Its not a race, we arent 'in front'.  The information shows the Economic Exclusion Zone by km2 in blue, and the maroon column is our wild catch in metric tonnes.  If this was a race, we would be coming last for having nearly 3 times more area to fish from than PNG but only producing about the same amount of fish as their catch.

My comment is related to the underfishing of our resources, 'its not a race' being if it was a race it would be stupid to see who could kill off all the fish in their area right? The 'but if it was we would be last' because the axis of the graphs and the data shown shows that we are underproducing compared to other nations.

So we all give ourselves a collective pat on the back, 'Good Job fellas, our fishery is so well managed' etc... But really you go to woolies, coles, fish mongers in the burbs etc and what do you see? They are selling Aus commercial fish, but its expensive so they dont sell much, but then they have Tilipia or Basa fillets going cheap right? Or Frozen prawns from SE Asia.  So really we are exporting our shortage of fish due to our underproduction to nations without the environmental controls we have. People still want to eat fish even if they cannot catch it themselves, so really is our underproduction in terms of our SE Asian neighbours a good thing because we are looking after our own backyard, or a bad thing because we are stuffing the rest of the world?

The way I see it, we could increase our fishing to 30-40% of our neighbours and still be ahead on the environmental side of things by supplying ourselves and not rooting another nations fishery by controlling the TAC and observing the relevant size and bag restrictions.