Australian aborigines have taken Australian Sea Lions for subsistence purposes for thousands of years. Early European colonists also took sea lions for food and other products, although numbers recorded in sealing logbooks were small (Ling 1999). Harvests by sealers in the 17th and 18th centuries reduced the population and extirpated them from areas around the Bass Strait and Tasmania.

Although now protected, the population has not rebounded fully in numbers or reoccupied all of its former range. Conflicts and interactions with fisheries exist. A high level of entanglement in abandoned and lost fishing gear and in marine debris has been reported, with a range of 0.2 to 1.3% of the population are entangled in these materials (Shaughnessy et al. 2003, Page et al. 2004). Other animals become entangled in fishing gear, particularly bottom-set gillnets of commercial shark fishers. A risk assessment of sea lion by-catch in shark gillnets indicated that there is a high risk of subpopulation extinction with even low levels of by-catch (Goldsworthy and Page 2007). A substantial sea lion tourist industry has developed; this activity is regulated at sea lion colonies in parks to minimize disturbance during the breeding season. Extensive disturbance can cause Australian Sea Lions to abandon colony sites.