Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Medicare) Share this | Hansard source

This legislation, the Shipping Registration Amendment Bill 2018, makes the shipping registration system of Australia more flexible, and transfers the registration process to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. It effectively simplifies the registration process, particularly when changes need to be made to the registration process itself, and that is something that Labor welcomes and supports.

As the minister pointed out in his second reading speech, approximately 12,000 vessels are currently registered on the Australian general shipping register. Most of those vessels, I suspect, are likely to be fishing or tourism vessels, because the reality is that Australia has very few cargo ships domestically registered and flagged. For an island country with—as the member for Grayndler quite rightly pointed out—around $400 billion annually exported through shipping, which represents about 90 per cent of our exports, it should be a national concern that so few of those ships are registered in Australia.

It is not just Australia that has lost its shipping fleet over recent decades. In fact, over the past four decades, in deadweight tonnes, the ratio of merchant ships flagged in developed economies has fallen from around 55 per cent in 1980 to about 25 per cent today. Panama, Marshall Islands and Liberia alone now account for around 56 per cent of vessel registrations based on deadweight tonnes. Countries including Malta, Antigua, Barbuda, Bahamas, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Saint Vincent and Cambodia are also places where ships today are being registered. All of those countries I named are not exactly countries that are thriving. Indeed, they are all developing countries. The ships, however, whilst registered in those countries, are owned by entities that are based predominantly in Greece, Japan, China, Germany and Singapore. None of those countries could be described as developing. The trend to shift the registration from developed economies to developing economies is done for particular reasons. In particular, it is because the places that those ships are registered are generally considered to be low-tax jurisdictions. But, more importantly, once the ships are registered in those countries and carry the flags of those countries, they can employ much cheaper, Third World labour from countries where seafarers are paid a pittance, as other speakers on this side of the House have quite rightly pointed out.

The trend in Australia over recent years has been identical to the international trend. I quote from a Senate inquiry that reported back to the house in July 2017. It's the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee. I noticed that the member for Whitlam used some of the same statistics. I want to quote directly from paragraph 1.29 of that report. It says:

Statistics on vessels operating on the Australia coast in 2014-15 reveal the decline in Australian-flagged vessels:

Those statistics paint a very clear picture about the demise of Australian shipping.

One shouldn't be surprised that we have had that demise, because, for the last two decades, coalition governments have been doing their best to destroy the Australian shipping industry. We had the Patrick dispute 20 years ago, where the Patrick Corporation and the coalition government led by then Prime Minister John Howard, with support of his minister Peter Reith, connived and concocted a scheme to sack Australian shipping crews, replace them with scab labour and ultimately replace them with foreign shipping crews.

See this speech in context