Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Tax and Superannuation Laws Amendment (2015 Measures No. 3) Bill 2015. The Greens are committed to maintaining strong protections for Australian workers and the industries that support them, and this bill is an attack on both of those. And it is Groundhog Daythat we see these measures coming back. The Senate gave an absolutely resounding 'No' to the government's previous attack on these important measures, just a few months ago. Is it because the government has no other legislative agenda that they are recycling their legislation? Or are they just trying to set up yet another trigger for a double dissolution so that we can have an early election under, perhaps, new leadership, but with basically the same old team with new clothes? You have to wonder why, if we have got such a strong agenda of government legislation being brought forward, we are being asked to consider and reconsider again the same legislation. So, as we did last time, just those few short months ago, the Greens will be opposing the changes to the seafarer tax offset and the research and development tax offset, because they are both essential measures for the future of a vibrant Australian economy.

I want to start with the seafarer tax offset, which this bill proposes to abolish. In its current form, the seafarer tax offset applies to a seafarer in a ship for which a company has the appropriate certificate and where the company employs the crew member for at least 91 days a year for these journeys. This tax incentive goes a long way to ensuring that Australian workers on overseas journeys can get paid a decent amount; it keeps their jobs viable. And it costs us the measly sum of $2 million a year. So, for the sake of just $2 million a year, the government is going to make it harder to employ Australian workers on our seas, and harder to have Australian-flagged ships plying our coast. And that is the last thing that we need to be happening now to our shipping industry.

This government is overseeing the decimation of the Australian shipping industry, at the cost of Australian jobs and the working conditions of the workers who are left. But it is completely consistent with its attacks through trying to repeal the coastal shipping act—completely consistent with what that bit of legislation was going to do. There was economic assessment of repealing the coastal shipping act. It showed that the repeal of the coastal shipping act and of the regulations associated with it were going to reduce Australian employment in coastal shipping from 1,100 workers to 88 workers. The repeal of the coastal shipping act would mean, it is estimated, that the only Australian workers employed on ships in domestic shipping would be those employed on the Spirit of Tasmania.

The government, not satisfied with those attacks on domestic shipping, is making attacks on international shipping. That basically means that there would hardly be a job left, whether in coastal domestic waters or on international journeys, for Australian workers. These proposed changes would have a disastrous impact on working conditions on and safe environmental conditions for ships that are in our waters. The saving the government is trying to achieve is tiny, and, for that, it is going to ditch security for workers and our shipping industry, at the very time they need our support. If we end up with virtually no Australian workers and no Australian-flagged ships, and with virtually every ship that is journeying along our coast or internationally being a foreign-flagged, foreign-owned ship with a foreign workforce, then we know that, inevitably, we are going to have a drop in the working conditions and we are going to have a drop in the environmental conditions. The evidence we have for that is: where we have ships that are only visiting Australian shores infrequently, they do not know the conditions and are much more likely to end up with incidents, and with environmental accidents with impacts on, for example, ships going through the Great Barrier Reef.

At the shipping summit that was held a couple of weeks ago that was convened by the ACTU, we heard from people across the industry how these changes to the government legislation are the very opposite to the direction that we need to be heading in. We also heard that what the shipping industry wants above all at this stage is certainty. They do not want to have to go to another piece of legislation and another set of regulations; the industry will not have the certainty to know where it is headed.

So we must not let it happen. It is the last thing that the shipping industry needs. The industry is already in a storm with the changes to the coastal shipping act that are being proposed. The last thing it needs is to be forced to navigate the storm that would be created if this tax incentive is abolished. The law as it currently stands promotes the professional development and training of workers by including this in the period deemed to be on a voyage, and this is an essential measure to train up Australian shipping workers and to give them the know-how to maintain our status as a major shipping nation. It is a status that we cannot afford and that we do not need to let go. We need to be maintaining every incentive we can, to be maintaining training and to be keeping the skill levels of Australian workers.

Again, at the ACTU shipping summit a few weeks ago, we heard how, by not having the opportunities for Australian sailors to be on our ships, all of the onshore jobs are also threatened, because it takes at least 10 years to build up the skills of a sailor or seafarer before they have the skills to be in a position to, for example, be a pilot—to navigate ships through our waters. If we do not have the opportunities for Australian workers to be at sea, we do not have the opportunity for them to be doing that training, and that means we will have even greater job losses—even more than the 1,100 jobs that are destined to go with the repeal of the coastal shipping act, and even more than are destined to go if we abolish the seafarer tax offset. It will mean complete decimation of the Australian workers being employed in shipping around the Australian coast and internationally. And this is when Australia, in fact, is the fourth largest seafaring nation. The amount of goods that are transported by sea around Australia and from Australia mean we have the fourth highest level of goods transported by sea of any country in the world. We need government to be supporting that industry and building it up. We do not need to be losing that industry. It should be a competitive strength of Australia's. Instead, we have government that has been hell-bent on letting it go.

We have options. We do not need these changes. There are constructive ways forward for us to maintain a strong, healthy, viable Australian shipping industry with good working conditions for seafarers and good environmental protections. Perhaps most importantly, the Australian shipping industry can be competitive with the rest of the world. It needs to be that. It truly is an international business. The industry operates in a market that is largely tax free in international terms. Seafarers on other countries' ships are given similar tax incentives. So this is just a matter of keeping our conditions here in Australia on a similar playing field as those in other countries. Taking this benefit away from our workers will be putting them at a disadvantage to the rest of the world just when we need to be doing everything we can in order to maintain their jobs.

The government argues that the seafarers tax offset has had a low uptake. But, while uptake numbers may appear low at first glance, the reality is that they reflect the number of Australian ships that are operating internationally. This is a vital industry. Rather than getting rid of it altogether, we need to be increasing the number of Australian ships operating and ensuring the safety of the people employed in industry. To achieve this, the seafarers tax offset is a measure that we must keep.

This bill also continues the Abbott government's attacks on science and research and development. The bill cuts 1½ per cent from the research and development offsets available to business and rips $620 million out of research and development over the forward estimates. We have a choice to make here. We can have either a prosperous Australia or an Australia devoid of the knowledge that we need to tackle the problems of the 21st century. In this parliament and in the Australian community it is accepted that increasing investment in research and science is the way forward. We know that our wellbeing, security and economic viability as a nation depend on maximising the innovation that Australians are renowned for. It is in areas that are underpinned by research in science and development that we are going to be able to compete on the world stage.

These cuts to research and development also come on top of the cuts to the research and development tax offset that targeted large company investment. This is not the direction that we should be going in. The insanity of these cuts is reinforced and underlined by the government's own figures on science expenditure. Even though we know that science increasingly needs to underpin our future as a nation, last year we spent less on science and research than we did in 1979. In 1979 I was a first-year science student. I would have thought, as a first-year science student, that as a country we would acknowledge the value of science and research and recognise the importance of science and research to our future and that we would be increasing our level of research. But, no. We are very much going back to a last-century outlook on the direction our country needs to be heading in.

We know that over the last three decades science and research have become increasingly important to our society and economy. The rot began under Labor in 2012, but Prime Minister Tony Abbott—however long he remains Prime Minister for—has taken spending on science and research to the equal lowest level since records began. Sadly, I do not think if we did have a change of leadership and a new Prime Minister that we would see any difference in the direction that this government as a group and as a party are taking our country in. It is not the direction we need to be heading in.

We have seen supported by all of the government, not just the Prime Minister, unprecedented cuts to clean energy programs. We have seen cuts to the CSIRO, forcing some of our world-leading scientists into early retirement. Again, we have skilled scientists who have decades of experience and are committed, capable and able to be continuing their careers and who want to be continuing their careers being forced to take redundancies or accepting voluntary redundancy packages so as to save the jobs of their younger colleagues. Now we are seeing these attacks on the research and development tax concessions.

We know that we cannot compete with China and India on wages, but we have the potential to be much stronger on research and innovation. To achieve this, we need secure and significant public investment. This is something that other countries have certainly twigged to. You would think that it would be something that in Australia we would acknowledge we need underpinning our public policy, given we cannot compete on low wages. But, no. We are trailing behind countries that are our competitors in the world—such as Germany, the UK and the US—and we are being outspent by key trading partners such as Korea and Japan.

We cannot afford to continue these cuts to spending on science, research and innovation. We know that the 'dig it up and ship it out' economy has had its day. We know that fossil fuel reliant industries such as mining have had their day. We have to look to the jobs of the future. We have to look to the jobs that are going to give us a clean, green, innovative, clever, prosperous future. We cannot allow the country's brain drain to continue, and that is what these cuts to science funding mean. They mean that bright Australian scientists are not able to find work in Australia.

I know a young scientist who has just finished a PhD in marine biology; his desperate hope is that he will find a job in his field—there is plenty of marine biology research that needs to be done and our economy depends on a good understanding of our marine biology—but he looks at the prospects for employment and he cannot see anything. He said to me: 'Janet, I want to stay in Australia.' But if you look at his prospects, you would have to think, 'What hope is there?' Another scientist whom I know has spent 15 years working as a climate scientist, but all those 15 years have been in short-term, insecure employment. So many scientists in her position have actually left working in science because they cannot rely upon it. They have mortgages to pay and families to support and they decide that, no, they cannot go from one post-doc to another post-doc to another post-doc—12 months here, 12 months there, perhaps another 18-month appointment there. Very reluctantly, they give up their passion, their commitment and their expertise in science and go off to find a job in some other industry that will give them more certainty. We should not be forcing our scientists to do that. We have so much useful, valuable, economically essential work that our scientists should be doing, but they are not being supported by this government and this government's approach.

We cannot allow the country's brain drain to continue. We must be looking to increase funding for research and development, so we can have the knowledge that the rest of the world is after. The Greens will always be committed to Australian workers—whether they are seafarers plying our shores or whether they are workers—and we are committed to their contribution to a prosperous thriving economy. The Greens are committed to maintaining innovation in our key industries. That is why we will be opposing this bill.