Andrew Wilkie (Denison, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

This motion is a dud. It is a dud for three obvious reasons. First, it is clearly an attack on Australian workers, because the federal government obviously has a preference for foreign ships and foreign crews working our coastline. We have precious few ships and precious few Australian workers on our coastline at the moment. If this motion was ultimately to be enacted and to become the law of the land and the coastal shipping reforms of the previous government were to be overturned, then some of those people would lose their jobs. Those who remained would have to endure diminished conditions of service.

The second issue is that this is an attack on the rights of workers to organise and negotiate. This is clearly an attack on the MUA and the Australian Institute of Marine and Power Engineers, two of the key unions that represent Australian workers on Australian ships. But I do not want to dwell on those first two issues, on how it is an attack on workers and an attack on unions. I want to dwell on what this is really all about. This is all about Bass Strait. This is all about the federal Liberal-National government not wanting to do anything to remedy the situation with Bass Strait, and the situation is that Bass Strait is and remains the most significant brake on Tasmanian economic development and it is the easiest to fix.

I will give you a sense of how big a problem it is. To get a 20-foot container of some sort of commodity from Hobart to a North American market, it costs $500 to get the container to a northern Tasmanian port, another $1,000 to get that container from the north of Tasmania landed in the port of Melbourne—so we are up to $1,500—but only $500 to get that container from the port of Melbourne to the North American market. In other words, three quarters of the cost of shipping a container from Hobart to North America is getting it landed in the port of Melbourne from Hobart. The majority of that cost is getting it across Bass Strait. Yes, we can tinker around the edges with an international shipping service in Bell Bay that will advantage a small number of Australian producers and yes we can commission a Productivity Commission report, but frankly what is needed—and it is quite simple—is an effective subsidy arrangement applying to all people, vehicles and freight in and out of Tasmania across Bass Strait.

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