Shark attacks are becoming more common – and a cull will work

"It is scandalous that shark scientists perpetuate the myth that shark culls don’t work."

(Editor’s note: In today’s Sydney Morning Herald a child-like essay appeared in the op-pages claiming that shark culls don’t work because “sharks swim vast distances”. The author, the paper’s environment and climate reporter who has “crunched the numbers” on attacks, describes any killing of sharks as “cruel and pointless”. This, despite evidence, click here etc, that Great Whites have a thing called “fear induced mass exodus” which keeps em away from an arrival of orcas or, say, a Great White hanging off a baited hook. So I asked Dan Webber, from, yeah, the fabled Webber clan, a man who’s had a front row seat to an attack to write a rebuttal. It ain’t quite a rebuttal of the story that appeared in the Herald but hits most of the same behaviours the writer of the piece exhibits.)

In a recent interview on Ain’t That Swell, Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson criticised the Murdoch Press for sensational reporting of shark attacks, as if the horror of shark attack is not worthy of public attention. They jokingly call The Daily Telegraph “The Daily Terrorgraph”.

The same argument has been used against recent media coverage of an attempted beheading in Belfast, claiming that the civil unrest erupting in its wake is primarily due to the style of news coverage, instead of the gruesome nature of the attack.

Progressives like Whish-Wilson are so devoted to their various agendas that they totally ignore the pain and suffering caused by their favourite policies. They view themselves as an elite breed of visionaries capable of social engineering a better world.

The psychology of their blindness is described, in “Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self Deception”, as a mental block that protects them from experiencing the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. The horror of a shark attack is ignored because it conflicts with their desire to be seen as a good person concerned about the environment.

I first met Senator Whish-Wilson at the Senate Inquiry into Shark Mitigation and Deterrent Measures, when he chaired a series of hearings around Australia in 2017. He kindly acknowledged my family’s status as “Australian surfing royalty”, which stems from an episode of Dateline, when the late George Negus decided to boost our reputation, after we donated a surfboard to Vanimo Surf Club in PNG. He was impressed that we had not taken the opportunity to promote the Webber brand, but had instead glassed the board with custom decals of the surf club’s logo, including the traditional lizard design carved on their canoes. The donation was heartfelt, because it carried a message that we are a community that extends all the way from the city beaches of Sydney to the remote villages of Papua New Guinea.

Clearly, the media have enormous power in swaying public opinion.

Ever since the Second World War, mainstream media have relentlessly eroded the traditional values that built Western Civilisation. At the beginning of the interview, Senator Whish-Wilson was asked to share a story from his local area. He told a wonderful story about an Aboriginal woman, named Wauba Debar, who is credited with saving two white men from a sinking boat during a heavy storm.

It is a great story.

However, in the context of the culture war, it was a clear shot across the bow of Anglo Australians, who are reminded incessantly that their ancestors colonised the continent at great expense to the original inhabitants.

This one-sided narrative is routinely promoted by academics, whose careers depend on publishing research that supports some form of progressive agenda. One such paper claims that our “unwillingness to adapt to an ecologically sustainable paradigm is simply colonialism in action”.

In the next episode of Ain’t That Swell, which drops tomorrow, I present the opposing viewpoint, drawing on firsthand experience of the shark crisis in Ballina, along with various insights taken from academic research.

As I explain in the interview, shark scientists claim that shark culls don’t work, because the number of sharks in an area does not necessarily equate to risk of shark attack. They typically cite a 1994 study which noted that the rate of shark attacks in Hawaii did not change despite the culling of 4,668 sharks. I ridicule this claim by comparing the stats from Hawaii with the data from Queensland.

Firstly, we have to establish how many of the 4,668 sharks actually posed a threat to human safety. Astonishingly, 1,819 were pups removed from pregnant sharks. Although the actual number of sharks culled was 2,088, only 460 were considered dangerous, being tiger sharks.

If you then consider that the culling programs spanned 17 years, we are talking about 27 tiger sharks killed per year, across a coastline of 1,200 kilometres, which equates to one tiger shark every 45 kilometres. In Queensland, where 366 bull sharks were killed in one year, over a stretch of just 300 kilometres, the average number of bull sharks killed is one every 0.8 kilometres, which is 50 times the rate of dangerous sharks killed in Hawaii.

It is scandalous that shark scientists perpetuate the myth that shark culls don’t work.

Thankfully, Queensland is doing an excellent job of reducing the risk of shark attack.

Tragically, we have to keep asking the NSW government how many more shark attacks we will have to endure, before they finally accept that it is impossible to protect sharks and people.