of 2013 an objective observer would have noted Australia's world leading carbon reduction policies and world's biggest oceanic national parks system including the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, the Coral Sea Commonwealth Marine Reserve and the South-east Commonwealth Marine Reserves Network.

But clearly, that is no longer the case. Australia is not the world leader we once were. We are now hanging back, wasting time and money on needless reviews while nations as big as the US and as tiny as Kiribati take the global leadership roles we had made our own.

Beneath our waves, the clock is ticking.