Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I certainly support the remarks of the honourable member for Chisholm on the Fisheries Legislation Amendment (Cooperative Fisheries Arrangements and Other Matters) Bill 2005. I am interested that we are changing the objective to ‘maximising the net economic returns to the Australian community from the management of Australian fisheries’ rather than, as it is today, ‘maximising economic efficiency in the exploitation of the fisheries resources’. The size of the industry is about $2.2 billion. As the honourable member for Chisholm has said, we visited Perth, Broome and One Arm Point and talked to a range of people about the illegal fishing problem.

But I do not want to call it an issue of illegal fishing; it is really an issue now of international organised crime. There is a big difference. Traditional fishermen have been coming down our coasts, and we have tried to prevent them. There have been previous programs of going to those specific villages and encouraging the fishermen to do the proper thing. The fishermen are not coming from those villages anymore. These boats are being financed and crewed from different villages.

Last year there were 8,000 sightings of these boats, a product of international crime. The latest figures indicate there were 13,000 sightings. Members of the opposition side have been bashed by the government about illegal boat people coming to Australia. The number of fishermen under the international organised criminal syndicates coming out of Indonesia exceeds the number of boat people many times. As the honourable member for Chisholm has said, they are actually landing on our coast and this government is completely unconcerned about it. It is a problem that is a decade old—10 years old—and I might say that 10 years is how long the Howard government has been in office.

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