In late November 2013, a surfer named Chris Boyd was killed by a shark at Umbies, a well-known break near Gracetown in Western Australia's South-West, with a friend paddling only metres away. His death was the seventh fatal shark bite recorded in Western Australia in three years, a concentration of fatalities widely reported at the time as unmatched anywhere else in the country. It was also the final straw for a state government that had spent those three years fielding a public debate about what, if anything, could be done.
Twelve years on, the debate has not gone away; it has changed shape. Western Australia no longer runs the mass baited drum lines that provoked mass protests in 2014. In their place sits a quieter, more technical apparatus: satellite-linked drumlines that page a contractor the moment something takes the bait, a public alert map called SharkSmart, aerial and drone patrols over popular beaches, and a state rebate that pays part of the cost of a personal electronic shark deterrent. The underlying question is the same one the Barnett government faced in 2014: how much certainty can a state buy for people who choose to swim, surf and dive in an ocean it does not control, and whether the answer Western Australia has settled on is actually working.
What the government did
Western Australia's current approach is best understood against what it replaced. Following the cluster of fatalities between 2010 and 2013, the Barnett Liberal-National government introduced baited drum lines off Perth's metropolitan beaches and the South-West coast from January to April 2014, targeting sharks longer than three metres for capture and, in most cases, destruction, under a federal exemption to interact with protected white sharks. The trial provoked large public protests and a formal environmental review. The Environmental Protection Authority of Western Australia examined the government's proposal to extend the program for a further three years and, in September 2014, recommended against it, citing a lack of reliable evidence that drum lines reduced the risk of a shark bite and unacceptable uncertainty about the effect on the West Coast population of white sharks, a species listed as vulnerable and migratory under the Commonwealth's Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Premier Colin Barnett accepted the recommendation and dropped the extended lethal program, though his government kept a standing power to order the capture and destruction of an individual shark judged an imminent threat after an attack, a policy every WA government since, Labor included, has also kept.
Labor took office under Mark McGowan in March 2017 and inherited a strategy already shifting toward non-lethal measures: a pilot of satellite-linked SMART (Shark-Management-Alert-in-Real-Time) drumlines had begun around 2014-15 near Dunsborough, designed to alert contractors within minutes of a shark taking the bait so it can be tagged and released, or towed further offshore, rather than left to die on the line. The McGowan and then Cook governments expanded that fleet along the South-West coast, added a personal deterrent rebate in 2017 that has since been reopened in multiple funding rounds, paying eligible buyers around $200 (approx.) toward an electronic shark deterrent for surfers, divers and spearfishers, and built out SharkSmart, a website and alert system run by the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) that maps real-time detections from a network of tagged sharks and shore-based listening stations. Aerial surveillance, the long-running Westpac Lifesaver helicopter service and, more recently, trial drone patrols over some of the state's busiest beaches, sits alongside it. Every WA Budget since has carried a shark-hazard mitigation line, funded in the tens of millions of dollars cumulatively since the program began (approx.; WA State Budget Papers, various years).
The strongest case
Western Australia has a real and disproportionate problem
Put the government's position at its strongest, because the underlying problem is real. Western Australia has recorded more fatal shark bites than any other Australian state since 2000, more than 20 (approx.), according to the Australian Shark-Incident Database maintained by Taronga Conservation Society Australia, spread along more than 12,000 kilometres of coastline (approx.; Geoscience Australia) that no government can fence, patrol in full or make safe by decree. It faces this pattern with a small population spread over an enormous stretch of ocean frontage, much of it popular with surfers, divers and fishers precisely because it is remote and unmonitored. Against that backdrop, dropping mass lethal drum lines after its own environmental regulator found no reliable evidence they worked, and replacing them with a program designed to release most animals alive, is a genuine improvement on conservation and animal-welfare grounds, not just a rebrand. A satellite-linked drumline, a real-time public alert map and a subsidised personal deterrent are modest, comparatively cheap interventions that give beachgoers more information and more choice than they had a decade ago. No government can make the open ocean risk-free, and a policy that tries to reduce risk at the margin without reverting to indiscriminate killing is a defensible answer to a problem with no clean solution.
The evidence
None of the elements of Western Australia's strategy is disputed as a matter of record. DPIRD, the department that runs the program, reports SMART drumline deployment and catch data each season: the fleet operates seasonally at a limited number of the state's most-visited beaches on the Bunbury-to-Esperance corridor, and the department has reported a release-alive rate above 90 per cent (approx.) in program updates, a sharp contrast with the 2014 trial, which was designed to kill any shark over three metres it caught. The deterrent rebate has been popular enough that funding rounds have repeatedly been oversubscribed and reopened since 2017, and the SharkSmart network now covers a growing number of tagged animals and shore-based listening stations feeding a public map.
What is less settled is whether the underlying fatality rate has actually moved because of any of this. Western Australia continued to record fatal shark bites through the decade of expanded mitigation spending, including the death of a man at Wylie Bay, near Esperance, in April 2023 (approx.; WA Police media statements, as reported), a reminder that SMART drumlines, drones and personal deterrents are concentrated on a handful of Perth and South-West beaches, while most fatal and serious bites recorded in the Australian Shark-Incident Database happen away from any monitored location: off remote beaches, reefs and boat ramps the program was never built to cover.
The critique
The weakest link in Western Australia's strategy is the personal deterrent rebate, because the state is subsidising a purchase decision it has not independently verified. Much of the favourable testing in the public domain is commissioned by device manufacturers themselves, and the small body of independent trials that exists, run mostly by other states' fisheries agencies working with university researchers, has found effectiveness varies sharply by device and by shark species, with none tested eliminating the chance of a bite. DPIRD's rebate scheme sets a minimum specification for eligible devices but does not appear to publish Western Australia-specific efficacy testing before adding a product to the approved list, meaning the state is putting its name, and public money, behind a category of product whose real-world performance in local conditions it has not itself measured.
The SMART drumline network has close to the opposite problem: it is well-monitored where it exists, but it exists almost nowhere. The fleet operates seasonally at a limited number of high-traffic beaches on the Bunbury-to-Esperance corridor; the great majority of Western Australia's coastline, including many of the remote surf breaks, dive sites and fishing spots where fatal and serious bites keep occurring, has no drumline, no drone and no acoustic receiver within range. The program's release-alive statistics are a genuine conservation improvement over the 2014 trial, but they say nothing about whether beachgoers at the state's monitored beaches are measurably safer than beachgoers anywhere else, because DPIRD has not published a study isolating that effect from the other things that also changed after 2014, including more beach closures on sighting reports, more public caution, and a large one-off cluster of attacks in 2010-13 that was always likely to be followed by a quieter period on its own.
Western Australia stopped mass-killing sharks with drum lines in 2014. It never gave up the right to kill one at a time.
The unresolved trade-off
That right is the strategy's least examined feature. Every WA government since 2014, McGowan's and Cook's included, has kept a standing imminent-threat policy that lets fisheries officers order the capture and destruction of a specific shark judged to pose a continuing danger after an attack, typically a large white shark near a beach where someone has just been killed or seriously injured. It is a narrower power than the drum line trial the EPA rejected, applied to one animal rather than an entire coastline, but it is still the deliberate killing of a species the Commonwealth lists as vulnerable and migratory, decided in the charged days after a tragedy rather than on the calmer, population-level evidence the EPA said the 2014 program lacked. The government has not published a population impact assessment specific to these individual kill orders, so there is no public answer to the question its own regulator raised in 2014: how many sharks can be removed from the West Coast white shark population, by whatever method, before the removals themselves become part of the risk to the species.
The spending behind the whole apparatus has grown steadily, tens of millions of dollars cumulatively since 2012-13 across drum lines, SMART drumlines, tagging, SharkSmart and the rebate (approx.; WA State Budget Papers, various years), yet it does not appear among the WA Auditor General's published performance audits, an unusual gap for a program that has run for more than a decade, touches public safety, tourism and a protected species all at once, and has never had its central premise, that the current mix of measures reduces the risk of a fatal bite, tested by an evaluator independent of the department that runs it. Regional, tourism-reliant communities carry a real cost in the meantime: a beach closure after a tagged shark's detection or a sighting report can shut a Margaret River or Esperance beach during peak surf season, an economic cost the state has not published an attempt to weigh against the safety benefit it buys. The same coastline promotes swimming with whale sharks and reef sharks at Ningaloo as a tourism drawcard, a reminder that Western Australia's relationship with its sharks is not simple fear management; it is a set of trade-offs the government has made without ever fully pricing them out loud.
The risk to the future
An assumption that has never been tested
Western Australia's shark strategy rests on a premise it has never independently tested: that the current mix of SMART drumlines, drones, tagging and subsidised deterrents is the reason the annual fatality rate came down from its 2010-13 peak, rather than a large one-off cluster settling back toward its long-run average on its own. If that premise is wrong, the risk is not abstract. A state that keeps expanding a politically popular but functionally unaudited program, while most of its coastline remains unmonitored, could face another cluster of fatalities on an unmonitored beach with no evidence-based case for what to do differently, only a decade of spending it cannot show worked.
There is a second, quieter risk in the conservation ledger. West Coast white sharks remain listed as vulnerable and migratory, in a population scientists still cannot precisely count. A government that keeps the power to kill individual animals after every serious attack, without ever publishing what that toll has been or what it has done to the population it is meant to be protecting, is accumulating a liability of its own. The evidentiary gap the EPA identified in 2014, and that the government still has not closed, is exactly what a slow-motion, one-order-at-a-time cull would look like from the outside. If Western Australia is ever asked to defend a decade of that habit as forcefully as it once had to defend the drum lines, it will find it kept the practice without keeping the paperwork.