Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In the two minutes in which I spoke previously on the Maritime Transport and Offshore Facilities Security Amendment (Security Plans and Other Measures) Bill 2006, I indicated that it is a slight bill with minor amendments. There is a reduction in the number of days—from 90 down to 60—during which the Secretary of the Department of Transport and Regional Services can look at applications made by shipowners or the controllers of ports or of offshore facilities for variation of security plans. In addition, there is a possible extension of that time by up to 45 days or so where more information is required. The connected matter is that a series of consequential amendments need to be made across a range of different bills to bring this legislation up to date. I had also referred to our amendments and to the broader question of maritime security in Australia as it relates to shipping and ports and to offshore facilities.

Mr Deputy Speaker, looking at the Notice Paper and at the order of presentation, you will note that only one government member will be speaking on this bill. If you take it simply that the bill itself is slight and that most of the changes are procedural—they are directed towards making it easier for those involved in maritime security, ports, offshore facilities and ships to cope with the administrative burden and towards creating a more efficient situation than where you have to put into place a five-year plan every time you want to make a variation or where a major change must be made when one of the contact people no longer remains with the company or the entity—you can understand why the government might not put up many speakers. However, where a series of amendments go to the very core of what Australia’s problems are in maritime transport and offshore facility security, you might expect more than one government member—no doubt the member for Fairfax will directly enter this debate, and I hope that he does—to speak to the bill and engage in a real debate here.

I believe that part of the reason that only one government member will speak in this debate is that the government has actually done very little at all about maritime security. So far, most of its concentration has been on areas where there is an expectation of terrorist attacks, according to where they have happened in the past. That has created a pattern of response both here and overseas. Such attacks have occurred by road, by rail and by air and they have impacted not just facilities and infrastructure but also the thousands of people who have been killed. There have been the events in the United States in September 2001; the train incidents in Madrid, where so many people died; and the bombings in Britain, on a bus and on the underground system. Just recently we had brought to our notice the planning of another series of attacks in Britain—again, a series of air attacks—and an announcement has just been made about another planned attack. None of those elements goes to the question of maritime security, and that probably conditions the response of governments and agencies when looking at what they might have as a hierarchy of probabilities.

However, two significant episodes have occurred over the last five years or so. One was the maritime attack on the MV Limerick and the other was the attack on the USS Cole. The attack on the USS Cole could have been worse if the terrorists had known where to hit it. Luckily, they did not. They hit it amidships. The impact was significant and resulted in some American naval officers being killed. But the terrorists did not hit the vessel where the most damage could have been inflicted. Attempts are made with US and Australian warships to contain ammunition and flammable materials so that, if these ships are attacked in such a way, major explosions do not occur. But those attacks are a precursor of what might happen. They are also a precursor of what the intent could be and what Australia’s particular problems are in dealing with maritime security.

We can look at the length of our coastline, at our dependence on trade by sea, at our close regional concerns with major shipping lanes through—as the member for Brisbane pointed out—the greatest area of piracy in the world, the Malacca Straits, and at our direct intersection with Asia and how difficult it is for us to actually maintain a security presence along that great expanse of water and coastline. Our fundamental approaches have been in relation to, firstly, illegal fishing in the north and, secondly, refugee problems that occurred after the Australian government supported the freeing of East Timor—just prior to the 2001 election, when 11,500 people came to our country in just 2½ years and the government completely lost control of our border security. That is where the emphasis has been.

There has been very little planning with regard to maritime security. We should have substantial legislation before us that does a great deal more than effectively ask people to make administrative changes. It should allow them to make it easier to present a maritime security plan, tick it off and say: ‘That’s terrific. That’ll be looked after. People have done that. It can be regulated and it’s not as hard as we thought it might be.’ We need to pay more attention to this and have a far closer reading of it.

The former minister for transport, the member for Gwydir, had a response to an ASPI—the Australian Strategic Policy Institute—document. ASPI is funded by the Australian government, but it is set up as an independent think tank. It put out a document in April 2005. That document is called Future unknown: the terrorist threat to Australian maritime security. It has an excellent first page introduction from the director of that organisation and an executive summary which goes to the key problems in Australian maritime security. In the series of recommendations that it made—which is extensive; it covers a number of pages—its underlying point is that we have not done enough and the planning is not there.

There have been investments made by the Australian government and by Australian industry, particularly the transport industry, to try to better secure ourselves, but they have largely been directed towards road and rail, particularly into airports, but not into the maritime area. ASPI quite sensibly points out that if you are dealing with airports—even though there is a variation between general aviation airports and the major domestic and international airports—there is a commonality amongst airports throughout Australia and wherever they are in the world. There has been a huge volume of people going through them and there has been a concentration on that in an attempt to improve airport security, but there has been very little attention paid to maritime security or to looking at it as a whole.

The government announced in December 2004, I think, a plan to try to secure Australia’s situation off Western Australia. It would provide vessels, which are passing there at the moment from the Northern Command, to try to secure our fundamental resources on the North West Shelf. That is immensely important. Just one of those trains run by Woodside at the North West Shelf is responsible for billions of dollars worth of exports of liquid natural gas. We know that the major contract signed with Guangdong Province was for a 25-year program with $25 billion worth of export. I was there when Woodside was putting together its fourth train. It is in the process of doing a fifth train.

Over on Barrow Island, where the petroleum resources are running down, one of the provisions Chevron is putting into place so it can continue exploration for gas resources is to do geosequestration of CO. Chevron is putting together the biggest liquid natural gas program Australia has ever seen. There is a minimum of 60 years worth of production for Australia, and the probability is that, in Gorgon and its associated field, there is 100 years or so of capacity. Chevron has got a broader and possibly even more productive field under view.

Those resources—our offshore oil platforms, our offshore gas platforms, what we are developing in the Greater Sunrise area, our intersection with East Timor and what is being developed through there—is enormously important to Australia’s economic future. One single maritime attack on those offshore facilities would do immense economic damage to Australia. And yet we have the protocols that have been put into place and the efforts that have been made by the government. Just look at this bill. What is it about? A bit of auditing and a bit of benchmarking. Luckily we have got an Australian Defence Force who understand the critical nature of this. I know they understand it, because I have discussed these issues with them directly and taken them up on it in committee and on site. I have spoken to people in the command, and they assure me that they understand the critical nature of that infrastructure and that Australia’s defence resources need to be directed to that.

If you look at what the government has done and the approaches it has taken, though, it is just not on the job with regard to this. The member for Brisbane made a comment when he was speaking with Mr Beazley, the opposition leader, about Australia’s maritime security and the need for a coastguard—which is one of the amendments we have here; in fact, that has not been put into place—and also the need for a department of homeland security. At the very time they were making the announcement, there was a major, high-risk ship full of ammonium nitrate steaming to Australia with foreign crew. There had been virtually no coverage in relation to that ship to determine what risk there would be to Australia.

If a ship like that ran into one of the ports in Queensland, into Gladstone for instance, and blew up there, it could do immense damage. A ship full of ammonium nitrate coming into Sydney Harbour would blast Sydney’s CBD to pieces. I have spoken to our Defence personnel, who are responsible for our maritime security within Sydney Harbour, and they say that they have the plans in place to deal with those kinds of incidents. I trust that they have. I do not trust this government has, because there is not the same focus on our fundamental maritime security needs.

It is possible that because of what has happened so far, and I think this is highly likely, there is a projection forward, which is normal in human affairs. Whatever has happened, people project into the future. When we had high interest rates, people projected we would always have high interest rates. They go up and down—the cycle is indicative of the changes in economic conditions. You had the same sort of operation on the subject of terrorist attacks. But the problem is people get fixated on what has happened already. The key problem is the attacks they have not yet made. ASPI deals at length with the idea as to why there has not yet been a major maritime security incident in Australia—at a port or with a ship or indeed with our offshore facilities.

There may be a range of reasons, and that may include the fact that bin Laden and al-Qaeda have such an investment in shipping—that is, they utilise shipping to do the rest of their terrorist activities—that they have not concentrated on the area yet. It may be that the degree of difficulty is such that it is significantly harder or that there just will not be enough bodies destroyed, enough lives lost, in this kind of incident. They would like to blast us back into the Middle Ages. They want to bring down our whole economic superstructure—the fundamental infrastructure that girds the modern world. The intersections between us and Asia and the sources of our wealth are their fundamental targets. The attacks we have seen so far have been more iconic in the aircraft that have come down, the railways that have been attacked and the people who have been killed. A much more massive impact could be made by destroying the very heart of our economic capacity.

That is where the Australian government, not the Defence Force, needs to be measured. The Defence Force take directions from the government, and the government does not have clear direction with regard to this. There is no real perception within the government of airport security. There are a whole range of areas where it has been extremely poorly handled. There is no perception that, if you scan only 10 per cent of containers coming into Australia, the 90 per cent you leave out probably have the terrorists in them. The member for Brisbane pointed that out. They found one bloke who had the plans and all the rest of the stuff he was going to do. He wanted a bit of extra air, and he just happened to be seen. He was pulled out. It is the area that is not covered where the most significant and difficult problems are. If you look at all of the planning, where is the indication that the government understands that port security, for instance, is not just horizontal? You have a much more difficult problem with ports than you do at airports, because you have to look at the seaborne approaches to that port, at the underwater approaches and at the land approaches and you have to secure the air approaches and the activities that are occurring within it.

I do not think it is enough to just tick off the list that people have put their plans in and to then rely upon that to secure us. We are dealing in these amendments with Australian regulated ships. We have had difficulties with the question of those having foreign crews, but also we have high-risk ships coming into Australia and—apart from US defence vessels—we do not know who the crews on those are. We do not know whether or not they are subcontracted to al-Qaeda. We have a radar capacity to pick up that shipping and we can travel it, but we do not really know as much as we should about the manifests in those ships or the manner in which the threat could be much greater than it is already perceived to be. I stand by every one of the amendments that we put forward and underline this fundamental and key fact: it is no good projecting from the past onto the future. You have to look into the areas that have been explored or covered already. Our fundamental area of difficulty is our continental size and reach. One of our great weaknesses is in the capacity of a terrorist organisation to hit at our trade and do fundamental damage. I commend the amendments to the House.

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