Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Welcome back to the member for Braddon. I'm not sure how much you've learnt in the time you've been away, but I was interested to listen to that long list of great Tasmanian products that you are very confident about growing, and I know the Hodgman government is very confident about the growing agricultural sector in Tasmania. But it seemed to me that you were very focused on the jobs of MUA workers and very poorly focused on the jobs of those who work in agriculture. There is repeated evidence that the Australian coastal shipping trade runs at roughly four times the cost of the international trade, and that will be worn by the Tasmanian industries that you're so very proud of and that I'm keen to see succeed as well.

You also touched on fuel supplies. If we lose the coastal shipping trade, there is not one Australian registered tanker. There is not one tanker. Every voyage has to be offered up to the market and then it is passed by, which is a two-day delay, and then it is given to international shipping. So, unfortunately, you are defending something that has virtually passed us by.

I remember that we debated this bill in 2012. The member for Grayndler, then the minister, brought in the platform that we are living on now. He was very keen to give his mates in the MUA a good run. At the time, there were 22 Australian registered vessels. That was down from 55 six years before. Now, as it was then, the fleet remains old by world standards. We are the fourth-largest user of shipping in the world, but for most of the tasks we are served by a competitive world practice. But, if you're an Australian business needing Australian supplies, it's a whole different world. It's roughly four times the cost and a whole lot of red tape. This bill seeks to streamline, to speed up, the permit system.

In 2012, when then Minister Albanese brought in the current act, he said it was designed to ensure the Australian shipping industry survived. In 2012 there were 30 ships. In 2018 there are 13. That reduction was under the act that the member for Grayndler said would protect Australian shipping. There was a reduction in deadweight capacity, over those six years, of more than 65 per cent.

The average age of the registered fleet, all 13 of them—there are 13 registered under the Australian flag—is 24, up from 23 last year. The oldest vessel is 26 years old and the youngest is two. There is one vessel that is only two years old. But, if you remove the two-year-old vessel from that list, every other vessel is at least 17 years old, and the average age goes up to 26. This is a very old fleet by world standards. In fact, the world standard is around 13 years old. It's 13, and we've got a fleet servicing Australia that is 26 years old. The largest vessels—and this is interesting—those over 10,000 tonne deadweight, are all over 19 years old. Sadly, in June, CSL's Iron Chieftain, used to bring coal to Whyalla, suffered a fire on board. While it is still actually registered, it has been retired. The Iron Chieftainwas our largest vessel, at 50,600 tonnes—not too bad a size. The next largest vessel we have surviving in the trade is 27,700 tonnes. So it's a 20-year-old fleet, when the world average is 13. I'm glad the member for Grayndler has just walked in, because it is his act that has brought us to this stage.

How strong a message do we need? We are still protecting, basically, a dying species. There are 13 ships left in the trade. When will we wake up and realise that the horse has expired—or perhaps, a bit more like Monty Python, that the parrot is dead? Electorates like mine are in the firing line. Nyrstar in Port Pirie; GRA in Thevenard, out west of Ceduna; Liberty OneSteel in Whyalla—they are all users of coastal shipping. The best way to avoid this overly expensive and antiquated fleet is to import product as well.

At the time of addressing that bill in 2012, I brought up the issues for GRA, west of Ceduna. It is cheaper, as it was then, to bring gypsum in from South-East Asia to Brisbane and to Sydney than it is to ship it around the Australian coast—basically, from just west of Adelaide, to Sydney and Brisbane. It's four times the distance, but it's cheaper to bring it on the overseas fleet. I'm even hearing stories at the moment of companies talking about shipping their goods to Indonesia and then bringing them back again so they can avoid the coastal shipping trade. This is an incredible inefficiency that we are visiting upon our industries.

I touched on oil tankers; we don't even have an oil tanker. There is not an oil tanker registered in Australia. Yet, if the refinery companies want to shift fuel up and down the coast, they have to put that out to tender on the Australian market—only to find no-one tenders—and then they can go to the international market. Talk about ridiculous red tape. We need to let this system evolve to reflect the Australia that we are living in at the moment.

I also raised, in 2012, the cost of demurrage. I haven't checked the figures again, but I don't imagine they're much different today from what they were then. Demurrage is $10,000 a day. That is when a ship is lying off-port, at anchor, waiting to get into the loading dock. It's $10,000 a day for an international ship and $37,000 a day for an Australian registered ship. That's enormous! That is an enormous difference. Essentially, we are inflicting extra cost on our fully Australian industries—those employing Australian labour, as the member for Braddon talked about; those that are giving a leg up, an opportunity, to our kids. We are imposing extra costs on them to protect an ever-dwindling number of jobs in the MUA.

The parliament is indebted to a former member for Wakefield, Bert Kelly—a heroic man who waged a one-man battle against tariffs in Australia throughout his time in parliament. Gough Whitlam eulogised Bert Kelly at his funeral. He said, 'No one man has done more to change Australian economic policy as a backbencher than Bert Kelly.' Bert Kelly talked about lowering tariffs and protections when it was completely unfashionable. His adage was that one man's tariff is another man's job. So it is with the coastal shipping act. The protection of the marine workers is costing jobs in the rest of Australia. Other people are paying the cost of those jobs.

We are a free and open economy in most cases. We certainly have to trade with the world. We sell 75 per cent of the food we grow to the world. We are a major export nation. In as much as we can access overseas shipping for the bulk commodities, we are treated well. But in as much as we're trying to support our manufacturing industry, shifting commodities around Australia for the blast furnace in Whyalla or the blast furnace and metal manufacturing plant in Port Pirie, or trying to get gypsum from Kevin around to Melbourne so we can use gyprock to build Australian houses, we are imposing a major penalty on those employers and on those businesses. This bill doesn't seek to abandon the Australian maritime industry—even though, probably, if I had my druthers, I would—but perhaps it is being a bit more pragmatic about the world in which we live at the moment. It is an assessment of the capacity of the Australian fleet.

The bill also seeks to lighten the red-tape disincentives for superyachts to come and visit our communities. I'm not too sure how many superyachts you have, Mr Deputy Speaker Vasta. I don't have one yet. But the people who have them like to sail the world, and they like to come to the South Pacific.

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