Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There are two things in relation to shipping and this bill which I would like to concentrate my comments on: firstly, the need to be competitive and reactive to changing circumstances and, secondly, the provision of port access and the ability to grow our businesses in a global market and deliver the framework for future growth and future job opportunities. Australia, as an island continent, should have a vibrant and engaged shipping sector. Yes, with our population compared to landmass and the concentration of our population in the state of Victoria and New South Wales, there will always be challenges surrounding the logistics of these operations. We should be good at this and we should be competitive in our own waters.

The facts tell a different story, though. Between 2000 and 2012, despite the volume of freight increasing by 57 per cent, Australia's share of that freight fell from 27 per cent to 17 per cent. Worse still, over the first two years of Labor's Coastal Trading (Revitalising Australian Shipping) Act, there was a further decline of 63 per cent in the carrying capacity of the Australian coastal trading fleet. This is despite the outlook where our overall freight task is expected to grow by 80 per cent by 2030. The big statistic is that there is not a single vessel on the Australian International Shipping Register. If you were in the business of insolvency or business restructure, you would be thinking to yourself that you had a massive problem. I note that the member for Gorton talked before about wanting Australian workers to have fair terms and opportunity. Clearly, the circumstances and framework in which they are currently being asked to operate are not working. The facts speak for themselves.

What do we need to do? The industry has come to us, the coalition, with real examples of where red tape has stifled performance. The system should be flexible and easy to use. Instead, the changes introduced by the member for Grayndler in the Coastal Trading (Revitalising Australian Shipping) Act 2012 seem to have had the opposite effect. To require foreign vessels to apply for a minimum of five voyages before a temporary licence can be granted seems counterintuitive. Surely, the nature of shipping one-off cargos means that opportunities are being closed off. In my state of Queensland, we have an important gas export industry. This product is shipped around the world exclusively by foreign ships as there are no Australian ships capable of carrying it. Still they must go through the costly and time-consuming temporary licence processes.

These are foreign ships, and the question needs to be asked: how will smoothing the process out improve the lot of Australians trying to get a job? Look at what has happened since this legislation was passed in the last parliament. There are about 90,000 Australians employed in manufacturing sectors that use coastal shipping, including oil refinement, cement, steel and aluminium. All those industries are energy intensive. We are a high-wage country, and we like it like that. If you have high wages, then you can still compete internationally if you have low input costs and high productivity. The current legislation seems to stifle every attempt to address the way our businesses operate. What we have in operation today is clearly not working. Why is that? We are increasingly in a global market, and we must be internationally competitive. Are we competitive in pricing, efficiency and practice? It is easy for people and organisations to pick statistics to suit their needs, but, at the end of the day, business will go where the best deal is. Plainly, it would appear that our coastal shipping sector has some major challenges in front of it.

It is my firm belief that we all come here trying to do our bit to make the country a better place. We come from different angles and philosophies, but we want the best result. Here, I believe, is an example where the previous minister has done his best to get a result and it simply has not worked. We must address the issue and get the sector back on track. When you have organisations telling you that the changes made by the previous government have resulted in Australian ships being around $5 million per year more expensive to run than comparable foreign ships on comparable routes, you know you have a problem.

If we fail to address this issue, we will not have any industry at all; we will be forever looking at our ports and wharves and saying, 'What happened here?' while the jobs disappear. We cannot continue to simply pass these costs on to the consumer. We owe it to every single Australian to show that we can be as competitive in price, efficiency, productivity and cost as the players from around the world. When Australian firms are charging coastal shipping rates as high as double those offered by foreign ships—adding tens of millions of dollars to the cost base—you are killing off Australian jobs. When a foreign country can land the product—steel, cement, aluminium and that sort of stuff—at the destination cheaper than we can get it there, you have a problem. Like I said before, business will go where the best deal is. When it is cheaper to ship materials from overseas than to a neighbouring port in Australia, you are attacking the jobs of Australians working in value-adding industries, who want to have a job and want to provide quality products for competitive prices. We must allow our industries to access the most competitive and efficient forms of product delivery so that we can compete with others on a level playing field. The workers of this country do not ask for anything more than that.

This legislation has built-in protections for Australian workers and also for wages and conditions for all seafarers on foreign ships operating in the Australian coastal shipping game. If they operate here for most of the year, they will have to pay our wages and meet our conditions. Ships trading for more than 183 days will be required to employ a master or chief mate and an engineer or first engineer who is Australian or who has our work rights. This crewing requirement is the cornerstone of our revised system.

We are good at this caper. We should hold our own against any in the world. More importantly, we need to ensure that these skills are not lost to our nation. What we have in operation today is clearly not working, and, if it is allowed to continue, we will lose these people. There can be no other sensible conclusion. We are seeing it happen now, and we have seen it happen since the Coastal Trading (Revitalising Australian Shipping) Act came into place. We need a system which encourages participation and eases concerns, not one which operates like a closed shop with no worries. Clearly, there are worries in relation to this.

What we are trying to do here is ensure that efficient and reliable coastal shipping services form a key plank in our national transport system. We need to reduce the red tape in our systems relating to general licences, transitional licences, temporary licences and emergency licences. Replacing them with a single coastal shipping permit that permits holders to engage in unlimited transport for a 12-month period just makes so much sense. If you are looking to create an environment which encourages more business, this is it. We will treat all ships equally and ensure that the end user—the person buying or using the goods—gets the benefit of a competitive and efficient market mechanism. We need to make it attractive for players in this market to list on the Australian International Shipping register. We must do what we can to reverse the exodus of players from the market.

In my city of Townsville, we are doing our best to make certain that our shipping lanes are busy and that our port business grows. There are challenges, and there are issues confronting us as we try to grow our business.

Townsville, as everyone says—and I will say until I am blue in the face whilst I am here—is a natural hub for the north of Australia and our links to Papua New Guinea and the Asia Pacific region. Swires Shipping has started a new service from Townsville to Shanghai. It is a 10-day journey and is now the fastest container shipping service between Australia and China—it is something which my city is very proud of and something which we do not hear enough about—but we have to make sure that our port can cope with it. Too often, we are seeing ships anchored off Townsville, waiting to get a berth where containers can be unloaded. Too often, we are seeing suggestions about reform to our waterfront systems put on the backburner. Too often, we are seeing opportunities for new services and facilities fail to appear, because we have a state government intent on strangling Townsville's enterprise.

Queensland has a Labor state government. They won the 2015 election in January, promising that no public assets would be sold. That mandate must be respected. I am happy with that. But, if they are going to keep these assets in public hands, they must invest in the necessary infrastructure that will drive our port forward. Failure to do so, while stripping the state owned enterprises of their cash, taking massive dividends and loading these institutions up with debt, is not the answer. Townsville can and should become a major container port. We should have the facilities to unload, wash down, inspect, hold and transport these economic drivers quickly. Had the port been sold, a private firm would already be working on how this could be completed and how the business could grow. In Townsville at the moment, we simply do not have anything in place.

In North Queensland and in Townsville, we are currently seeing very tough times for employment. Just last weekend, we saw an announcement by Glencore that 535 jobs would be lost in and around Mt Isa in their zinc businesses. The cyclical nature of commodities is surely the major factor here, but the lack of any action to bring forward any real infrastructure projects in our region by this state government is a major concern for all who live and work in the north. It is simply not good enough to see the money we put into state coffers continually spent in the south-east corner. For example, tomorrow my mayor and civic leaders will be down here to talk about a combined stadium and entertainment convention centre project. Money is going into the south-east corner. Let us compare what the state government is prepared to pay in the south-east corner with what it is prepared to pay in the north of the state. The Townsville Fire won the Women's National Basketball League Championship earlier this year. It was the first win for us in the north of the state. If you draw a line between Perth and Brisbane, it is the only professional women's sporting team north of that line. Our Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, was there for the game. She revelled in the girls' triumph, but there was nothing for these girls and the club from this Labor government. The Queensland Firebirds won this year's National Netball Championships. They are Brisbane based. I am not sure if the Premier was there, but the girls did perform very well. They received a $30million training facility as a gift for winning a national premiership. So we have a discrepancy between how the south-east corner and the north of the state are treated in terms of their facilities and infrastructure. My region deserves support from the state government.

From a federal perspective on infrastructure, we are rolling out road and bridge work, defence establishment infrastructure and social infrastructure such as the community centre and playing fields at North Shore. Over $500 million worth of federal infrastructure has just been completed, is being finished or is underway. We are attacking the needs of those in the north who want access to our ports for our goods to be exported. All this stuff is linked. We saw in question time today how the Prime Minister clearly made this link. We need all of our transport systems to work together. So it is important that we make sure that we do these things. It is time the Labor state government found out that the northern border for Queensland is the Torres Strait and not the Pine River. I commend the bill to the House, and I hope that we get the reforms through.

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