licence

do you need to get a special licence if you are breading fish to sell?

Not really, you will need an ABN if you make a certain amount but iam not sure what it is..

Technically you need a licence if you are selling any fish you breed to a commercial enterprise ie lps and wholesaler. The licence covers you for all fish species on schedule 6 only and also deals with issues like waste water managment etc. Almost every breeder i know does not have a licence however that may change over the coming years, i've been visited by Department of fisheries and had talks with them regarding my activities in the fish sheds and warned to be careful how i distribute the fish i breed. It is ok to breed fish and resell in a pvt manner such as on the forum or through the classifieds but selling to the pet shop means i am a commercial endevour and subject to the same laws that commercial food fish industry abides by. The funny part about it is the fish i import i can sell to anyone i choose without any legal issues, its just the home bred fish that cause the problems. If you are thinking this does not apply to you then think again, even a 12 yo who bred some guppies cannot technically sell a fish to a reseller like the pet shop.

why doese everything have to get very confusing instead of just beeing keept in plain english

because i'm thinking where does the commercial food fish industry come into it when you shouldn't eat your fish that you keep lol


some of them have tooo many bones lol

Basicly if you a making a living from selling fish.

Sunshine correct me if i'm wrong here, But you would have a licence to import fish, stating water is purifed or to that effect a certificate stating so, where it's coming from ect ect.

duck

Yes Duck, you need a licence to import fish. But you also need a licence if you breed fish and sell to a commercial premises regardless of wheather you make money from it or not. Did you know that it is also illegal to breed fish that are not on schedule 6, the permissable import list. If you get caught breeding fish that are not on the list you can be prosecuted, this includes common stuff like bristlenoe, many cichlids and countless other species. The laws are all in place but to the best of my knowledge nobody has been prosecuted yet.

Gee Rod, thats interesting. Can you give a bit more detail about why it is illegal to breed bristlenose. I can understand some of the more aggressive cichlids, but a poor little bristlenose seems harmless enough.

It is illegal to breed them because they are not on schedule 6, it's really that simple. Why they are not on the list i do not know. Perhaps it is to do with some of the relatives of the bristle nose which dig holes in dams and river banks to breed which destroys enviroments, guilt by association perhaps?! It's all crazy laws, i laughed at the fisheries officer when he came to warn me but he was deadly serious. I think where the trouble from all this will come eventually is when we have large aquaculture firms producing fish for the trade and they want to control the competition, by that i mean get rid of all the back yard breeders who are competition and force all fish resellers to buy of registered and licenced breeders. The smaller breeders will have no where to sell the fish to other than privately which basically is not worth the trouble, too much effort for small returns and people continously tramping through your house just to buy a handful of fish. 90% of the fish i breed are sold directly to resellers, if i had to rely on pvt sales i would have been broke years ago.