Jim Turnour (Leichhardt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

When the minister retires, she would be most welcome to come to Cairns and tropical North Queensland. I am sure I could put her in touch with some bareboat charter people so that she could enjoy some of the experiences that I am about to describe. I had the opportunity to travel in a 32-foot Miller and Whitworth yacht—which is a wonderful yacht, designed and built in Western Australia—up through the Great Barrier Reef with my good friend Gary Rogers. Swimming with manta rays off High Island, just off Innisfail and Cairns, is a wonderful memory. We spent time up at Lizard Island, snorkelling on the reefs, doing a little bit of line fishing and eating mackerel every night. It was very, very nice. We had no freezer, so we ate freshly caught fish.

These are the sorts of experiences that we are talking about protecting as part of this bill. By putting in place this compensation framework, we make sure we send the right messages to large oil companies and freighter companies who are transporting fuel in the area. My mention of eating mackerel and snorkelling is very pertinent to this bill. These are wonderful experiences to have. Going north of Lizard Island we have Princess Charlotte Bay and then Margaret Bay. This is the northern route of the Great Barrier Reef: the northern inner route of the shipping lanes. There are significant numbers of large vessels more the 50 metres long that transit this route every year. I will speak about that in more detail later. My experience of travelling through that area in a 32-foot yacht is that you come across large freighters and oil tankers. At the same time, you come across trawlers, recreational fishers and a range of leisure craft. They are not in large numbers, but they are negotiating a channel inside the Great Barrier Reef in difficult circumstances, with winds above 30 knots and sometimes up to 40 knots and where sections of the channel are only a few hundred metres wide. These create significant risks of oil spillages. The Great Barrier Reef is a fantastic icon from not only an environmental point of view but also an economic and a way-of-life point of view. I know plenty of people in my part of the world—whether they are out sailing on the weekend or out doing some recreational fishing—will appreciate that the parliament is putting this legislation in place not only to ensure that there is sufficient money in place for compensation but also to send a message to those companies that we take the risk to the reef very seriously.

There was a review of ship safety and pollution prevention measures in the Great Barrier Reef undertaken back in 2000, and a report was brought down in July 2001 which provides very useful information in relation to ship movements along the east coast of Australia, particularly in relation to the Great Barrier Reef. There are two routes down the coast. The inner route extends north-south from the Torres Strait to Gladstone between the Great Barrier Reef and the Queensland coast. The northern section of that route obviously borders my electorate and runs up to another great part of my electorate—the Torres Strait. The Great Barrier Reef runs up to border it, and there are tremendous reef systems through there that are also at risk because those ships enter through the Torres Strait into that inner zone. There are pilotage issues and there is great risk to the Torres Strait from oil spills when ships enter through the Torres Strait and traverse down through the inner route.

There is also an outer route that commences at the eastern limit of the Torres Strait, the Great North-East Channel, continues southwards through the Coral Sea and rejoins the Queensland coast near Sandy Cape, south of Gladstone. The outer route was surveyed and charted to international standards in 1997, encouraging a greater number of vessels, particularly oil tankers, to use the outer route. Some of the larger vessels use the outer route, but there is still a lot of use of the inner route by larger vessels. There are a couple of reasons for that. It is a shorter distance, so economically it makes sense for companies in the shipping business to travel that way, but also the weather conditions are much tamer within the inner route. They can be quite severe and you can get some short chop in those areas, which I have experienced, but larger vessels manage to cope with that. Regulations allow them to carry more cargo through that inner route because of those calmer conditions. So there is an inner and an outer route and, between them, the report found that there was not any difference in terms of risks and safety.

To come back to the amount of shipping that actually traverses the Great Barrier Reef region, there are approximately 6,000 movements of vessels in excess of 50 metres in length that run down the east coast. That is understandable when you look at the number of ports that we have along the east coast of Queensland. Queensland is obviously one of the major economic drivers of the great nation of Australia, and tremendous amounts of resources come out of the great state of Queensland. Resources come out of places like Cape Flattery, Cairns, Mourilyan, Lucinda, Townsville, Abbot Point, Mackay, Hay Point, Port Alma, Gladstone and Bundaberg. These are all major ports down the east coast of Queensland, and it is not surprising that there are 6,000 ship movements across this area.

Looking specifically at the numbers of oil tankers that traverse the east coast of Queensland, between five and 10 per cent of shipping movements are oil tankers, so we see significant numbers of oil tankers moving up and down the east coast of Queensland. They are carrying either refined product to service Queensland ports north of Brisbane or ballast. If we take five to 10 per cent of 6,000, we are looking at between 300 and 600 oil tankers heading north through this region each year. There are considerable risks associated with that.

If we look at some of the statistics available through the review of ship safety and pollution prevention measures report we find that, during the period 1985 to 2000, there were 11 collisions and 20 groundings within the inner route of the Great Barrier Reef, which represents over two incidents each year. We are talking about incidents happening not irregularly within that route and we are talking about large vessels. Two incidents a year might sound like a relatively small rate, but it is not. There are more than 2,500 ship movements in the northern region, which borders my electorate, every year. There is considerable risk of ship groundings within the region that I am talking about.

The largest contributing cause of all incidents was human error. We can do all we like in terms of technology, and it certainly helps to improve safety, but the reality is that there is always a human factor when it comes to ships travelling down the east coast of Queensland. Human error accounts for 57 per cent of the incidents. It is the reason for most of the incidents that happen. This is above international standards, which place human error as accounting for around 48 per cent of incidents. I suggest that it is not because Australian pilots or seafarers traversing Australian waters have less ability but because the risks are higher because of the difficulty of the inner channel, particularly the narrowness of the inner channel, and also the sea conditions in existence.

As I mentioned earlier, as part of the review there was a study commissioned by Det Norske Veritas, DNV for simplicity, to ascertain whether there was a reduction in risk by pushing ships into the outer route, outside the Great Barrier Reef, coming down through the Coral Sea. That report effectively found there was no difference in risk. With an incident outside the reef, we have the strong high-pressure systems that regularly traverse the southern part of Australia pushing south-easterly winds, and any spill would be most likely driven back onto the reef. It is also a long way to go, if there is an incident, to undertake a clean-up. It makes the clean-up more difficult and there is essentially a greater risk to the environment. It has been found that there is no real difference in risk between ships travelling down the inner and ships travelling down the outer route of the Great Barrier Reef, according to the DNV report that was done as part of that study. I found that most interesting because you would think by pushing ships to the outside it would reduce the risk, but that is not what the independent report found.

There are real risks to the Great Barrier Reef, which not only is an environmental icon in Australia but also creates the wonderful lifestyle that we enjoy in tropical North Queensland. It is a wonderful icon environmentally and it creates tremendous lifestyle advantages for those people living in Cairns, the north and all along the Queensland coast. I am sure the member for Longman will talk about some of those experiences as well.

This bill will lift the amount of compensation available from $350 million to $1.3 billion. The tourism industry, on which my electorate is so dependent, is such that the $350 million compensation that exists in the current two protocols would not go very far. We do need to introduce this legislation and ensure that we have the legislative framework to support the international protocol that we signed up to back in 2005. This legislation will ensure that those tourism operators in tropical North Queensland, who may be impacted by an oil spill from a tanker at some stage in the future, have the wherewithal to be properly compensated. The legislation sends appropriate messages to oil companies that they need to ensure that their vessels are well maintained and that every risk assessment is done to reduce the likelihood of an oil spill in tropical North Queensland and all around Australia.

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