Survey of Recreational Fishing in New South Wales and the ACT, 2013/14

The NRFS was the first comprehensive assessment of recreational fishing in Australia and provided a range of ‘big picture’ information (as noted above) for each state and territory (Henry and Lyle, 2003). Since then, various jurisdictions have conducted state/territory-wide surveys to provide comparable information to the NRFS. In each of these studies, the main survey instrument (an ‘off-site’ telephone/diary survey) has been the same – with stratified random sampling from ‘White Pages’ telephone listings and expansion of all survey results to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) estimates of the resident population for the state/territory concerned. Analysis of these surveys has been conducted using a customised analysis package (RecSurvey; Lyle et al., 2009a). Since the NRFS, Fisheries NSW has conducted a number of ‘on-site’ surveys, including several with large spatial and temporal scales, e.g. the Recreational Fishing Surveys in the Greater Sydney Region (Steffe et al., 2011). Also, in the lead-up to the present survey, extensive development work was undertaken to optimise data quality and utility for telephone/diary surveys – a key feature of which, has been the development and application of ‘dual-frame/hybrid’ sampling. In the current survey, White Pages sampling comprised the ‘core’ sample frame and has provided direct comparibility with NRFS data for NSW and the ACT, as for telephone/diary surveys in other jurisdictions. Also, as an integral part of the hybrid survey design, supplementary sampling was undertaken of licence holders from the NSW Recreational Fishing Fee (RFF) database. However by design, the results from this component are the subject of separate analysis and reporting. Therefore, all substantive survey results in this report refer to the White Pages sample frame for NSW/ACT residents, together with comparable data from the NRFS.