April update - Native Fish Recovery Strategy

On Tuesday 14 April the public submissions period for the draft Native Fish Recovery Strategy closed. We received over 60 submissions from a diverse array of stakeholders, ranging from First Nations peoples, anglers, water management organisations, community members and scientists.

Feedback was generally positive with messages that the Strategy provided a good foundation to ‘Get on with implementing’ on ground actions. Many submissions provided useful insights on the challenges, threats and key actions required at local scales with valuable suggestions on how we can better involve community. Check out our Get Involved page for the full set of submissions, noting we could only publish where permission was given.

The next step for the NFRS team is to incorporate this feedback into the final strategy. To inform amendments to the draft Strategy we held teleconferences with our Steering Group, Cultural and Technical Advisory Groups to discuss feedback and how we could incorporate it. The Cultural and Technical advisory groups also supplemented submissions feedback with their own observations on the Strategy, providing insights on where additional context would be useful.

Considering the volume of feedback received, the need to give submissions their due consideration and the difficulties associated with working from home, the Steering Group agreed to push back the release of the final strategy until June.

Overall it was great to get confirmation from Basin communities that the draft Native Fish Recovery Strategy is hitting the mark. We would like to thank everyone who contributed to providing a submission, especially during this tumultuous time. With your help this strategy will help recovery our native fish in the Murray-Darling Basin.

As always, if there are any questions please send us an email at NFRS@mdba.gov.au or post an enquiry on our GetInvolved page.