The Minister for Primary Industries Niall Blair said on Saturday that the NSW government would fund aerial surveillance for the first time on the north coast during the school holidays. At the same time, aerial patrol of Wollongong beaches is starting this weekend, and will continue running until Anzac Day next year.

A spokesman for Mr Blair said routine checks "in peak times" were already underway over Sydney beaches.

Mr Blair said the government was committed to making the beachers safer, and the aerial surveillance of the north coast during the school holidays would help spot any immediate shark threats.

Other measures include a range of Shark Smart advertisements and the tagging of sharks. Eight great white sharks had been tagged in the North Coast Local Waters Shark Tagging Project.

It found that sharks travelled large distances in a short period of time. One travelled about the distance from Wollongong to Newcastle in a week, covering 550 kilometres.

This year there have been more than 13 unprovoked shark attacks on NSW's beaches, including one fatality, compared with only three unprovoked attacks in 2014 including two fatalities. In February this year, 41-year-old Japanese surfer Tadashi Nakahara died after being bitten by a shark at Shelly Beach at Ballina.

News of the funding for aerial patrols near Ballina was welcomed by Harry Mitchell, the general manager of the Bendigo Bank aerial patrols in the Illawarra.

His company was contracted this year to keep young surfers safe at Lennox Head after a competitor was knocked from his board.

He said the combination of aerial patrols and surf lifesavers on jet skis had kept the young surfers safe and the beach completely free of sharks during the surfing contest, although the spotters could see sharks on beaches on either side.

"For 20 years we have been trying to get (the NSW government) to fund aerial funds. They said they are ineffective but we beg to differ," he said. "There is no silver bullet in achieving or minimising public risk at beaches. It is a suite of measures," he said, citing the use of rubber duckies, lifeguard towers, and aerial patrols over the top "All of these mechanisms help greatly to mitigate public risk from shark attack and other incidents."

They might not see all the sharks, but they keep people safe, argues Duncan Leadbitter, a visiting fellow with Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security at University of Wollongong and a volunteer observer with the Illawarra aerial patrol.

"If the aerial patrol were evaluated on outcomes (number of fatalities or bites), not inputs (number of sharks seen), then it too would have an enviable record. The last fatality in the Aerial Patrol's region was in 1966 in Jervis Bay after a boat sank. This outcome suggests that seeing only one shark in eight has merit and is not ineffective, as claimed by the researchers," he said on The Conversation.