Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia must have a sovereign shipping capacity. It means having the right ships for all our needs. It means ships that are owned and flagged in Australia. It means the ability to build and sustain ships. And it absolutely means a high-quality maritime workforce, from the shipyard and the vessels' crew to the docks. More than 99 per cent of all imports and exports travel by sea. We're an island continent nation in a region of thousands of islands at a time of increasing climate impacts. Without question, our economic, social and environmental wellbeing depend on Australia's sovereign shipping capacity, which needs to be rebuilt after a decade of deterioration.

I'm incredibly proud to represent a seafaring, shipbuilding and port community. In my community, we're acutely aware that Australian life depends on shipping. Yet, in recent decades, we've seen our sovereign shipping capacity, whether in the form of our Navy or merchant marine, fall away. During the last election, the WA Liberals took out full-page ads in the West Australian, seeking to boost their credentials and saying that WA's role was 'set in stone' and that we'd benefit from 50 per cent of defence shipbuilding. Unfortunately, that wasn't delivered. In fact, the former government presided over a fall in our sovereign shipping capacity. It was driven by their appetite for deregulation and their constitutional aversion to maritime workers and their representatives in the Maritime Union of Australia.

The Albanese Labor government won't allow our national interest to be undermined like that. One of the first election commitments Labor made from opposition was that we would establish a strategic shipping task force to look at creating a strategic fleet. Three weeks ago in Fremantle the minister for transport, Catherine King, was on Victoria Quay to announce the government's response to that task force. We've now confirmed our commitment to create a fleet of up to 12 vessels so that Australia is not vulnerable to freight supply disruptions.

Last week I was with the Minister for Defence Industry to announce a strategic shipbuilding agreement with Austal, which is headquartered in the Australian Marine Complex in Henderson in my electorate. This secures Henderson's future as a vital shipbuilding hub. It provides a shift from a project-to-project acquisition process to a longer-term approach, giving certainty and confidence through a secure pipeline of work.

This will help secure long-term skilled jobs, infrastructure investment and certainty across the extensive supply chain, which is critical for the local and Western Australian economy and my community in Fremantle. These two measures—a strategic merchant fleet and a strategic defence shipbuilding agreement—will be the foundation stones of Australia's future sovereign shipbuilding and ship operational capacity. I'm very proud that Fremantle and Cockburn will be fundamental to that delivery.