Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am glad to have this opportunity to speak on the Maritime Legislation Amendment Bill 2005 because, as they do to the member for Port Adelaide, issues of maritime concern matter greatly to the great people of Port Melbourne, who form an iconic part of my electorate. Port Melbourne has been part of Melbourne Ports since Melbourne Ports became a seat—indeed, since Federation. Although the boundaries have changed, Port Melbourne has always been part of Melbourne Ports. Some may think the issues covered in this bill are not particularly glamorous, but it gives me a chance to talk about the important issues relating to the welfare of Australian seafarers and waterside workers, the health of the Australian shipping industry and some other questions of national security.

The electorate of Melbourne Ports has existed since 1901 and has been represented by a Labor member since 1906. This December, we will be celebrating a century of Labor representation in my electorate. In all of that time, the only suburb that has been continuously in Melbourne Ports is, as I said before, Port Melbourne. It is locally known as ‘the Borough’. It is a great honour to represent the fine people of Port Melbourne. As I polled 74 per cent of the two-party vote in the Sandridge booth in the 2004 elections, it seems they are pretty happy with me as their representative. Perhaps that is because issues affecting port are of very serious concern to me. Although the social mix in Port Melbourne has changed a lot over the years, it still has a core of people who make their living from maritime industries. Of course, all the people of Port Melbourne, regardless of their occupation, have a stake in the security of Melbourne’s port facilities, which are close to their homes, their workplaces and their schools.

This bill amends four maritime acts. Most of the amendments are not controversial, and Labor supports them. That is why we are not opposing the passage of the bill. But it is necessary to make some comments about this government’s administration of one of these acts, the Navigation Act 1912. The Navigation Act provides that the minister for transport may issue a single-voyage permit or a continuing voyage permit to an unlicensed ship to engage in trade between Australian ports, but only if there is no licensed ship available or if the service provided by the licensed ship is inadequate and the minister is satisfied that it is in the public interest to do so. The bill amends the act to remove the requirement for the minister to give six months notice of the intention to cancel a continuing voyage permit.

It is therefore relevant to this bill to look at how the current government has administered this act during a decade in power. When there is a coalition government, the transport portfolio has traditionally been the preserve of the National Party. Since this government has been in power, successive National Party ministers—Mr John Sharp; the current Deputy Prime Minister; the honourable member for Gwydir; and the current minister, Mr Truss—have been in charge of our transport system. So the current state of our transport system is a result of 10 years of National Party stewardship. I have to say that this is not something that inspires confidence within me or the electors of Melbourne Ports. This year we have watched day after day during the Cole commission a steady accumulation of evidence of the gross negligence—there can be no other expression for it, and even that is an understatement—of successive National Party trade and agriculture ministers responsible for the debacle in the AWB affair, a scandal that has cost Australia our valuable wheat market in Iraq. It is truly scandalous to hear Minister Truss say that paying commissions in the Middle East was quite a routine affair—‘normal’ were his words. His comments moreover ought to be understood in that context, as if Australia, who had been involved in a conflict with a regime which this government quite rightly described as evil, should not have taken special care to see that we were not in any way assisting the very regime in which the government had invested so much effort identifying as one of the most evil regimes in the world.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

As I was saying, the attitude of the series of National Party ministers in the transport portfolio does not inspire my confidence, particularly with the controversial issue of single-voyage permits. We have watched the behaviour of successive National Party trade and agriculture ministers exposed at the Cole royal commission every day. Earlier I mentioned Minister Truss’s claims about how normal it is to pay bribes in the Middle East, that I think infects their attitude to Australian shipping—in particular to the single-voyage permits.

The AWB affair has been spoken about very seriously by many people, but I think there has been nothing as witty as a very short letter that appeared in the Melbourne Age, which imitates the metier of the great American comedian Jackie Mason. I will read it for Hansard readers’ amusement and for members of this House. The government’s attitude to the AWB scandal can be summarised as follows, according to David Cameron Staples of Elsternwick:

It wasn’t illegal. It was illegal, but no one could have known. People could have known, but it wasn’t as if they should have known. People should have known, but they didn’t. People knew, but they didn’t tell anybody, or they told the wrong people. The right people were contacted, but too late. The right people were contacted years ago, but did not think it was serious. It was thought serious at the time, but no one told the ministries. The ministries knew, but no one told the ministers. The ministers knew, made notes to tell someone and thought no more about it, and this vindicates everything that has been claimed so far.

I think that Vaile/Truss gobbledegook and incessant contradiction summarises neatly the attitudes of National Party ministers to this ‘wheat for weapons’ scandal. It is indicative of their attitude to the Australian shipping industry and single-voyage permits in particular. How can we go on entrusting the security of our ports, the safety of our port communities and the protection of our maritime environment to a party which has been responsible for the greatest scandal in this country for decades?

As the shadow minister, Senator O’Brien, said in his second reading contribution on this bill, the Howard government’s administration of coastal shipping under the Navigation Act has been a shambles. This was revealed in an article in the Australian last year, from which Senator O’Brien quoted. The article revealed that a compliance review of coastal shipping permits had been conducted by KPMG in October 2004. This report delivered a scathing assessment of the government’s performance and revealed that one in six coastal shipping permits was being granted without a signed application form, which means the department risked granting a permit based on a bogus or unauthorised application.

It is astonishing that, 4½ years since September 11, the Australian government still permits such a slack system of shipping regulation—one that clearly places Australia at increased risk of attacks by maritime terrorists. The United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars making its ports and shipping routes secure against terrorist threats. In Australia, by contrast, we have a government that still allows the Department of Transport and Regional Services to issue shipping permits in response to unsigned applications. Bodies such as International Maritime Security have been warning for years that al-Qaeda and its regional affiliates have penetrated the international shipping industry, an industry which has been marked by dodgy operators concealing their real identities behind a facade of dummy companies and flags of convenience.

Australia’s vulnerability to a terrorist attack is greatly increased by permitting foreign ships to sail from port to port, allegedly for domestic purposes, without, as we now know, even lodging a signed permit form. Under this government, foreign ships, including those under flags of convenience whose real origins and ownership are unknown, are being authorised to carry LPG and dangerous chemicals such as ammonium nitrate into Australian ports.

The fact is that this government often has no idea what ships are entering Australian ports. The KPMG audit revealed inadequate financial controls, which means that the government is often unaware of fraud or other irregularities in licence or permit applications. It revealed poor record keeping, meaning that the data relating to more than 20 per cent of approved licence and permit applications was ‘absent or incorrect’. The KPMG audit further revealed that existing regulations are out of date or do not reflect current operating procedures. In the current security environment this is simply not acceptable. It will certainly not be acceptable to people who live and work in port communities, like those in my community or in that of the member for Port Adelaide, whose safety is being put at risk by this government’s negligence.

The carriage of dangerous goods like ammonium nitrate by foreign ships must stop now if Australia is serious about minimising the threat of terrorism. It should be clear to everyone that the safest way to transport such dangerous goods around Australia is on Australian ships crewed by Australians and subject to appropriate security screening. Secure ships and secure seafarers mean better protection for the Australian community. The Howard government has not only allowed a great expansion in the number of continuous voyage permits issued to foreign ships; it has also left Australia vulnerable to the threat of terrorism through its refusal to properly regulate the coastal trade.

I now turn to some of the industrial issues raised by this bill. It is not news that this government is hostile to the Australian maritime industry and those who work in it. We remember the efforts of the former minister for industrial relations to destroy the livelihoods of Australian maritime workers. It is interesting to observe, in the Port of Melbourne, that many members of the MUA, so denigrated before, are now shifting cargo at incredibly fast rates. The box rate through Australian ports is very high. But the trickle-down effect of the microeconomic benefit of  higher productivity with less labour like this has not been seen by anyone. All that has increased since the changes arising out of the government’s brutal dockside intervention is the rise in the share price of firms like Patricks.

While maritime workers are shifting an incredible number of containers through Australian ports, the cost to importers and exporters of containers continues to go up. So the only benefit from this microeconomic reform has not gone to the wider Australian economy or to the trickle-down effect to importers and exporters and therefore to the public but to the share prices of Patricks and P&O.

In other areas of maritime concern it seems that little has changed. Under the navigation, coast and trade regulations, single and continuous voyage permits are only supposed to be issued when a licensed ship is unavailable and the minister for transport is satisfied that it is in the public interest to do so. The KPMG report found that the government has frequently breached the regulations by failing to establish if a licensed ship is available before issuing a permit. It is notorious that many unlicensed foreign ships granted single or continuous voyage permits do not pay their crews Australian wages when trading on the Australian coast, and that foreign flagged ships of convenience undercut Australian wages and conditions. I suppose the analogous situation would be to allow truck drivers going up and down Highway 1 to be paid at Filipino or Sri Lankan rates. That is an exact extrapolation of what the Australian government is permitting along the Australian coast at the moment.

The Liberal-National government’s maritime behaviour is in marked contrast, I might say, to the United States, which does not permit any of this kind of activity with its coastal trade. The Howard government has presided over the near destruction of the Australian coastal trading fleet, while allowing foreign shipping companies to use substandard vehicles and engage underpaid workers. This government must do more to fix the deficiencies in maritime security, which have been well known for several years. Australia depends to a greater extent than most countries on seaborne trade, and we are adjacent to a region where terrorist groups have maritime capabilities. In particular, there is that well-known al-Qaeda hub in the south of the Philippines. It is no longer acceptable that the administration of our shipping system is in the hands of these National Party ministers who, in my view, administer control of Australian transport in this wholly inadequate way.

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