Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

With deep respect, Senator Lambie—through you Acting Deputy President— I have to explain how wrong you are. I particularly appeal to Senator Carr, Senator Moore, Senator Brown, Senator McEwen and others in this chamber. It is not often that you rise to beg for bipartisan support across the whole chamber. Before I came into the Senate, I was an executive director in the oil and gas industry. It is an industry I know and my comments to my colleagues opposite—and I wish they were listening—are to appeal to you, Senator Carr, Senator Moore, Senator Lambie and Senator Wright—through the chair—to understand what it is that you are about to do.

The people to whom you are referring, Senator Lambie—through you, Acting Deputy President—are not the people who are going to be affected by this legislation. In a previous life I travelled on livestock ships; British officers, Pakistani crews. I travelled in and out of Australian ports; in and out of Middle East ports. I understand the maritime situation well.

I do not want to go into the politics of this. I want to say to you: you should understand very clearly—I went to you, Mr Acting Deputy President Whish-Wilson, before we had the maiden speeches tonight, because I want you to understand clearly what it is we are talking about. This is not something to do with party politics. It is to do with the employment opportunities of Australians.

Senator Wright—through you, Acting Deputy President—you cannot be more wrong when you speak about low-paid international employees on these ships. I was on a platform supply vessel in Central America in December and January. This is an industry I understand. The sorts of vessels that Senator Wright was speaking about, and that Senator Lambie just mentioned, are highly specialised international vessels. They are platform supply vessels. They are dredgers. You would have seen them operating in our northern ports. They are subsea installation vessels. These are not low-paid international subclass workers; these are highly paid specialists. These are people who command the highest of incomes.

So that I could be accurate this evening, at twenty to five this afternoon I called an international shipowner who has their vessels currently in the Gulf of Mexico. I said to this shipowner: 'This is what is being proposed'—I am sorry you are leaving, Senator Lambie, because it is very important that you hear this—'what is being proposed is that, if you were to bring your vessels into Australian waters, you would immediately have to change the industrial conditions under which your highly specialised employees are registered to work'. Do you know what this person's answer was? It was: 'Chris, it would be totally uneconomic for me to bring my vessels into Australian waters under those conditions'.

I do not want to go down Senator Cash's path. I do not want to accuse my colleagues in the Greens of wanting to destroy the offshore oil and gas industry. That is Senator Cash's right. I will not go down that path. My Greens colleagues are people who I admire and respect. We often differ, but we can have good discussions, as Senator Siewert and I have done over the last couple of days on another issue.

I want you to understand clearly that what Senator Cash has said here this evening is absolutely right. The sorts of positions on the vessels we are talking about are not those that Australians will replace. These are highly specialised subsea installation vessels.

A colleague with whom I spent a lot of time not long ago was brought into Australian waters to re-establish the Montara field, above surface. But then he was asked to re-establish the subsea structures as well. He was competent to, because he is one of the best in the world, but he did not want to. Subsequently he did re-establish the subsea structures. He employed Australians as the opportunity arose. But each person in those crews was a highly-paid highly-specialised international. They are the people who follow the vessels.

These are dredgers; these are pipe-laying vessels; these are platform supply vessels; these are the vessels that produce the mud and the cement and pump it. This is not the sort of stuff you get people who are unskilled to do. This is the sort of work that is critical from an environmental point of view and from an occupational health and safety point of view.

This person said to me at twenty to five this afternoon: 'Chris, if you had not got me out of bed in the middle of the night, if I was in my office, I would send to you the demand curve. Because the demand at the moment around the world is so great for these highly specialised vessels that we could be operating in offshore Brazil'—where the same company is bidding on work at the moment—'in the North Sea, in West Africa, in the South China Sea, as we are here in the Gulf of Mexico.' And there is an enormous demand at the moment in Mexico; the Mexican government has increased radically its exploration drilling, and that is the work this particular group are in. And this person said to me: 'Chris, if you think that the owners of these vessels and these highly-skilled highly-paid international crews are going to come into Australian waters under these circumstances when we have so much other work around the world, then you must tell them they are dreaming.'

Colleagues, what I want you to understand is this: these vessels are very often the vessels that are directly related to the occupational health, safety and welfare of the Australians who work on the rigs. They are the people who take supplies out to the rigs. They are the people who take equipment off the rigs, take them in to shore, do the necessary maintenance and repair work, and take them back out. They are the people that look after the rig anchorage systems. They are the people who have the capacity in the event of fire, because their vessels are also equipped for fire control and fire suppression. I have to defer to Senator Cash as the Assistant Minister. I am not pretending to be far enough across the issues associated with visas. But if it is the case that, as of the time this is disallowed, those people working on those vessels find themselves illegal, let me tell you what is going to happen, Senator Carr: the first thing is those people are not going to work when they are working illegally. The second point I want to make to you is: those owners are going to remove their vessels from our waters. I cannot tell it to you any more plainly.

These are people are friends of mine. My son-in-law is a Norwegian from the city of Stavanger, which is the centre of the Norwegian shipping, and oil and gas industry. I would like to engage with you at some time: I too envy the Norwegians for the sovereign wealth fund that they have got, Senator Wright. This is not an industry about which I have no knowledge; it is an industry that my family are involved in. It is an industry my son-in-law has helped to develop, particularly some of the platform and offtake vessels.

This is critically important, Senators, because if we cannot supply the rigs, if we cannot do the dredging, if we cannot lay cables, if we cannot do the subsea installation, simply because the economics of it is not there for the these owners, we are placing not just the $200 billion offshore oil and gas industry at risk; we are placing thousands of high-paid Australian jobs at risk. We are placing at risk the opportunity for Australians to develop the expertise that resides on these vessels—all for what?

These people are already highly paid. They already travel with the ships. The ships do not stay all that long. They might stay weeks. They might stay months. If there is a dredging opportunity going on in Port Hedland, they will stay there—big Dutch dredges were there the last time I was in Port Hedland. They will be there for the length of that contract and they will be gone, Senator Wright. But they are not going to be replaced by Australians.

If you bring through this disallowance this afternoon, those dredges are not going to come into Australian waters and all of a sudden have Australian crews on them, because they do not have the skills. We do not have a skill base in this country and we will never develop a skill base in this country simply because those vessels are not going to be here. The Australians who are getting jobs on them and learning from the highly skilled specialists who are there will not have that opportunity, because they will be operating offshore Brazil. They will be operating the Gulf of Mexico. They will be operating in the South China Sea. They will be operating off West Africa, and we are the losers.

Senator Lambie, this is not a situation in which tens of thousands of Australian jobs are being put at risk because this disallowance has not been put through. I say to you: thousands of Australian jobs will be at risk tonight and beyond. If these people find themselves in a circumstance in which this disallowance goes through, they will no longer be able to work in Australian waters. Those vessels owned by overseas owners with crews that are highly specialised will leave Australian waters—they will go—and what will be left behind, unfortunately, is an industry at risk. We have at risk thousands of Australian high-paid jobs. Your colleague Senator Dio Wang, coming as he does from the mining industry, as I understand it, in Western Australia, would understand the levels of payment in that particular industry.

Let me finish with this: Australia is already becoming non-competitive in offshore oil and gas. Our costs have now escalated to such an extent that, by the time the new developments offshore come into commercial production, the Canadians will be delivering LNG into Japan more cheaply than we are here in Australia.

The managing director of one of the major—I will mention it, because he did publicly. Speaking to Roy Krzywosinski, the managing director of Chevron, recently, he said to me and then repeated it at an APPEA conference—they have the big Gorgon project that started out at $37 billion, now $52 billion; they have also got the Wheatstone contract further south. He said to me—