Senate debates

Wednesday, 11 March 2009

Aviation Legislation Amendment (2008 Measures No. 2) Bill 2008

Second Reading

Debate resumed from 13 February, on motion by Senator Sherry:

That this bill be now read a second time.

5:11 pm

Photo of Ian MacdonaldIan Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | | Hansard source

The Aviation Legislation Amendment (2008 Measures No. 2) Bill 2008 continues the work on aviation safety and security commenced by the coalition government, and generally speaking it will be supported by the coalition. Amending the Aviation Transport Security Act to expand the range of information that the department is able to collect is, we believe, a sensible step in ensuring that aviation security is as effective and efficient as possible for all parties. In addition to monitoring compliance with the act, the department will be able to gather information that will enable them to make better informed decisions on security matters.

As the challenges facing aviation security change it is important that our responses adapt so that measures taken to ensure the safety of Australian skies are as effective as possible and do not impose undue costs on industry players, which is of course of paramount importance. The coalition are happy to help ensure that this is the case. The key to the new powers being legislated for in this amendment will be the scope of information collected. I want to assure the Senate and the aviation industry participants that the coalition will ensure that the supporting regulations are subject to scrutiny before they are finalised.

The amendments permitting the secretary of the department to delegate his authority are, we think, a sensible step towards ensuring that the government is able to respond to emergencies in a timely fashion. Thankfully, Australia has had a relatively peaceful record when it comes to aviation security. This is due in no small part to the vigilance of those charged with ensuring a secure environment in the skies and the actions of past governments from both sides of politics over the years. It would be imprudent to discount the possibility of an emergency situation arising in the future. In any such emergency the demands on the secretary would be immense and, in a rapidly developing situation, action may be required without delay. The current legislation only allows the secretary to delegate his authority under the act to another officer within the department. This legislation would enable the secretary to delegate his authority to an officer in any other department with national security responsibilities. Such a delegation would not be taken lightly. The secretary can still retain overall authority under the proposed legislation, can set restrictions on the delegation and can withdraw it when the emergency passes. These amendments would ensure that if Australian skies faced a prolonged emergency, whether it was a pre-planned situation or not, our aviation security apparatus would not be left in a position where decisions vital to national security could not be made.

There are amendments allowing for copying of cockpit voice recorder information for testing and maintenance purposes, and we believe that that deserves bipartisan support. The proposal is the result of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s investigation into the tragic Lockhart River air crash up my way in Cape York in 2005. The cockpit voice recorder on the crashed plane was found to be faulty. As a result, no audio recovered from the recorder could be confirmed as having been recorded during the accident flight. The bill will clear any doubt that the copying of cockpit voice recorder information for maintenance purposes is permissible and will enable these kinds of faults to be discovered and dealt with more easily. These amendments were first proposed when the coalition were in government and we are still happy to support them. I understand there may be an amendment in relation to this aspect of the bill; perhaps I will speak more about that in the committee stage.

Finally, the changes proposed to the reporting of aviation incidents and penalties associated with the failure to report such incidents are another idea that the coalition will support. Allowing the executive director of the transport safety investigation to require further information after receiving a report on an immediately reportable matter or a routine reportable matter will ensure that the accident and incident database contains accurate and sufficient information on each immediately reportable matter and routine reportable matter. The penalty for failing to report an immediately reportable matter will be raised to 12 months imprisonment and, as a result, will bypass the statute of limitations and mean that there is no limit to when a prosecution can be instigated. Given the current penalty under the Crimes Act, prosecutions must occur within one year. It can take many years for unreported incidents to be discovered and, as a result, these breaches cannot be prosecuted.

Additionally, under the proposed legislation failing to provide a full written report of an immediately reportable matter or a routine reportable matter will attract a penalty of six months imprisonment and prosecution could begin at any time within six years of the offence. In the case of the Lockhart River air crash in 2005, the failure to report the routine reportable matter was not discovered until many years after the alleged commission of the offences. Failing to report these immediately reportable matters or routine reportable matters can be indicative of a culture that gives safety a low priority. It is important, therefore, to deter such a culture. Increasing the penalties for failing to report or provide full details regarding aviation incidents will maintain this deterrence.

We do have a good aviation industry in Australia and have had for some time, but there are some difficulties with the industry. Certainly the Labor government’s increase of the passenger movement charge from $38 to $47 in Mr Swan’s first budget did cause some difficulties in the airline industry and particularly in the tourism industry up my way around Cairns. Cairns is already struggling with difficulties associated with the cutbacks in both domestic and international services. The global financial crisis, which has been amplified by Kevin’s financial crisis, as I call it—the KFC—has really made it very difficult for the tourism industry, particularly around Cairns. I am distressed that this increase in the passenger movement charge, this additional tax on tourists entering Cairns, has made the industry less competitive and certainly has not been appropriate for the time.

Furthermore, our aviation industry is in many instances typified by the Royal Flying Doctor Service. It celebrated its 80th birthday recently, but during the celebrations the government scrapped critical funding earlier announced by the coalition that would have enabled its services to be expanded. I suspect the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, who has an inner-city Sydney electorate, does not really understand the importance of the Royal Flying Doctor Service to those of us who do not live in the fortunate cities of Australia, but it is a real difficulty. Cutting back its funding was, indeed, unfortunate. Certainly in Queensland the Royal Flying Doctor Service has a major impact on the health and safety of regional communities. We are distressed that there was not more consultation. I am very disappointed that the Queensland Premier, Anna Bligh, did not make more of a song and dance about the cutback in the budget of the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

I am also very disappointed that the Queensland Premier, the Queensland Treasurer or any of the three members of state parliament who represent the Cairns area—or, indeed, the state member who represents the Whitsunday area—did not make more of an objection to Mr Swan, the federal Treasurer, also a Queenslander, about the increases in taxes. One would have thought that the members for Whitsunday, Mulgrave, Cairns and Barron River, who are all Labor members, would have been able to use their personal influence with Mr Swan to stop the impost of this additional tax, which would have such a big impact on the aviation industry and therefore the tourism industry of North Queensland and the Whitsundays.

While we do have a very good aviation industry in Australia and our pioneers—Charles Kingsford Smith, Bert Hinkler, the Reverend John Flynn—did a great deal to bring Australia closer to the world, aviation is a much-needed service for the bush. I am concerned that the Queensland government’s penny-pinching attitude to a regional airline called MacAir has led to its demise. MacAir had the Queensland government contract for servicing remote parts of the state, but they were going broke because the subsidy given by the Queensland government simply was not sufficient to make ends meet. I know that MacAir approached the Queensland government, but to no avail. As a result, MacAir closed its doors and that left many parts of Queensland without a regular air service. Now there has been emergency action taken to try to get a service back, and there has been a replacement service, but all of this would have been unnecessary had the Queensland government had the understanding and fortitude to do something about that before the collapse happened. But it is just another indication of the way Queensland has been mismanaged for several years now.

I want to now talk a little bit about another important aspect of aviation—again, you will excuse me if I relate it particularly to my home state of Queensland. I come from the north. I am familiar with a little town on the Gulf of Carpentaria called Karumba, a great town, a great tourist destination. The so-called grey nomads head there in droves. It is a great fishing spot for recreational fishermen, but a very significant commercial fishing industry also operates at Karumba. It is a community which, with the floods, has been out of road contact with the rest of Australia for almost two months now, I think. If it was any other town in Australia that was cut off by road from the rest of Australia, there would be outrage. You would have the Prime Minister visiting there and making one of his very special media announcements. But this has not happened in the case of Karumba. Karumba is where it is and people understand that, and they do put up with a lot of difficulties because of this. But those difficulties could be overcome if there were a decent airstrip there.

Photo of Glenn SterleGlenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | | Hansard source

Ah, the Conroy runway!

Photo of Ian MacdonaldIan Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | | Hansard source

Indeed, Senator; we have raised this at estimates. I would call the runway anything, even after a nice guy but a failed communications minister! I would still call it after him if we could get the Commonwealth to commit some money to it. But I am disappointed. It is not something that the Commonwealth in the past has dealt with, but under the so-called stimulus package here is a great opportunity for that money to be spent. The surface needs to be sealed, and it also needs to be extended.

Now the Queensland government, who do have a responsibility in this area, have been approached for years by this community to do something to provide a decent service into Karumba to support the tourism industry, support the fishing industry and help in times like these when you cannot get road access there. But the Queensland government have done very little over the years. Just recently they said, ‘Look, we’ll put in one-third of the cost of resealing if the council puts in one-third and the Commonwealth puts in one-third’—a total sum of a massive $360,000-odd, as I recall.

What it needs is a much larger commitment of $5 million or $6 million to extend the runway and to seal it. I would have thought that would have been a high priority for the Queensland government over the last four or five years. Regrettably, it has not been, and again I can only express concern that the local state member, the member for Mount Isa, who just happens to be a Labor member, has not been able to get the Queensland government to deal with this airstrip over that period of time. Why this would be I cannot understand. Of course, now, a couple of weeks before the election in Queensland, we are getting promises flying right, left and centre. But I think the locals would be thinking a bit like me: if you are going to express some concern about it, then why didn’t you do it during the past 10 years when you have been in government, rather than leaving it until the last two weeks? I do hope at least the federal government, with all of this money they have available and will be splashing around everywhere, could use some of it for a decent infrastructure project to help the Karumba people with an extended and sealed runway.

While I am on that, I want to briefly mention another runway that desperately needs assistance. It is on Horn Island, which, as many senators would know, is in the Torres Strait. It is the entry into the straits and all of those communities up there. It is used by any number of Commonwealth and Queensland government agencies. But this airstrip needs a massive upgrade of some $12 million to make it serviceable. Again, you cannot drive to Thursday Island. You cannot drive to the island communities of the Torres Strait. The only way you can get there is by an aircraft into Horn Island and the ferry across to Thursday Island, or a smaller plane from Horn Island out to one of the outlying communities. And yet this airstrip, which was built during the war—that is how long it has been around—desperately needs strengthening and upgrading. The result, according to Sinclair Knight Merz, is that the current pavement of the runway does not have structural capacity to cater for the continual use of the aircraft Qantas want to fly in there—the Q400. There is serious rutting and cracking and this has resulted in a situation where there is a medium to high risk of a crash or a serious incident occurring if that aircraft continues to be used.

A recommendation has been made for the runway to be extended and upgraded, as per a Queensland Transport report, but unfortunately there has not been any assistance from the Queensland government. This part of Queensland is represented by a member of parliament who, unfortunately, is another Labor member, but nothing seems to have been done about this most important piece of infrastructure. I want to repeat this: we want this airstrip not just because we want everyone to have an airstrip; this is a vital means of entry—the only means of entry—into the Torres Strait, not only for the convenience and ongoing daily work life of the inhabitants but also for any number of important Commonwealth and Australia-wide border protection issues. But nothing has been done. It is a Queensland airstrip. It should have been upgraded by the Queensland government well prior to now. I regret that neither the local member nor, it seems, the Premier have had the fortitude to do anything about it, even though the campaign for upgrading it has been going for a number of years.

There is a lot of money splashing around in the Commonwealth’s coffers these days with the so-called structural package. I will not go into who is going to pay for that. Someone will have to pay for that in the future, but we do not seem to worry about that. We opposed it, but it is there. A good use of some of that money would be to help the Queensland government upgrade the airstrip. I will keep calling for the upgrade. Quite clearly, neither the local, state nor federal members, regrettably all Labor, seem to have been able to use their influence. I will keep calling for this.

None of that alters the fact that the coalition will be supporting this bill that is before the parliament. We think it is an important update. It will build on the strong foundations left by the previous government and will enable us to maintain a solid aviation security apparatus in an efficient and effective way.

5:31 pm

Photo of Mark ArbibMark Arbib (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Government Service Delivery) Share this | | Hansard source

I thank Senator Ian Macdonald for his comments and contributions to this debate on the Aviation Legislation Amendment (2008 Measures No. 2) Bill 2008, although I have to disagree entirely with his argument concerning Queensland and the stimulus package. I note that he has made these comments in the weeks before a Queensland state election.

This bill makes four key amendments to aviation security and safety legislation. The amendments to the Aviation Transport Security Act 2004 will expand the information collection and delegation powers of the secretary of the department. The sort of information to be collected may include information relating to the screening of people, vehicles, goods or cargo. The other amendment to the Aviation Transport Security Act 2004 will improve the robustness and flexibility of the aviation security framework to ensure a timely response to threats of unlawful interference with aircraft.

The amendment to the Civil Aviation Act 1988 will improve the reliability of cockpit voice recorder information for future safety investigation purposes by clarifying the legality of necessary maintenance practices. On many occasions cockpit voice recorder information is the essential piece in the puzzle for determining why an accident occurred. We must make sure that the source of this information is functioning and reliable and that the information is only used for legitimate testing and maintenance purposes.

Lastly, the amendments to the Transport Safety Investigation Act 2003 will improve the workability of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s accident and incident reporting scheme. It is essential that safety data is recorded on accidents and incidents for the improvement of future transport safety. The amendments contained in this bill will further enhance Australia’s aviation security and safety regime.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Ordered that consideration of this bill in Committee of the Whole be made an order of the day for the next day of sitting.