Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

You can eat the snail, in fact. To harvest these you have to come onshore and pick them up from the reefs. Boats are coming onshore with individuals who are carrying communicable diseases that we have eradicated from our shores. They are also bringing a quarantine risk because they come onshore with food to survive on for a couple of weeks while they harvest the trochus shell. They are bringing birds onshore. Is avian flu now going to be rife? They are bringing onshore other domestic animals that may have foot-and-mouth disease. This is a huge concern and we are letting it go unchecked.

The Howard government has appointed only five fishery officers to cover the entire Kimberley coast, which covers areas such as Broome and One Arm Point. During the pearling season four of these officers will be in Broome to ensure proper pearling practices are undertaken, leaving other areas of the coast unattended. These individuals also have to protect the domestic fishing industry to ensure that catches are right.

The pearling industry is very concerned about these illegal boats coming in. Often they are infested with stripey mussel, and this can cause great damage to the pearling industry by polluting the waters where our pearls grow. Unless the government takes action now entire ecosystems will die, Australian fishermen will lose their livelihoods, Broome’s pearling industry could collapse because of marine pests, Australian agriculture will be at risk from quarantine threats and Australians will be at risk of contracting rabies, tuberculosis and avian flu. Also, terrorists will be able to patrol our unprotected coastline.

The Aboriginal people of One Arm Point are outraged by Indonesian poachers who are raping the reefs of the valuable trochus shell. The Aboriginal communities, including the Bardi people, have the right to harvest the shell, of which Japan is a major importer. The shells are used for jewellery, ornaments and clothing, and they sell for about $6.50 a kilo. To ensure sustainability the Aboriginal communities have established a quota of harvesting 10 tonnes of trochus shell each year. The Indonesians obviously have no regard for quota systems. So, while the Aboriginal communities and the fishing industry have placed quotas on themselves to sustain our aquaculture industry, this is being undermined by illegal fishing vessels entering our waters. Again, as I say, these bills are not introducing any measures to bring in money to ensure that these things are combated.

The Aboriginal communities at One Arm Point will lose their livelihoods, indeed they are already losing their livelihoods. The loss of revenue is already hampering plans to establish a second hatchery to breed the trochus. The Bardi people are considering suing the Howard government over its failure to combat illegal fishing and poaching. Curtin University professor of politics and constitutional law Greg Craven says that they have ‘a strong moral case’.

So we have seen complete incompetence from the Howard government on this issue. We need more action and we need it now. There need to be discussions on the MOU that is in place for the waters off WA, which has ensured for many a reasonable agreement between Indonesian fishermen and the Australian fishing industry. That MOU has been respected for many years and has worked well. But now it needs to be renegotiated and reconsidered because the illegal fishing trade, with lots of money behind it, is totally ignoring it. It is not only destroying the livelihood of the Australian fishing industry but also taking away the ability of the traditional fishermen to ply their trade.

This is also becoming a huge security issue for these Australians when they are at sea trying to earn their livelihood. What happens is that these boats come towards them—it is becoming fairly scary. They are becoming the frontline of protection for our Australian waters. They are genuinely concerned for their safety. These Indonesian boats are becoming far more sophisticated. They are backed by rather large syndicates out of Indonesia, and it has become a situation in which people are fearing for their lives.

The other area of grave concern is regional airports. While I welcome the expenditure in these appropriation bills, it does not go far enough. Around 140 regional airports in Australia still have no screening facilities. In its 2004-05 annual report, the Department of Transport and Regional Services gave itself only one tick—a fail mark—for implementing passenger screening at these 140 airports. Despite allocating $3.8 billion for wand metal detector kits and staff training in the 2004-05 budget, the Minister for Transport and Regional Services spent only $400,000, or just 10 per cent. Poor planning by the government has seen very little training done to date, with only one firm able to carry out the instruction. This bungle means that the training of regional airport staff to use handheld wands and detectors will not be completed until the end of 2006.

This failure comes on top of the criticism levelled at regional airport security in the Wheeler report. To date, we have not seen a response from the government to that far-reaching report. Four years after the September 11 attack, the Wheeler report produced 150 pages on the failure of this Howard government in airport security. Instead of writing more laws, which mean nothing to terrorists, the Howard government should be making sure that practical security measures are implemented now.

With respect to these appropriation bills I see yet again absolutely nothing—complete silence—from the government and, again, it demonstrates their complete ineptitude when it comes to running this economy, although they keep claiming they are great economic managers. I remember the Treasurer—he slayed the inflation dragon. We do not hear that statement anymore. This is a government that is presiding over the largest current account deficit we have ever seen. The December 2005 deficit of $1.7 billion is disastrous. It is one of the highest in the OECD at a time when we are having booming commodity prices. It is at a 30-year high. How is that so? And there is $450 billion of foreign debt. We do not see that debt truck around anymore. Again, this demonstrates that Australia is becoming an egalitarian economy—dependent on a narrow range of commodity exports. Service exports are very weak and our manufacturing base has collapsed, along with productivity outcomes.

The Howard government has done nothing to capitalise on the reforms of the Howard-Keating years. This decline in manufacturing is having a severe and immediate impact upon my electorate of Chisholm. We have seen a series of closures of car component plants, the largest and most recent being Silcraft, where 460 people will lose their jobs in the coming weeks. At the Icon factory, 120 people are just hanging on to their jobs. We are not 100 per cent sure which way that will go. A few years ago we saw the closure of the Arnott’s biscuit factory, where over 600 people lost their jobs. I am quite fond of saying in many quarters that, if I represented a regional centre, I would probably have a rescue package by now, but because I am in downtown metropolitan Melbourne nobody seems to care. These job losses are severe. The individuals who have lost their jobs from these industries have not been able to find new ones. They have specific skills to the manufacturing industry, the manufacturing industry is going and we are doing nothing about it. There is no plan, there is no position and there is no thought for the future.

The amendments to this bill talk about how we should be doing things now and doing things more intelligently. This government is failing on that score. The manufacturing industry is experiencing a massive decline in employment. Since the election of the Howard government in 1999, a total of 144,900 manufacturing jobs have been lost. That is a rate of 320 jobs per week or nearly two jobs per hour. It is a disgrace and this decline is accelerating. Since the government’s re-election in 2004, we have seen 68,000 manufacturing jobs go. As I say, nothing is being done about it. The automotive industry is the hardest hit, but it is not just at automotive plants. It is the downstream plants that are most affected and those in my electorate of Chisholm. The Silcraft factory has been there for 50 years. It has worked hard, it has worked well and it is going. There is no rescue plan, there is no restructuring, there is no hope—there is nothing. It is closing its doors and that is the end of it.

Greg Combet gave a speech to the National Manufacturing Summit entitled ‘Repositioning Australian manufacturing in the global economy’. I would like to quote some interesting things he said. He opened his speech:

In a recent article in the New York Times the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Thomas Friedman began with the following words:

What if we were really having a national discussion about what is most important to the country today and on the minds of most parents?

I have no doubt that it would be a loud, noisy dinner-table conversation about why so many U.S. manufacturers are moving abroad—not just to find lower wages, but to find smarter workers, better infrastructure and cheaper health care. It would be about why in Germany, 36 percent of undergrads receive degrees in science and engineering; in China, 59 percent; in Japan, 66 percent; and in America only 32 percent. It would be about why Japanese on bullet trains can get access to the Internet with cell phones, and Americans get their cell phone service interrupted five minutes from home.

It would be about why U.S. 12th graders recently performed below the international average for 21 countries in math and science, and it would be about why, in recent years, U.S. industry appears to have spent more on lawsuits than on research and development. Yes, we’d be talking about why the world is racing us to the top, not the bottom, and why we are quietly falling behind.

You could probably transpose that to Australia and say exactly the same thing: why are we attempting to race to the bottom in this country? Why are we no longer pursuing the great dream of being the clever country? Why are we no longer putting money into skills and education? We are the lowest ranked country in the OECD in putting money towards education. We are falling behind.

We cannot ride on the sheep’s back or the mines forever. Even if we attempt to do so, we still need the infrastructure and services to support it. We have seen that recently in having to import skilled workers. It is ridiculous. We have a country with so much to offer and we are letting it go. We are not putting money into areas where it is vitally needed, such as research and development. Again, my constituency of Chisholm is very dependent on research and development. I have the largest university in Monash Clayton, one of the largest CSIRO institutes at Clayton, the Monash Medical Centre and various other research development areas around that. But that money is going to seed. As we have recently seen, CSIRO scientists are being gagged and forced out of the country because we no longer want to employee intelligent people and we no longer want research and development. We are racing to the bottom instead of to the top. In his speech, Greg Combet said:

However, the important thing about Friedman’s article is that it focuses attention on the positive proactive agenda for repositioning a nation’s manufacturing industry so that it can win its share in the race to the top.

It’s about how nations and firms investing in skills, infrastructure and innovation to win international business opportunities and move up the value chain with more defensible competitive advantages. It is this debate about the race to the top rather than the usual debate often associated with the race to the bottom that Australian manufacturing must engage in if it is to succeed and meet the global challenge.

That is why I say that our challenge is to race to the top by investing in skills, infrastructure and innovation. There should not be no mention of them at all in appropriation bills. We should be doing more about them. We should not be making it so expensive to go to university that children are no longer going. They are turning away from science and engineering degrees because they cannot afford them. If we do not do these things now, we will have no future for a children.

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