Fishery performance is highly dynamic and depends on several environmental and non-environmental parameters such as changing temperature and ocean currents, fish behaviour, changing market and economic conditions. Therefore, management tactics ideally should be designed to be adaptive to respond to changing conditions. A robust adaptive and flexible management strategy identifies and measures appropriate indicators against their relevant reference points that trigger management interventions. Indicators can be model-based quantities where adequate data on life history stages, stock biomass status and fishing mortality are available or model-free indicators such as CPUE trends and proportion of catch in particular life stage. Slow recovery or lack of recovery of a number of overfished stocks in Australia’s Commonwealth fisheries and the continual decline in catch for some quota species, despite significant management interventions, has raised concerns that the traditional fisheries indicators we have applied to inform management may not be as responsive and robust as first envisaged or measuring the entity of interest. Our current study aims to evaluate the efficiency of possible indicators explaining the fisheries stock performance within the adaptive management strategy framework.