Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to support the Chair of the Standing Committee on Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, the member for Ballarat, and also on behalf of the coalition acknowledge the work of the secretariat: Janet Holmes and then Richard Selth; Michael Crawford, the inquiry secretary; Katie Ellis, Emma Martin and Jazmine Rakic. I would also like to acknowledge the work of my colleagues and the effort that they put into this.

You would think that a country like Australia, sitting as it does in the southernmost part of the world, would have developed great expertise in shipping. You would think that that would be the one area in which we excelled. If we look down through the history of shipping, right back to the Phoenicians and in more recent times, in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, to the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the British, we see that all of them enhanced their national standing, their terms of trade, their political influence and their national wealth by the expertise of their national shipping fleets. I think there is a lesson in there for us. There was a time when we had quite a vibrant shipping industry, but I think we did two things: we overregulated it and we costed it out of existence. This inquiry looked at some of those things, and I felt it did a very good job.

Our terms of reference dealt with the characteristics of Australian shipping, regulatory arrangements, the need for a skilled workforce, coastal shipping policy and the competitive nature of our shipping industry, as well as naval, environmental and security implications. Time does not permit detailed consideration of the report, but what emerged was a recommendation for a national approach to maritime safety. To me that was one of the key elements, because this committee and its predecessors, all the way back to when the Hon. Peter Morris chaired the committee and was largely the author of the report called Ships of shame, have all focused on that matter of maritime safety.

We recommended the reintroduction of accelerated depreciation. As a member of this committee for many years, as the member for Ballarat said, to me the thing that has always stood out as being deficient in encouraging a better charter aviation fleet and better coastal shipping has been the lack of accelerated depreciation. We also talked about a one-year review of the maritime crew visa; a national maritime training authority, which I think is most important; and a national training vessel, which brings it down to the really key elements of how our seafarers should act and be in demand on the Australian coastline. We called for section 23AG of the Income Tax Assessment Act to be reviewed. That is a very important consideration for our seafarers. Finally, we called for a group to implement the reform agenda so that this does not just slip back into the ether again. There were other aspects raised, such as single permit voyages—this is a knotty area; you cannot overenhance those without damaging the existing shipping arrangements.

One thing that stood out to me—and I certainly do not want to be misquoted on this—was that when we were cross-examining Canada Steamship Lines they said that one of the reasons that they were able to have five vessels now in Australian coastal waters was the workplace arrangements of the previous government. I said, ‘Does that mean they are paid less?’ The witness said, ‘No, they are paid more.’ The point I am making there is not that I want a reawakening of that workplace agenda but rather that I think there is a lesson to be learned—that in the future of Australia’s maritime industry we need to have EBAs that are sensitive to the needs of a specialised industry. (Time expired)

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