Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I speak today on the Maritime Legislation Amendment Bill 2005 because at the core of the Australian maritime industry are issues that affect all Australians, whether they be land-dwelling or seafaring—those issues being protection of our coastal environment, national security along our coastlines and in our ports, the working conditions of Australians and others who work in this country and Australia’s capacity in the long run to compete globally by building a strong, efficient workforce. The bill is specific to the maritime industry, but the essence of the bill pertains to all Australians because it speaks to the rights of all people in their workplace—or, rather, in relation to the four issues that I spoke of, it fails to speak to them: it fails to speak adequately to the security of our nation, the protection of our coastal environment and working conditions of Australians and those from overseas who work in our coastal waters.

The bill amends a suite of maritime legislation, four acts in all, relating to general maritime navigation, ship safety and the impact of shipping on the marine environment as well as various administrative matters. These are all important concerns, and that is why the Australian Labor Party will be supporting the bill, albeit with a second reading amendment. While Labor does support the bill, it does not support the Howard government’s failed administration of maritime policy. The member for Oxley has moved a second reading amendment:

That all words after ‘That’ be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:‘whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House condemns the government for:

(a)

failing to uphold Australia’s national interest by adopting anti-Australian shipping policies that favour foreign vessels and crew despite the risk to national security, Australian jobs and the natural environment;

(b)

failing to ensure adequate security in relation to the shipping of dangerous goods and hazardous material, including explosives precursors such as ammonium nitrate; and

(c)

failing to ensure ships comply with the requirement to provide details of crew and cargo forty-eight hours before arrival.’

In respect of these major issues in our maritime industry, the government falls short yet again. We on this side of the House condemn the Howard government for failing to uphold Australia’s national interest by adopting these anti-Australian shipping policies that favour foreign vessels. We on this side of the chamber are committed to the Australian maritime industry. The member for Blair in his earlier speech raved on for quite some time about the Labor Party’s support of what he called our union mates in the maritime industry. Let me say for the record that the Labor Party absolutely support the Australian workers in the maritime industry, as they deserve to be supported. Call them our union mates if you like, because they are union members, but basically at their heart they are Australian workers and they deserve the support not just of the opposition but of the government.

Labor acknowledges the real and vital role Australia’s maritime industry and its workers have played in national security and the role that it should still be playing in defence and economic prosperity. We also acknowledge that the Howard government’s policy of supporting cheap foreign shipping serves to threaten Australia’s national security, risk our coastal environment, facilitate the human rights abuse of foreign crews and significantly sacrifice jobs for Australian workers. The Maritime Union of Australia and their global equivalent, the International Transport Workers Federation, have been lobbying tirelessly for tighter security, safety and environmental controls on ships entering Australian waters—and quite rightly so. The Maritime Legislation Amendment Bill 2005 does little to alleviate their deep and very real concerns about the poor security on flags of convenience ships, as they are known, which leave Australia vulnerable to terrorism and environmental disaster.

As members of this place will know, the practice of flags of convenience shipping is one where an open register allows shipping companies to register their vessels under a foreign flag. In other words, a ship can fly the flag of a country to which they have no connection. One in five of the world’s ships are registered under this system. This registration can even be obtained over the internet, which likely contributes to the poor and substandard state these ships are reported to be in, seeing that it seems that safety and seaworthy testing can be easily evaded.

Flags of convenience ships fly the flags of other countries because they are cheap. They have low registration costs and low or even no taxes. But they also have poor standards and cheap crews, crews that have little access to a union, crews that are forced to work in appalling conditions—on leaking ships with a lack of food, low wages, physical abuse and little or no training. Often they work with written instruction manuals in a language they do not speak. Flags of convenience shipping represents more than half of the worldwide ship losses. It also represents hundreds of lives lost in shipping accidents. Flags of convenience ships are also responsible for the majority of major maritime collisions, resulting in pollution, the death of marine life and the destruction of our natural environment. It is luck rather than good management that our coastal waters remain pristine from these major environmental disasters.

This bill does little to abate the human rights abuses that these flags of convenience ships of shame harbour. The bill does little to protect the rights of workers whose very lives are often at stake in these coffin ships. The bill does little to help assign responsibility to flags of convenience rust buckets as they trail their leaking oil slicks across our seas.

The Australian coastline stretches 36,700 kilometres. Its ocean territories cover more than 12 million square kilometres and cover three oceans. Our nearest neighbour is 200 kilometres to the north; then Timor, 640 kilometres; and New Zealand, 1,900 kilometres. Australia is the sixth largest nation in the world, after Russia, Canada, China, the United States and Brazil, and is the only one of the top six that is completely surrounded by water. Perhaps that is why the Howard government’s lack of concern over the flags of convenience shipping phenomenon cuts so deep. We are the largest island nation in the world, and we have relied on our maritime industry over our history. We have had a strong, viable maritime industry, which is seriously degraded after 10 years of the Howard government’s inaction. We have the longest coastline in the world. We have the most to protect. We have the most need to protect our vulnerable country by providing secure entry to our nation from the oceans that surround us. We have the most need to service our vast country via our vast waters and the most need to supply proper and safe working conditions for Australian seafarers and maritime workers. On that point, we have the most need to supply jobs to Australian seafarers and maritime workers—full stop. I will talk more about that later, more on the impact that the Howard government favouring foreign vessels and crews has had on the number of Australian workers employed at sea in Australian waters.

The irony is that many of the flags of convenience ships plying our waters, bringing with them potential environmental hazards and certain human rights abuses, are flagged to landlocked countries. At least 40 countries, many of them developing countries, rent out their flags to shipping companies of any nationality. The country opening a flagging register does not have to be situated on the coast. Indeed, landlocked Bolivia is one of the top 10 maritime countries in the world. Australia, the largest island, with one of the longest coastlines in the world, is not anywhere near the top of the table. In fact, we are significantly far down.

Responsibility is the real problem with this issue. The Maritime Legislation Amendment Bill 2005 addresses culpability to the extent of an increase in offence provisions but it does not assist in determining just who it is that is culpable. Our world famous and world heritage listed Great Barrier Reef stretches for more than 2,300 kilometres along the north-eastern coast. If, for example, a shipping accident occurs off the coast in Queensland resulting not only perhaps in the tragic loss of human life but most certainly in oil spilled, with this flag of convenience ship flagged in Bolivia, owned in Switzerland, crewed by labour from Cambodia and captained by a Greek national, who is responsible for the environmental damage and where does the buck stop? Let me tell you it certainly does stop with the Australian government, which has failed to act on this issue for many years.

Australia has one of the most coast-dwelling populations in the world. More than 80 per cent of us live within 100 kilometres of the coast, and the majority of us live very close to our thriving ports. The impact such an environmental disaster occurring in Australian waters would have on the Australian way of life is worth noting. To keep with the example of the Great Barrier Reef, tourism is now the largest commercial activity in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, generating over $1 billion per annum. The marine tourism industry is a major contributor to the Australian economy. This could be said about any part of our coastline: the pristine waters off the coast of Western Australia that attract people to places like Port Hedland in the north of the state and Esperance on the southern coast; the spectacular seas of the Eyre Peninsula off the Great Australian Bight; and, a little closer to my electorate, the famous waves of Bondi beach.

Being a coast-dwelling population, it would be natural to conclude that there would be a fair proportion of Australians employed as seafarers, employed on the ships that move cargo and the like up and down our 36,700 kilometres of coastline. Sadly, this is no longer the case. We live in the reality of the outrageous situation where the number of people employed in seafaring jobs in our coastal waters is being negatively affected by the presence of cheap labour in the form of foreign crews of flags of convenience vessels. The Howard government has not sufficiently amended maritime legislation to protect the rights of Australian workers. In fact, over 10 years its policies have decimated the Australian coastal fleet and put thousands of Australian seafarers out of work.

The Maritime Legislation Amendment Bill deals in part with amendment to the Navigation Act 1912. However, it fails with respect to flags of convenience shipping by not sufficiently amending legislation to stamp out the abuse of single and continuing voyage permits. Labor has long held the view that the unfettered granting of permits to foreign ships represents a security risk to Australia also. If the ships entering our waters and our ports are flags of convenience vessels, which many are, then Australian authorities still have no way of tracing the owners of these ships and very little way of knowing who is actually aboard. There is no real background check undertaken on just who it is that constitutes these crews of foreign workers. This leaves our nation well and truly open to terrorism. Shipping in Australia is still the best way to transport dangerous materials from one side of the country to the other; it is much safer for us all than land transport. Because of that, it is important that we have a secure maritime system where we know who is staffing the ships, who owns the ships and that the ships in our waters have some responsibility to this country.

Another of Labor’s long held views is that the Howard government does not care about the Australian worker and certainly does not care about the maritime worker. The Howard government’s favouring of foreign crewed vessels can only come at the expense of Australian workers, and what an expensive price to pay. We are the largest country in the entire world that is completely surrounded by water, a country reliant on a vibrant shipping industry, and yet our maritime legislation allows for the cheapest, exploited foreign crews to regularly work our waters and service our country in favour of Australian workers. I am not just talking here about ships that come in from other countries, bring in their cargo, move up and down the coast delivering it and leave. I am talking here about ships that ply the seas between our major cities on a regular basis. They are here in our coastal waters on an almost permanent basis, leaving only when they have to.

Where an Australian worker is denied a job, an Australian family is also denied an income. There is no doubt about the ability of our seafarers and maritime workers. Of course skilled Australian workers would be highly sought after as crews, but at what cost? We cannot accept, in any of our industries, either on land or at sea, Australian workers being forced into a position for jobs on the wage rates of our large neighbours such as China.

We hear quite often in this parliament that wages need to be cheaper. We see now the government allowing visas to bring unskilled people into this country to do apprenticeships and do Australians out of jobs. But we have also seen for many years a government that is prepared to see the Australian transport industry staffed within our own waters by the cheapest, most exploited labour in the world—again, Australia competing in its own country, in its own waters, on the basis of the incredibly low rates of Chinese and Indonesian workers.

It is unimaginable that that would happen on land. It is unimaginable, if we were talking about our rail system or our trucking system, that a foreign company would be able to move into Australia with its trucks and its staff from overseas and pay what in Australia would be called slave labour rates without any real conditions. I fail to see why, if it is not allowed on the mainland, it is allowed in our coastal waters—again, not just the ships that are coming in from other countries but the ships that work here on a regular basis. That is what they do: they go from Brisbane to Sydney to Melbourne to Adelaide to Perth and back—over and over again—with the cheapest, most exploited labour in the world.

Australia may be an island nation but a fantasy island we are not. This is the real world. In the real world the bottom line is punctuated absolutely by the dollar sign. In the real world, desperate underdeveloped nations full of desperate people risk their lives and limbs on rust buckets, coffin ships and ships of shame. But that does not mean that Australia has to be part of a world that allows people to work under those conditions. We need a strong voice against any circumstances in which people are treated that way. We are against child labour. We equally should be against this unbelievable exploitation of some of the most desperate people in the world, who spend their lives on ships that can sink at any time, with no conditions and for little wages, if any.

Yet in Australia, with this government, that is tolerated. And it is tolerated in order to weaken the very ‘union mates’ that the member for Blair accused us of supporting. There can be no doubt that it is part of the government strategy to weaken the maritime unions by ensuring that their workers are more and more on the dole. There is no doubt that, in their attacks on the unions, they are prepared to see Australian workers literally cast aside, as we have seen in the industrial relations legislation that they introduced late last year.

There is no doubt that this is a government with a fixed ideology that is so full of hatred for unions that it is prepared to sacrifice Australian workers in its battle to win a war. This government is against a union that is of course a group of workers in the first place. I am astonished by the capacity of this government to refer to unions as though they are not workers. The next thing we will hear is it talking about the police force as though they are not the police. When you are talking about the union, you are talking about a group of workers who have come together and formed a collective in order to bargain for their rights.

Working on a ship in Australian waters should be treated no differently from working on the mainland. If it is not good enough on the Australian mainland to bring in foreign workers from overseas at slave rates, then it is not good enough to do it in Australian waters—it is just not good enough. Remember that Australia’s ocean territory covers more than 12 million square kilometres and takes in three oceans. We should be one of the great seafaring nations of the world. That is what we could have been. Ten years after the Howard government, we are nowhere near that. Our fleet has been decimated—and, along with our fleet, so has our shipbuilding capacity. If you knock out the Australian fleet, you knock out industries that support it.

This bill does some good things but it just does not go far enough. This government has presided over a deliberate weakening of the Australian maritime industry and a decimation of the Australian fleet, and it is about time it acted to turn that around.

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