Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Tourism and International Education) Share this | Hansard source

As Senator Canavan has just indicated, the Shipping Legislation Amendment Bill 2015 is a really important piece of legislation not just in respect of shipping but also for industry and commerce generally in Australia. I say at the outset that the government is committed to a safe, secure and efficient transport system. This is unambiguously also the case for coastal shipping. Nowhere is this more important than in my home state of Tasmania, which, by virtue of geography, requires affordable and competitive shipping. It plays an incredibly important role in our economic prosperity.

Under Labor, the fleet of major Australian registered ships with coastal licences dropped from 30 vessels in 2006-07 to just 15 in 2013-14. The changes that Labor made were supposed to save the Australian shipping industry. Under Labor's changes, there is less freight, fewer ships and less employment. So the costs that were imposed on all of the Australian industries that used those coastal shipping services have not done anything to save the Australian coastal shipping industry, as Labor promised when they passed the legislation.

Between 2000 and 2012 the shipping industry's share of Australian freight fell from 27 per cent to just under 17 per cent while the volume of freight across Australia actually grew by 57 per cent. What Labor's laws did was take freight off the coastal shipping routes and put it onto the roads of Australia. You only need to think about that additional load on the road transport system to consider what the potential impacts might be, yet Labor said that they were going to save the coastal shipping sector. When we look forward—with Australia's overall freight task expected to grow by 80 per cent by 2030 but, under the current settings, coastal shipping is to only increase by 15 per cent—there will be more trucks on the road and less freight being carried around the Australian coastline by ships.

The government's objective is to facilitate greater use of coastal shipping services around the coastline. The coastal shipping has more to do. It can do it economically and it can do it efficiently, particularly for a number of industries. I say that nowhere is more important than my home state of Tasmania. Why should Bell Bay Aluminium pay something like $29 a tonne for moving its freight from Bell Bay to Gladstone when the global going rate is about $17 or $18 a tonne, and before Labor's coastal shipping laws came in the rate was about $1 or $2 more than the global rate. Labor's laws have inflated costs and made it more difficult for Australian industry to compete within Australia. Labor's coastal shipping changes are locking Australian industry out of the Australian market. That is the effect of Labor's coastal shipping laws that they said would save the industry, but it has had less freight, less ships and less employment as a result of their process. Our amendments provide a more competitive and efficient coastal shipping industry for Australian shipping users. It replaces the cumbersome and complex framework, which was put into place by Labor, with a single permit significantly reducing red tape and regulatory burden.

There is some view being put around this place that these changes will create some form of disaster in employment in Australian coastal shipping that does not exist already. One of my Tasmanian colleagues foretold job losses at Toll, TT-Line and Searoad. All of those businesses existed within a coastal shipping framework that existed prior to these costly Labor regulations. All of those businesses operated using Australian employees prior to the commencement of these destructive changes that were brought in by Labor in 2009 and 2012. So to suggest that there is not some concept where they can exist within a new environment that takes us back more to that framework I do not accept.

It was the changes that were made by Labor that actually cost Tasmania its international shipping service. That is one of the reasons the AAA service left Tasmania—