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

Yes, one brave government member, Wilson Tuckey—at least he was from WA—had the gumption to speak on the bill. The other reason I am slightly amazed that no other government member has got up to speak is that this is a law and order bill. I would have thought government members’ stock in trade was talking on a law and order bill, to move something in respect of law and order.

As I said, the minister in charge of solving the problem of illegal fishing, which has grown to a crisis point since the Howard government came to office, has bothered to talk on the issue only twice. That is not very impressive, nor is the Howard government’s record on illegal fishing. Some columnists say national security is the coalition’s strength. I would ask them to stop looking at the spin and start looking at the facts, because the facts on illegal fishing say it all. Last year there were 13,018 sightings of illegal vessels in Australian waters, so 13,000 boats managed to get into our waters. Some of them may have been subject to double counting, but Coastwatch actually said in a written supplementary estimates answer that they thought maybe they had underestimated, not overestimated, the number of sightings.

Of those 13,000 boats sighted last year, only 214 of the vessels were apprehended, which means that somebody had a 1.5 per cent chance of actually being picked up. Having travelled the countryside on behalf of the Labor Party task force on transport and maritime security, I have heard countless stories from individuals to the effect that when you come into contact with Indonesian fishermen, who have been apprehended or have landed on the shore to get supplies, they say they have a one in 10 chance of being apprehended, so if they make 10 trips they may get caught once, but that is very rare. So the Indonesian fishermen have this mentality that there is no deterrence, there is no way of stopping them, so they may as well risk their lives coming down from their waters. Bear in mind that coming down from Indonesia into our waters is a fairly dangerous pursuit, but they are prepared to risk it because they know there is no deterrence at our borders. If they are caught once they get here, as the member for Corio pointed out, up until recently the government has had this great system—I think they have finally seen the light and said, ‘This doesn’t work’—of illegal forfeiture which meant that, when they apprehended the boat, they did not actually take the crew and charge them with illegal fishing or take the boat and destroy it; they just took the equipment and said to the crew, ‘Terribly sorry, but we’re taking your nets and your fish and we’re going to send you on your way.’

It reminds you of Rex Hunt taking the fish, kissing it and chucking it back in the water. It actually made the situation far worse because the illegal fishing crews, who are predominantly Indonesian, knew that if they were apprehended all they had to do was hand over their stock, their fishing gear and then head around the corner to a little inlet where they had dug a nice big hole and had whacked in another load of nets. So it was making the situation worse because it was actually forcing these crews to risk coming onto our shores, with all the associated quarantine risks. They would actually come onto our shores and hide their nets, knowing that if they were caught they would have to restock.

The other thing is that this situation has resulted in a lot of theft at sea. If the nets of illegal fishermen are confiscated they often steal the nets off Australian boats. Throughout Australia I have met with many fishermen—they were predominantly men—and one brave fisherwoman. I do not know if that is what she is called but she is a woman who earns her living on the sea; there are probably more but I have met only one. They are becoming fairly apprehensive about going to their workplace, which is in a boat on the ocean. Yes, it is a fairly dangerous livelihood, but now they are scared for their personal safety. Time and time again we were told during our task force visits that people did not think about ‘if’ a dangerous situation were to happen at sea on one of our boats but ‘when’ that situation would happen.

I would like to quote from a report on illegal fishing in Australian waters by Professor James Fox, who is at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the ANU. I had the pleasure of meeting with Professor Fox recently, and I was fascinated by the things that he had to say. In his report of January this year he said:

There are no indications that the number of eastern Indonesia fisherman coming into Australian waters will decrease. In fact, there is every indication that these numbers will continue to increase. The value of shark fin is creating a kind of ‘gold-rush’ mentality among the poorest socio-economic group in Indonesia. The fishermen’s own fishing areas are now heavily over-fished and largely depleted of valuable shark. Hence there are few alternatives available to these fishermen. Despite the intentions and rhetoric in the new Fisheries Law, only the development of managed fishing zones with recognised and strictly enforced quotas on catch is likely to improve the present combination of legal and illegal overfishing.

As Professor Fox has said, this gold rush mentality has now happened. The Indonesian fishermen who are put into the terrible situation of coming down and plying our shores for our fish are willing to risk their lives because of the gold rush mentality and the notion that there is no deterrence, that there is nothing to stop them. As I say, up until now, if they were caught their equipment was taken and they were sent on their way.

This bill goes at least part of the way to address that situation, which came to our attention over and over during our task force visits. We went to the major fishing towns throughout Australia. We went from Perth up to Broome, across to Darwin, down to Cairns and back to Brisbane. I have met with people all over and have been to quite a few remote Indigenous communities, and we spoke to people over phones when we could not get out to some of the very remote places. Having spoken to them and spoken at length to the state fisheries officers and the relevant state fishery ministers, we find that one of the No. 1 complaints about tackling the problem of illegal fishing is the sheer lack of coordination and cooperation between the states and the federal government. The current situation is that there are various laws, dependent upon where the fisherman is apprehended and by which authority. If they are apprehended in WA waters by state fisheries officers they are predominantly apprehended, taken to shore and charged under that state’s laws.

Given the issue of where sea boundaries begin and end in state waters, federal waters, the economic zone and international waters, things do become a bit blurred. But there is this constant mismatch between which laws apply on the ground. So in Western Australia they are actually apprehending quite a large number of these Indonesian illegal fishermen and putting them in jail, and then fining them under their laws. There are different laws and different rules with regard to captains and crew. These laws are in conflict with what is happening on the Commonwealth side.

The Commonwealth seems to be using either forfeiture or deportation. They are taking the crews and deeming them to be illegal migrants and deporting them straightaway, as opposed to dealing with them through the legal system and saying, ‘This is an illegal activity on our soil and you should suffer some consequences. You should suffer some fine. You should suffer some deterrent.’ There should be an indication that there is a deterrent to taking the fish stocks out of our waters.

This bill, which will introduce legislation, give greater coordination and cooperation between some of those laws across the state and federal boundaries and improve the fines and custodial sentencing, is a move in the right direction. But it is only a drop in the ocean. As was also mentioned by the member for Corio, there was a statement by the Treasurer in the budget. There is increased money in the budget to go towards fixing this illegal fishing issue. Again, it is only a drop in the ocean. The Treasurer’s great statement was, ‘We’ll double the number of boats apprehended.’ That is great! That is three per cent, by my calculation. That will be 400 boats, and there were 13,000 sighted last year. The estimations from everybody who is studying this is that that number will increase this year. In talking to the individuals on the ground, or more importantly those who go out on the water, they say they noticed a huge drop in coastal surveillance for illegal fishing at about the time the government decided that it would concentrate on people-smuggling. It did seem from their perspective that there was a huge drop-off in deterrence to illegal fishing, and that is when the issue spiked, because there was nobody out there caring about our fish stocks.

At the same time, our fishing industry, particularly those who fish on the Great Barrier Reef, have taken a cut to what they can catch. They have taken hits about where they can catch so that we can have an ecologically sustainable stock within our waters. They are saying, ‘Why are we taking the hit about how much we can take and where we can take it from when nobody seems to give a hoot about where these illegal fishing boats are going?’ When we met with the commercial fishers, recreational fishers and charter boat operators in Cairns, they were absolutely outraged; they had begrudgingly accepted locking up the reef. They understood the importance of locking up the reef and they were prepared to deal with that. But, at the same time, they are sitting there and seeing illegal fishing boats coming into our pristine waters and emptying bilge water over the side, which can be as damaging as catching the fish in those pristine environments, and nobody is doing anything about it.

The No. 1 message from everybody we have spoken to on this issue is that we need to deter people. We need to give an indication that, if you come into our waters, you will be apprehended and suffer the consequences. The measures in this bill go some way towards sending the signal that you will be locked up, jailed and fined and that there will be some penalty. The problem is that it is a double-edged sword. Some of the individuals who get locked up will earn more in jail in Australia than they earn out on the water. This is one of the double-edged swords in what is happening. I want to quote again from James Fox’s report. Talking about the repatriation of fishermen to Indonesia, he says:

The present practice is to repatriate fishermen as expeditiously as possible once court proceedings have been concluded. Without exception, all the fishermen, with whom I spoke, preferred to be able to sail back to their home port—either on their own boat, if the bond had been paid or on another boat from the same port that was set to return. All these fishermen, even the sole fisherman who was born in Kupang, expressed reluctance and, in some cases, outright apprehension about being returned to Kupang … Kupang represents a different and unfamiliar, almost threatening, world for many of the fishermen, particularly the younger fishermen. There is only one ship a month that sails from Kupang in an eastern direction and this ship takes a long time to get the fishermen as far as Ambon. In Ambon, they still have a long way to travel to reach their homes.

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Many of the sailors had stories, either their own or those of their friends, about the woes and misfortunes of those who were sent back to Kupang. In fact, the fishermen had more worries about being sent to Kupang than being sent to jail.

There is a mishmash happening. It does not seem that we are gathering any of the information available through the good work of Professor Fox, from the on-the-ground intelligence that the Indigenous rangers and communities are picking up from speaking to the Indonesian communities that are coming down, from the state fisheries departments that are intercepting these people or from some of the fairly ambitious projects in which Indigenous communities and state authorities have gone to Indonesia to speak to fishing communities to find out what is going on. It seems that nobody from the Australian government cares enough to collate the data and ask these Indonesian fishermen, ‘What will stop you taking fish from our waters?’

You have to remember that it is a fairly lucrative trade, even though most of the people on the boats are in an indentured arrangement. These activities are being funded predominantly by some fairly shady types. Indonesian fisherman spoken to by Professor Fox report that they are predominantly of Chinese background. We do not seem to be looking at any of that intelligence and using it to stop this trade. We are not looking at how we can influence these fishermen so that they are not risking their lives by coming into our waters.

It is estimated that, since the beginning of last year, at least 40 Indonesian fishermen have lost their lives at sea. The numbers could be far greater than that, because nobody is collating the data, nobody is coordinating and people are not discussing it with others. There is all this information out there that just goes begging, that nobody deals with. On average, a kilo of shark fin will net these individuals $170. On average, the trip down in one of the little boats takes about five days and there are about three crew on board. They try to get 10 sharks. It is a hideous situation. They take the shark’s fins off—there are about eight fins on a shark—and chuck the shark back in the water. Nine times out of 10, the shark is still alive and it drowns, which is horrendous. They also take dolphins as bait for the sharks. We have no idea of the number of dolphins, turtles and sharks that are taken in these exercises. They get 10 shark per trip and they do roughly 24 trips into our waters per year. One rough calculation by Professor Fox is that the trade in shark fin which these fishermen take out of our waters is worth $23 million per year. This is big business and these individuals are making big money out of our fish stocks.

Our commercial fishing industry has now been told that the situation is so dire that the federal government is prepared to buy back licences and pay for them to go out of the industry. We are exploiting Indonesian fishermen who are risking their lives to come down here. We are exploiting Indigenous communities whose livelihoods, stock and culture are being polluted by this and we are doing very little about it. This bill goes a little way to address that by talking about deterrence and offences, but it does not go far enough. We need a far greater coordinated response by everyone. We need a cop on the beat 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to ensure the Indonesians know that, if they come here, they will be caught.

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