Drowning Deaths Soar While Millions Are Wasted on Ineffective Shark Nets

As Australia grapples with its deadliest year for drowning fatalities in recorded history, the uncomfortable truth becomes harder to ignore: while more than 340 people drowned across the country in the past 12 months, Queensland and New South Wales continue to pour tens of millions of dollars annually into shark mitigation programs that are not only outdated and scientifically discredited, but increasingly out of step with public safety priorities.

A recent Guardian report laid bare the scale of Australia’s drowning crisis, highlighting that coastal drownings alone hit a record high of 139 deaths in the last year. Yet this tragedy unfolds alongside the quiet continuation of programs like the Queensland Shark Control Program and New South Wales’ shark meshing—policies that together consume almost $20 million annually in taxpayer funds and growing, with an almost non-existent return when it comes to saving human lives, especially when it comes to the costly culling components of those programs.

Despite their names, these shark control programs are not about public safety. If they were, the dollars would follow the data. Instead, they follow political optics.

The False Promise of Shark Nets

Take NSW’s shark nets, deployed for just seven months a year, covering only select metro beaches, and catching mainly non-target species such as turtles, rays, and dolphins. Despite this, they persist, largely unchanged since the 1930s. In Queensland, shark nets and drumlines (baited hooks designed to kill large sharks) operate year-round under a similarly antiquated framework.

Some if the spending goes towards modern, effective alternatives like drones, but the lions share (especially in Queensland) goes to catching and killing sharks. 

These programs have long been criticised by marine scientists, coastal safety experts, judges, and animal welfare advocates alike. A 2019 Senate inquiry concluded that shark nets and lethal drumlines offer a “false sense of security,” while peer-reviewed studies have consistently shown that newer, non-lethal technologies such as drones, SMART drumlines, and personal deterrents are more effective at reducing risk without killing marine wildlife.

And crucially, even these newer technologies are not designed to prevent drowning which remains the leading cause of coastal deaths (aside from drones, which have th added benefit of spotting potential drowning victims, and hovering over them to provide comfort while help arrives).

Politics Over Prevention

It’s difficult to conclude anything other than this: shark control programs are no longer about public safety, they are about public perception. They are a show of force, not a shield. A PR campaign with bycatch. Acting tough on sharks plays well politically, and politicians are happy to waste millions of dollars, and quite literally let people drown, to achieve that.

If the goal were really about saving lives, the record drowning toll would trigger a reallocation of public funds toward drowning prevention. It hasn’t. And it won’t, because that would require courage to break with decades of populist policy and confront the reality that fear of sharks is not matched by risk.

This is the problem with politics-as-performance: it rewards what looks like action over what actually works.

A Moment for Reckoning

The contrast between record drownings and the stubborn defence of lethal, ineffective shark programs is more than just a policy failure, it’s a mirror held up to the way political capital is spent in Australia. Lives are lost not just to rips and rough seas, but to decades of misdirected priorities and spending, choosing what plays well politically, over what actually provides the greatest good.

It’s time to ask: are we spending to save lives, or to save face?