The hall No evidence required
Five to 33
A third of the park went quiet. The cover still tracked the storms.
The Plan aimed to protect and conserve the biodiversity of the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem… green zones (no-take areas) where fishing is not allowed, expanded from five per cent of the Marine Park to 33 per cent.
1 July 2004, the 2003 Zoning Plan comes in. Reef Authority timeline: the plan aimed to “protect and conserve the biodiversity of the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem.” Green zones — no-take — from five per cent of the Marine Park to 33. Queensland mirrored it in state water. Twenty-one thousand submissions. The largest no-take network on the planet, sold as the thing that would keep the Reef.
The Outlook still lists “remaining impacts from fishing” next to climate, mud and starfish. Plibersek, 2024: “sustainable fishing” as one of the three pillars that kept UNESCO’s “in danger” stamp in the drawer. Then a $185 million gillnet phase-out.
This card files that expansion. It does not file “open every green zone.”
What did have a receipt:
- Fish biomass in no-take zones is a real meter. Hard coral cover is another. AIMS still writes the cover years as bleach, cyclone, crown-of-thorns. Yasi 2011, Hamish 2009, Debbie 2017 — after the 33%. The central Reef hit its LTMP floor seven years into the new zoning.
- De’ath 2012: the 50% loss split is storms, starfish, bleach. Fishing is not a column.
- Gillnets kill dugong and turtle. That is a different animal to Acropora. The zoning slogan treated “protect the Reef” as one verb.
Grammar: protect, conserve, five to 33. Logic: a no-take line is not a cyclone track. Rhetoric: world’s most comprehensive.