ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to draw together Australian national perspectives and then layers them across insights from each of the four oceans. In doing so, it reveals the considerable and growing importance of fisheries and the activities of fishing boats within Australia’s maritime domain. It highlights how constabulary operations, which form the primary response to manage fisheries issues, have received limited strategic consideration. This chapter confirms that illegal fishing is now the number one global maritime security threat and is significantly focused in the Indo-Pacific. Unchecked, illegal fishing will continue to disrupt vital food sources by undermining sustainable food stocks and access to those food stocks, distress already fragile ecosystems, which are vital to a sustainable marine ecosystem, and foment tensions between states that will threaten global instability. Moreover, this chapter illuminates this contemporary sea power challenge, defines maritime security, which elevates ‘good order at sea’ beyond a temporal notion, and refines existing theory to advance concepts to help frame the on-water activities of constabulary operations. This, in turn, demands that the dynamics of Australian bureaucratic processes be harnessed and corralled to a common national maritime policy purpose.
