Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I find it pretty appalling that only one member of the government backbench spoke on this bill and we have got 15 or 16 speaking on the Labor side of the House. It shows the interest that the government has in maritime matters and in the security of the country. It also shows up the government’s hypocrisy. The Maritime Transport and Offshore Facilities Security Amendment (Security Plans and Other Measures) Bill 2006 has some severe implications for Australia, but it is not a bill that goes far enough and it never has. The other bill that this is amending was not good enough, and this one has been brought in to try to stove it up a bit. But that is not getting there either. The government has not dealt with the matter as it should have.

Labor have been calling for urgent maritime security reform for some years and we welcome this amendment bill. However, many urgent reforms are required in Australian maritime security. You see government ministers weekly, nearly daily, talking of the security of Australia and the difficulties we are in. We have to take these issues seriously. We have changed act after act giving more powers to security forces and police forces in this country. We may need to do that, and we have done it, but in the maritime sector we are still falling pretty short. We still have not got there. We have got nowhere near where we have to be.

We seem to want to pick on Australian seamen. We want to make sure that they have the credentials, we do security class checks and make sure that they have their security cards et cetera, and that is fair enough. But we allow foreign seamen to enter the country. We have ships tying up to the wharves around Australia without the same sort of checks.

It seems to be hypocrisy on the part of this government. In one area we are stressing enormous numbers of security issues. We have made boat people into terrorists. We are creating very high tension around these things. But we do not seem to want to deal with the issue of foreign crews coming into the ports of Australia. We know, and I think my predecessor mentioned, that the United States of America do not allow foreign crews into their ports because of the security issues. They do not allow them to sail around the shores of their country. I understand why; there are many reasons why.

The amendments that my colleague the member for Brisbane has moved to this amendment bill are good and I will be supporting them. It was the government trying to deregulate the shipping industry some years ago which pointed them in a bad direction. The amendment bill gives effect to Australia’s international obligations under the International Maritime Organisation, the IMO; the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code; and chapter XI-2 of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, the SOLAS convention, of 1974.

That act establishes a means to protect against unlawful interference with maritime vessels and associated transport or offshore facilities by setting up a regulatory framework centred on the development of security plans for ships, ports, port facilities and offshore facilities which are crucial to imports and exports oriented maritime transport or domestic energy supplies. Naturally, that is what we have done in this country to protect our ports and the export and import industries—to protect what we import and the great wealth we get from our exports. Presently a participant cannot change a plan without submitting a revised plan—that is, somebody coming into an Australian port cannot position a boat without saying that they have revised what they have done. I think there is a change here to make that slightly easier. I accept that as being a reality, and that is fine.

But ship security is something that we need to be far more careful with than this current legislation is. In the past the fact that we have had Australian crews operating on ships around Australia has probably given us a false sense of security. Our crews are highly trained and they have a great sense of loyalty to their country. Our crews go back to the Second World War and our merchant navy, where they served their country well. Their loyalty is not questioned.

On the whole they are probably some of the best seamen in the world, and they are recognised as such. Other countries will seek out Australian crews because they know they can rely on them, their skills and their ability to manage ships and make them work—as opposed to foreign crews, who are normally very badly trained, if trained at all, and have very little safety knowledge or understanding. Also there are always language issues that are never dealt with in any way, and they should be. I think my colleague the member for Shortland made some very good points about being on ships, and I have also been in this situation, and seeing frightened foreign seamen in pretty bad distress—not people that you would want to rely on, people that could probably be manipulated in many ways. That is not a very good security situation to have.

We have set a standard for Australian shipping and for overseas ships that come to Australia, but I understand that 20 per cent of ships that dock and tie up in Australian ports have not notified who their crew are or what they have on board the ship. That is appalling, but it is what we seem to be letting happen. We also have foreign crews taking permits and using ships for coastal freight around our boundaries.

In Tasmania, we sell vodka to the Russians, tulips to the Dutch, truffles to the French—they might go on the plane—meat to the Japanese, wood to China and milk powder to Jordan, and hundreds of other products produced in Tasmania are sent out to the world. A lot of that is shipped from the ports in Burnie and Devonport, and our ferry ports take in many other things. Concrete from the Railton cement works goes out from there. The port of Bell Bay at the top end of Launceston looks after Comalco and the other refineries. There is also the port of Hobart, which of course is not very big anymore. These ports take foreign ships and foreign crews, and we do not know who is on board these ships when they tie up to the port. That shows a lack of security and understanding. Ministers who sit in this parliament stand up at question time and go on television to lift the security level of this country to a very high level and get people at a higher sense of alert, but they are not taking seriously these sorts of situations. They are allowing foreign crews on the coastlines of Australia to flout the regulations that we are setting for ships that come into the ports to notify who their crews are and what they have on board.

Many of the Australian crews have been trained through the Maritime College, which is in my electorate in Tasmania. It is an excellent facility that trains in security and safety and all the other aspects that are needed. It is a great course used by many people from other parts of the world to train to become good seamen, and we have retrained many Australian seamen there. It is recognised as a great training facility right around the world.

In the 1990s I sat on the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Transport, Communications and Infrastructure for the inquiry into the ships of shame and I was around when the Ships of shame reports were tabled. Peter Morris, the previous member for Shortland, was the chair, and he knew a heck of a lot about shipping in the world. We watched the deregulation of the shipping industry and saw foreign ships come into the ports and the security issues come into play, knowing that the ships of shame had been highlighted. Ships of shame were in the world and needed to be dealt with, but we still allowed ships to come into Australian ports. Given that, I find it even more difficult to work out why ministers and why this government’s agencies have not acted.

We have touched on a few bits of what can be carried. I remember being in Halifax, Canada, some years ago and reading about the great explosion, which was the greatest explosion in the world prior to the dropping of the bombs on Japan during the Second World War. In Halifax, Canada, a ship blew up in 1917. It was loaded with gunpowder and petrol and was leaving to go to the front in France. It devastated the city, and I remember reading a book about it while I was there. That ship did not have ammonium nitrate on it, but after reading that book I started to take notice of some of the other enormous explosions that have taken place, like the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and injured 500. That was ammonium nitrate. The IRA used ammonium nitrate in a bombing of London’s Canary Wharf. The total damage was estimated to be about £85 million; two people were killed and 100 were injured. In 2004 the UK arrested some people on terrorist charges and they had half a tonne of ammonium nitrate, fertiliser, in their lockup, and we know what they were trying to do. The most famous incident dealing with ammonium nitrate was the explosion of the SS Grandcamp in Texas City in the United States in 1947. It was carrying 2,300 tonnes of ammonium nitrate. The explosion was heard 150 miles away and it threw the 1.5-tonne anchor two miles from where it started.

So one would think that we would not allow ammonium nitrate to be in a foreign ship with a foreign crew sailing around Australia and calling into ports. But we do. There is something seriously wrong in allowing this to occur. This government is failing the people of Australia. It is raising the security level of this country up and up but it does not want to do anything about some bits of it. We are saying that a standard for an Australian seaman has to be at this level, which is fine. He has to have a security pass, has to reach a standard, has to carry his card and has to be at this level. We accept all that. We know that he can reach a level of safety and competence to meet any test in the world. But we know that there are foreign crews that cannot meet any level. We know that they are not up to any sort of level that we could put them up to.

This should be dealt with. This bill does not deal with it. As I said, I understand that 20 per cent of ships that come in and tie up in Australia do not notify who is on board the ship, who is in the crew and what is in the ship to be unloaded. A part of the international standards that were pulled together was to make sure that those things occurred—that ships were to notify. As I said, these things have been around since the Ships of shame days and all that good work done by Peter Morris, who went around the world speaking about those ships. This House should be very proud of the work done by its transport committee in those days because I know that report was a world-renowned report.

Whether we have taken shipping to a better degree and a better level is something that awaits further reports, but it is a standard that we should be setting for the world. We should be a part of it. We need to deal with these issues. We need to come to grips with these things. Under Labor’s plan, as announced by our leader earlier this year, we would establish a department of homeland security and organise around two core responsibilities of border protection and protecting against terrorist attacks on the border by making sure that we had a coast guard. We would deal with local groups as well. We could make sure that the volunteer coast guard people were right up to date. We could do things with proposed acts like this to make sure that those foreign crews, if they were going to be on the coast, have the same standards that Australia has.

I just want to mention the Australian shipping industry. When you see that so much of all the commodities that we are selling to the rest of the world out of Australia today is going out in foreign owned ships, that is a bit of an indictment, and we need to come to grips with that. (Time expired)

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