Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We believe it was the department acting in anticipation of the bill that you are attempting to get through the parliament, and the validity of this will be challenged. Of course, it is open for you to direct that this not happen. Indeed, it has happened under your watch and you need to take responsibility for it.

It is not simply this vessel. We are being constantly contacted by seafarers who are concerned by what is going on in their industry. Another Western Australian gentleman has contacted me. His name is Norm Potter. Norm comes from Geraldton. He is a master mariner and has worked in offshore oil and gas since 1989. For about 12 years, he has been sailing as a master aboard a variety of vessels in the offshore industry, and he is a permanent employee of a particular company. He has not worked since July this year, and he is using up his long service leave in the hope that work may become available. I am told he says there is a good chance he will be made redundant in 2016. This cannot be explained away just by the change in the offshore oil and gas. There is still plenty of work out there, but the problem is that so much of this work is now being done by foreign workers on visa classes 400 and 988. Norm says that he totally understood and supported overseas workers coming into the industry during the boom construction phases in WA, when Australian workforce could not cover the positions required, but that has changed, and now we are seeing, nevertheless, a failure to respond in clawing back the availability of those visas. This is why we are starting to see the unemployment level in Western Australia clawing up. We all accept that there is a change—that the mining construction boom is over. But it is absolutely appropriate that we now take steps to very severely wind back these temporary visa classes so that those Australians who are currently sitting on unemployment queues with incredible skills to do these jobs are given an opportunity to do them.

It is certainly important to understand that during that massive boom there was broad bipartisan support and support from the union movement for the use of temporary migration visas to allow us to take full advantage of the investment opportunities that were being generated by the high iron ore and gas prices, but we now have to be prepared to look at a very different set of circumstances. We need to ensure that we are providing adequate jobs for Australians.

There are two things we are seeing happening here. Firstly, these visa classes are still being issued even though there are quite clearly Australian workers with the skills able to do this task. Secondly, we are allowing the coastal trade to be taken over by foreign crewed vessels. We have to be protective of our industry. We have quite rightly made the requirements that they get efficient, that we do not have vessels overstaffed and that we have modern technology and work practices on our vessels. But we have that. We have the unions in the shipping industry working together to achieve that. It is simply unacceptable for us to allow those skilled workers to be denied jobs and to deny jobs to young people who are currently going through programs at Challenger TAFE and various other maritime training centres along the coast of Western Australia. They really have vastly diminished job opportunities.

At the end of the day, it is the generation of employment, the generation of well-paid jobs, that is going to in fact create the Australian dream. They will create a society where we have a sense of opportunity, a society that has the drive and the confidence to go out there and innovate. Look at the sort of remuneration received by the CEO. While his base salary in 2014 was only $1.4 million, he received total compensation of $18.2 million, including $8.7 million in shares, awards and stocks. It says something, doesn't it? They will be skimping on the wages for 19 skilled, experienced, long-serving Australian crew on the MV Portland, to save probably a couple of hundred thousand dollars by putting on foreign seafarers, whilst the CEO feels it is appropriate that his total remuneration package is $18.2 million. It goes to a very significant problem that we are seeing in our society, where we have this incredible gap opening up between the ordinary working person and those with the top salaries that CEOs are awarding themselves.

We want to have an Australian shipping industry. It is not an unrealistic aspiration. It is not an impossible aspiration. But what we have seen here with the government's conduct—its preparedness to keep issuing those temporary visas and, indeed, encouraging those temporary visas and its actions in granting permits for coastal shipping to be taken over by foreign crewed vessels—is completely and utterly unacceptable. I think Australians will understand that we need to be providing good-quality Australian jobs for our people as our first priority.

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