Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Listening to the member for Leichhardt just before me, I think that he has probably done more for North Queensland tourism than the infamous ‘Yo! Way to go’ advertising campaign of the 1990s. I am very pleased to speak on the Protection of the Sea Legislation Amendment Bill 2008, which, importantly, implements the supplementary fund protocol. I do not necessarily intend to talk much today about the IMO protocols, the civil liability convention or the like. Many speakers before me have done that. I want to talk about a number of things; one of those is this nation’s maritime tradition. The infamous assertion by the minister for transport of some years ago, Mr Anderson, that Australia is a shipper nation, not a shipping nation, has done great disservice to our country. Our country is a maritime nation. I repeat, it is a maritime nation, although you would not know it given the parlous state of our Australian shipping industry. I think there are only about 43 ships registered under the Australian flag at this time.

As other speakers have indicated—including Mr Truss, the Leader of the Nationals, when he spoke earlier in this debate—virtually all of our imports and exports are transported to and from this country by sea. What we are not saying is that they are transported to and from this country by sea in ships that are generally owned by people overseas, who make no economic contribution to the coffers of this country. Apart from the bulk carriage of material in supply chain operations and the carriage of oil and petroleum products, for instance, around the coast, very little of our domestic freight is carried by sea. I note that today the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government is announcing record rail freight results for Australia in the past 12 months, so maybe we should be doing something about that. Our railways and our roads are always congested and our sea lanes are quite clear. You could pretty much say they are ‘traffic free’. As a nation, as I said a moment ago, we do not derive anything like the benefits that we could or, indeed, that we should from having a strong, vibrant Australian maritime sector. I note the member for Shortland, I think it was, spoke about that a little earlier.

However, the attitude of the former minister for transport is an accurate indication of the attitude of the former government, who did, at best, very little to prevent the dismantling of what was once an efficient Australian ship owning and operating sector. The government has, of course, asked the all-party House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government to undertake inquiries in relation to coastal shipping. I am a member of that committee and have had a lot of opportunity as a consequence to talk with people involved in the shipping industry. We will obviously have a lot more to say about that when the committee reports.

I want to, if I may, just briefly pick up on a couple of comments from the member for Wide Bay, the Leader of the Nationals, who is the only opposition speaker to have taken part in this debate. The member for Wide Bay indicated at the beginning of his contribution that this legislation has been brought on because the government has run out of legislation of substance. I would point out to him that this is legislation of substance. It may be a small bill but, as you will have gathered from the number of speakers from the government side who have wanted to talk on this bill—about the effects that it could have on their electorates and the effect of not joining in this third tier, as we call it, of protection for Australia in the event that there is an oil spill—this is something that is important. The member went on to say that we have every reason to be a signatory to international maritime conventions which ensure adequate compensation is available in the event of an oil spill in our waters. A little further on he said, ‘We take our responsibilities to the environment seriously and we are in a position to lead by example.’ They were in a position to lead by example on this in 2003 when the members opposite were in government and they chose not to take the opportunity to lead by example. In fact, they have left it to those who followed to lead by example on this issue.

The eastern coastline of Bribie Island, which is the eastern boundary of my electorate of Longman, is actually the north-western boundary of the port of Brisbane, one of the major ports in this country. Brisbane is a busy port—and increasingly so. I think they have invested about $1.1 billion in Brisbane, and I thank the members of the Port of Brisbane Corporation for a tour that they provided us with recently and some discussions about their plans. It is the closest container port to the Asia-Pacific rim. In some cases, the sailing time can be up to five days quicker. There are 50 shipping lines serving Brisbane and, in 2006-07, 2,632 shipping calls were made at the port. Importantly, amongst the major exports from Brisbane is refined oil. Amongst the major imports to Brisbane are crude oil and refined oil, just the kinds of products that we are talking about here today. Importantly, in relation to the port of Brisbane and its location in respect of my electorate, all ships that enter Brisbane port sail past Bribie Island, travelling firstly down the North West Channel and then on to the Spitfire channel. They all pass Bribie Island and, for us, there is serious concern that there could be a marine accident for a vessel approaching or departing the port of Brisbane.

In fact there has been such an accident. If we go back to 29 October 1981, the Anro Asia ran aground at the northern end of Bribie Island. This is not a tanker; it is a roll-on, roll-off container vessel. But if a roll-on, roll-off container vessel can run aground on the northern end of Bribie Island so can a tanker. Despite the fact that bad weather hampered the clean-up and retrieval operation, we were fairly lucky. Some oil did reach the shore and had to be cleaned up, but fortunately the efforts of the authorities at the time prevented oil from crossing the Caloundra Bar and going into Pumicestone Channel.

We, of course, have some local understanding of what is possible because there have been a number of oil spills around the coast of Australia. I want to refer particularly to the first recorded oil spill in Australia—a vessel called the Petriana, which ran aground in Port Phillip Bay in November 1903. There were a couple of things about this spill that were interesting. The first is that the oil that escaped from the Petriana was described at the time—and I am sure that environmentalists of today will be appalled to hear this—as:

... a film of great beauty, radiating all the colours of the rainbow, spread from Sorrento Back Beach to Point Nepean ...

This description went on to say that the foul-smelling oil contaminated the beaches for months afterwards.

The other interesting piece of Australian history in relation to this particular oil spill is a matter relating to the crew of the vessel. When the captain, his family, the officers, the cabin boy and the crew were evacuated from the vessel after they discovered that they were unable to refloat it, there was a national controversy. I say this noting that there are some students in the gallery today who may or may not have been given information in their education about the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 and what was called the White Australia Policy, which prohibited immigrants of non-European descent from entering the Commonwealth. The crew of the Petriana, who were Malay and Chinese, were placed aboard a Japanese steamer and sent to Hong Kong. There was quite a bit of controversy at the time, but I think I will give the final word on that one to the captain of the Petriana, Captain Kerr, who wrote at the time:

If this treatment of my crew is a fair specimen of your humanity, it is about equal to the worst barbarity of other nations, and if it is forced on you by your laws, I regret to say they are a disgrace to the British Empire.

It took a long time, but we finally got rid of that particular blight on Australia.

There are a couple of other spills that I would like to mention, particularly as they have a certain pertinence to matters that were talked about by the member for Leichhardt—that is, the major oil spills on the coast near some of the tourist islands of the Great Barrier Reef and in the Torres Strait. In 2001 the Pax Phoenix ran aground near Holbourne Island in the Whitsunday group and discharged oil. The Pacific Quest spilled oil near Border Island near Hayman Island—I am sure a number of people have enjoyed holidays on Hayman Island—and again we were relatively fortunate there. In March 1970 the Oceanic Grandeur sank in the Torres Strait.

Obviously there are any number of examples of oil spills in the world. In fact, using the modern research technology called Google, I called up a list of major oil spills. I have 14 pages of references here, starting with the Torrey Canyon in 1967 and going through to an oil slick in the Suez Canal in December of 2004. So there is quite a history of oil spills.

There has been a tendency, I believe, in the contributions today to demonise the oil tanker industry, and I am not sure that that is entirely warranted. It is easy enough to pull out information that says that the majority of man-made oil pollution in the ocean has come from land based activity, such as the rupturing of pipes, while public attention has focused sharply on tankers. I think most of us would be relatively familiar with the situation during the first Gulf War where retreating Iraqis opened the pipes and allowed probably 1½ million tonnes of crude oil to spill into the ocean there. Closer to home, in Brisbane we were much concerned back in 2003 by an oil spill at the Santos terminal, where about 1½ million litres of crude oil leaked from a ruptured pipeline. Fortunately, we were able to respond appropriately to that incident and look after it.

The point I am making is that, whilst the bill that we are talking about deals with tankers, we need to be aware that transporting oil and petroleum products by tanker is statistically fairly safe. The losses from tankers in the 1980s and 1990s amounted to 0.01 per cent of the product that they carried. I cannot think of any endeavour that would not think that that was a pretty good safety record. I am sure there are plenty who would like it as a safety record. But the problem with that 0.01 per cent is that it can make a hell of a mess and it is very visible. We all recall the kinds of things we saw when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska.

The member for Leichhardt spoke a great deal about the Great Barrier Reef. As a Queenslander—indeed, as an Australian—I know that we are all very fond of that iconic environmental area. As the member said, annually there are approximately 6,000 ship voyages through the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. At any one time there are about 40 to 50 ships within the park. As he indicated, there have been about 33 incidents in the period since 1987. None of those incidents resulted in an oil spill; however, they easily could have done so. They would have had devastating, catastrophic, economic and environmental effects on the marine park and would have taken several years of work to overcome.

The oil tanker industry hold many annual conventions, one of which is Spillcon—I think it was biennial in Australia once upon a time but may now be triennial—where they discuss technology, techniques and the means of avoiding the incidence of spills.

As the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government is here and paying very close attention, I want to raise one particular issue in relation to the legislation that he may want to cover in his concluding remarks. The information that we have received, and indeed it has been commented on a couple of times during the debate, is that levies from the supplementary fund will only be collected after an oil spill has occurred and after the first two tiers of compensation have been exhausted. That sounds very reasonable, as if that would be the situation. However, after doing some research, I found that the IMO, on their website, say:

Annual contributions to the Fund will be made in respect of each Contracting State by any person who, in any calendar year, has received total quantities of oil exceeding 150,000 tons.

So the IMO are talking about an annual contribution, but the information that we have talks about a contribution that occurs only after there has been an oil spill.

While oil tanker spills are not a major issue for us, I was taken by one of the slides from a presentation on aerial surveillance given to Spillcon 2007 by Anneliese Caston from AMSA. It was a nice, coloured slide of Australia observed from the air, with white dots indicating where oil spills had been observed. In this place, I will be understood if I say that the picture makes Australia looks like a strange shaped lamington, because there are lots and lots of white flecks on the outside. There have been a large number of oil spill incidents around the country, and we need to be aware that tankers, whilst a part of that problem, are improving their industry and are less of a problem than they used to be. In fact, over the seventies, tankers averaged 24 spills a year; in the eighties, just under nine; and, in the nineties, just over seven.

Hundreds of millions of gallons of oil have spilled onto coastlines around the world since the dawn of the supertanker. Techniques have improved, but even in calm weather a complete clean-up is impossible. Any spill is a potential environmental disaster for wildlife and for human life, particularly for those who depend on tourism and the ocean for their living. Anything we can do to make sure that the effects can be mitigated is worth while. I commend this bill to the House.

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