John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

I seek leave to table an explanatory memorandum relating to the bill.

Leave granted.

I present the explanatory memorandum.

I have great pleasure in introducing the Marine Engineers Qualifications Bill 2013.

This bill has a simple aim of safeguarding the safety standards in Australia’s marine industry and address deficiencies in the Marine Safety (Domestic Commercial Vessel) National Law Amendment Bill 2013. Under normal circumstances matters of this detail are dealt with by regulation rather than by legislation. But due to three significant mistakes by Labor, it is imperative that we now act to prevent the lowering of regulatory safety training and certification standards for marine engineers in Australia. That is the big risk here. Without the passage of this bill, there is a real risk that regulatory safety training and certification standards for Australia's marine engineers will be lowered—and that is the last thing we want.

The first mistake under this government is that the regulator, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, has become so politicised that there is real doubt as to whether it can produce impartial safety regulations on merit. This is a major problem for our seafaring industry and has to be addressed. Unfortunately, we can see again the influence that the unions are having on Labor policy. And we saw it again last night when another Prime Minister was deposed. This is now par for the course for Labor—governing for the unions and their own self-interest, not for the Australian people.

Returning to the Marine Engineers Qualifications Bill and the reasons it must pass, the second significant mistake is that, due to political interference by non-engineer interests, AMSA abandoned on 22 October 2009 the considered engineering reforms they had agreed to with the Australian Institute of Marine and Power Engineers. Instead, there has been the attack on the marine engineering safety training and certification standards that I have just referred to.

The third mistake is that, as a result of the poor drafting of Minister Albanese's shipping reform bills and acts, vessels currently covered by the Navigation Act 1912 standards will instead default to a lower standard under the Maritime Safety (Domestic Commercial Vessel) National Law Act 2012, or the national law as it is known. Let us look at this in more detail. AMSA has attacked engineer standards of training and certification throughout the entire Marine Order 3. I asked many questions at Senate Estimates on this issue. I continually question them on the processes, for which there are genuine concerns that accountability is being downgraded.

I will list where these deficiencies lie. Engineering standards of training and certification are being attacked through MO3 in the following ways: by counting sea service as a rating as engineering qualifying sea service, which clearly it is not; by deleting tables used for assessing workshop service; by deleting a table showing the framework of state and federal issue marine engineer certificates and how they relate to each other; by deleting the three-year duration of training for an engineer cadet. That is amazing. How are you going to train a cadet in less than three years? Look at our apprenticeships around Australia. And the final ways in which the engineering standards of training and certification are being attacked are by deleting the requirement that engineers not be certified unless they pass an examination by an AMSA examiner and by allowing AMSA to foist the audit of the college course onto a third party.

And that is just the start. AMSA drafted successive changes to Marine Order 3 from the point of view of desk officers and of ratings—that is, relatively unskilled seamen. Because of all the requirements, that adversely impacts on engineer officers. What are these adverse effects? Firstly, last time, AMSA's proposed changes incorrectly required engineers to meet the eyesight standards for the desk, which would have ended the career of hundreds of engineers. And this government talks about protecting Australian jobs! The time before that, AMSA's proposed changes would have refused to issue an engineer a certificate unless the candidate had passed the deck subject for radar training and for radio operator training. Neither of these is relevant for engineers—more red tape. This time, AMSA has incorrectly deleted the recognition of separate engineer certificates for steamships and for motor ships. This mistake is clearly unsafe and ridiculous. An engineer who is qualified for only motor ships cannot safely operate steamships, and vice versa. This is the downgrade in standards that I have been referring to. This time AMSA was too busy putting in new certificates for ships cooks to provide certificates for ships electrical officers.

AMSA also proposed changes which would have prevented hundreds of engineers from renewing the periodic validity of their certificates. And now we start to work out what this is all about. What is really behind the drop in these standards? The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has allowed the interests of other parties, such as the Maritime Union of Australia, to press them to reduce engineer training standards. The MUA is a union that our new Deputy Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, is aligned with. I say 'new' Deputy Prime Minister because we do not know how long he and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will remain in their jobs. The frequency of turnover would suggest it will not be long before the knives are out again. Such political interference is easy to justify when a change to ratings regulations simultaneously changes engineers regulations. These examples could have been prevented if AMSA would revert to a separate marine audit just for marine engineer qualifications, as previously existed. This bill seeks to make that a mandatory requirement. Let us get the politics out of this and keep the standards high.

Turning to the second of these government mistakes, AMSA, apparently due to political interference from Minister Albanese and his factional colleagues the MUA, have abandoned the considered engineering reforms they had on 22 October 2009 agreed to with the Australian Institute of Marine and Power engineers. Here we go—flip flop again. Those reforms included an agreement that the new Marine Order must require AMSA to not just turn away applicants who had the wrong trade to be an engineer but must instead require case-by-case evaluation of post-trade experience to help make up workshop efficiency and to evaluate alternative trades. Those reforms also included a breakthrough undertaking that would assess the maintenance experience of class 3 state certified engineers as a substitute for the possession of an approved engineering trade and thereby allow them access to AMSA certification.

These case-by-case assessments would require decisions about marine engineering qualifications to be made not by non-engineering managers but only by suitably qualified AMSA engineer examiners—and this too has been agreed to by the AMSA chief executive officer. But after political interference with AMSA, the authority suddenly changed its mind. It walked away from the agreement with the marine engineers, who were holding discussions in good faith, once suspicions were aroused as to why this was so—but walk away it did. The result is hundreds of Australians with not quite the right trade are turned away from a highly skilled future career now that engineering reforms have not been progressed. This bill addresses this and requires AMSA to implement what it agreed to.

I said at the outset this legislation seeks to address three government mistakes. This is the third. It has enormously reduced applications of Marine Orders part 3 as a result of the repeal of the Navigation Act 1912. The Navigation Act 1912 covered all Australian ships that traded internationally or between the states. Astonishingly, its replacement, the Navigation Act 2012, applies only to ships that trade internationally. Why is that so? Let me elaborate. Vessels that trade between the states are now covered by the Marine Safety (Domestic Commercial Vessel) National Law Act 2012, which sets much lower safety training and certification standards. In fact, this new act further reduces standards compared to those applicable under the state laws this new act replaces. That is why the Marine Engineer Qualifications Bill 2013 is necessary to mitigate in some small way both these reductions in marine engineer standards.

If passed by parliament, the Marine Engineers Qualifications Bill 2013 would require regulations issued pursuant to the Navigation Act 2012, to the extent they deal with marine engineering training certification matters, to implement and give effect to the 15 standards set out in the bill. The same would apply with respect to the regulation issued pursuant to the Marine Safety (Domestic Commercial Vessel) National Law Act 2012, which deals with vessels of at least 3,000-kilowatt propulsion power or 500 gross registered tons. The redraft of the Navigation Act 1912 was necessary because the Navigation Act 1912 only applied to trading vessels during the time they were on an interstate or overseas voyage. That definition does not include an oil and gas industry vessel, which, of course, had not been contemplated in 1912.

In relation to Australia's substantial oil and gas industry, parliament tried to resolve this with a later amendment whereby section 283G attempted to be deem a foreign registered offshore industry vessel to be covered by the provisions of the Navigation Act 1912 as if it were registered in Australia and not registered in any other country. But AMSA's view, based on Crown law advice, was that the deficiencies of a section 2 application of the act—that is, only covered trading vessels—could not be overcome by parliament's deeming provision. So Minister Albanese, now Deputy Prime Minister Albanese, dealt with these deficiencies in the Navigation Act 1912 by having it completely redrafted. As a result, does the new Navigation Act 2012 cover commercial vessels engaged in Australia's offshore oil and gas industry in our claimed Exclusive Economic Zone? The answer to that question is: no, it clearly does not. Even Australian based companies like Farstad Shipping in Melbourne and Swire Pacific in Perth, which actually own their offshore vessels, find it much cheaper to not register or flag them in Australia, so the Navigation Act 2012 has little application. I will use an analogy: if you wanted to run a trucking business from Melbourne to Brisbane, you would have to register your truck in Australia and comply with Australian regulations. That is obvious; that is the law. But there is nothing in the Navigation Act 2012 or the national law that requires anyone to register their ships in Australia to conduct a commercial shipping business from Melbourne to Brisbane. I will repeat that because we are now getting to the crux of this whole debate. The much vaunted Navigation Act 2012 does not require anyone to register their ships in Australia to conduct a commercial shipping business from Melbourne to Brisbane. But wait, there is more. Nothing in the Navigation Act 2012 or the national law will require anyone to register their ships in Australia to operate commercial oil and gas vessels in our oilfields in our claimed Exclusive Economic Zone.

The Navigation Act 2012 expressly only covers ships that trade from Australia to international destinations. How many would that cover, you ask. Would it cover 50, 100 or 150 perhaps? No, there are only seven such ships in Australia, just seven—that is all. The Navigation Act 2012, AMSA claims, will cover more vessels than this but it just is not so. All the other ships that were covered by the Navigation Act 1912 will now fall through to a lesser safety regulatory standard under our state based regulatory system under the new national law.

The effect of section 9 of the Navigation Act 2012 will be that the offences and penalties of the legislation only apply to a foreign vessel while it is in an Australian port or entering or leaving an Australian port or internal waters such as rivers, lakes or a territorial sea other than in the course of innocent passage but not when that vessel is out in the Australian oilfields in our claimed Exclusive Economic Zone.

Absurdly, even if Farstad or Swires chose to reregister their oil and gas vessels in Australia, the default position is that they would not be covered by the Navigation Act 2012 because it only covers Australian registered ships while they are proceeding on an overseas voyage. Instead, the default position is that the Australian registered offshore oil and gas vessel would be covered by the national law and the lesser safety training certification standards it now introduces. That is what this legislation is trying to address. There is an ability to voluntarily opt-in to be regulated by the Navigation Act 2012. In other words, it is your choice. Isn't that like telling a motorist that the speed limit is 100 kilometres per hour and he can choose to drive to that limit if he wants to? This is clearly a flaw.

Federal and complementary state legislation has been passed by parliament to empower AMSA as the nation's single maritime jurisdiction for commercial vessels, and it was intended that the lower-safety-standard states be brought up to the standard of the better regulated states in a new national law. If that had happened we would not be here talking about it today. But that is not the scenario in front of us. Instead of every state adopting best practice, AMSA has taken the best states down to the lowest common denominator—that is, the hands-off, self-regulatory Queensland model, where the vessel owner, not the independent regulator, decides the manning and certificate requirements and decides whether his vessel is seaworthy. That is some regulation?—it is not.

Under the existing state system the lower safety standards of the states are replaced by the higher standards of the Navigation Act 1912 whenever a vessel crosses a state border, and that is consistent with international practice, where a ship voyage of more than 1,000 kilometres would normally cross a national border and trigger equivalent safety standards.

However, the new national law will no longer do this. From 1 July 2013 a vessel will be able to sail out of Port Phillip Bay, turn left and sail all the way around Australia on a voyage of more than 60,000 kilometres before returning to Melbourne, without triggering the higher Marine Order 3 standards that would currently apply once it crossed a state boundary. Such a voyage is the equivalent of three around-the-world voyages, yet AMSA will no longer apply the higher safety training/certification standards. Safety on commercial vessels will be reduced as a consequence.

Examples of how the national law standards are less than those under the Navigation Act 2012 and MO3 include that the national law counts only half the defined propulsion power in determining the level of training and certification required for a given vessel. It no longer triggers Navigation Act standards when a vessel exits state waters, does not mandate the three-year training requirement for a marine engineer watchkeeper, does not mandate AMSA oral examinations, does not ensure AMSA directly audits college course providers, and does not maintain the academic entry standards of engineer cadets.

Today I have attempted to give you an overview of what the Marine Engineer Qualification Bill seeks to address. It is about retraining, safety standards and certifications. It is about reducing union interference in our shipping industry. It is about jobs for Australians and proper regulation. I commend the bill to the Senate.