Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

The Liberal-National government has a new leader. Today, we are in day 2 of the parliament where the new leader and his new cabinet are in place. But the bill we are debating today absolutely bells the cat. The government might have a new head, but that head sits on the same rotting carcass as the last one. And it is rotten. Just look at what this bill does. What kind of government actively destroys the jobs of its citizens—and I mean actively destroys them—through a bill or a piece of legislation? They are not being destroyed inadvertently, not by unintended consequences, not by mistake or accidentally lost. What kind of government purposely sits down, develops a policy, drafts a bill, brings it to the House of Representatives and later to the Senate which actively and intentionally destroys the jobs of thousands of Australians? That is what we are debating today. This government has a new head but the same rotting corpse of a body.

This is an extraordinary bill that we debate today. What kind of government actively destroys the jobs of its citizens? The answer is really clear today: it is a Liberal government. We saw it under and Abbott and Hockey with the car industry. We saw them dare the industry to leave our shores. We saw it under Abbott and Hockey, and now in the new leadership team of Turnbull and Morrison, we see the active, intentional destruction of the Australian shipping industry. It has a new head, but it is the same rotten government—a job-destroying government with no regard for Australian workers. In fact, as demonstrated by this bill, it has active contempt for Australian workers and their jobs.

You could be forgiven, if you listened to the rhetoric over the last two days, for thinking that this government actually cares about opportunities and jobs. There has been nice rhetoric about innovation and start-ups, and that is a very important area. If Australia wants to prosper in the future, we need to build new industries. You will see that the opposition, dating back even further than the budget reply speech, have put out a number of polices involving start-ups and innovation, and we have been doing that for quite some time. It is really good to see the government, this week at least and for the first time in two years, starting to address the damage that they did to innovation and science over the last two years by beginning to try to rebuild confidence in that sector—that is a good thing. But prosperity and innovation in the future does not just come from the new. It also comes from taking care of the strong industry that we currently have and building it for the future. It comes from taking care of the many ways that a country supports its population and the many industries that support our future—taking care of those as well. Start-ups and innovation are really important, but what we have here is an absolute demonstration of a government that does not understand that what we currently have is also of value. A government that will actively shut down current, successful sectors is a government that beggars belief.

Let us have a look at what they are actually doing to the shipping industry. What does this bill actually do? It removes 'revitalising Australian shipping' from the objects of the Coastal Trading (Revitalising Australian Shipping) Act 2012. In other words: revitalising Australian shipping is no longer important to this government. They have removed it; it has gone; it does not matter. Revitalising Australia shipping? Not important. It replaces a preference for an Australian flag on ships working along the Australian coast with a complete indifference to flagging. In other words, it allows flags-of-convenience ships to be placed on the same level as the Australian flagged ships.

When you take an Australian flagged ship, you have a ship that is subject to Australian standards of safety, environmental compliance, and taxation and industrial relations both here and on the open sea. You have a ship that employs Australians. There are thousands of Australians employed on Australian flagged ships. If you remove the preference for an Australian flagged ship, what happens is that you will get more and more flags of convenience ships where those ships are not subject to the same standards of safety, not subject to the same environmental compliance and not subject to Australian industrial relations, which means they can pay their crews less and have them work under conditions that would never be acceptable in the Australian way of life. What this means is that Australian flagged ships will not be able to compete with foreign flagged ships and our shipping industry will essentially go completely.

Last month in the Senate inquiry into this bill we heard that the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development had been advising Australian shipping companies that in order to compete in Australia under this proposed legislation, they should drop the Australian flag, register overseas rather than here and sack their Australian workforce—just sack them. That is what the department was advising shipping companies to do when this extraordinary piece of legislation comes into force. We have a government suggesting that companies sack their Australian workforce and employ cheaper overseas labour—an extraordinary thing.

So is this shipping industry a redundant one? Is this an industry that we might see fading in time anyway? Is this a government that is saying, 'Okay, things are changing.' That might be an excuse, but when you look at the Australian shipping industry it is clearly not the case. Australia is an island nation. We are a big one. We have a lot of coast and we are dependent on shipping for 99 per cent of our trade. That is not going to change—in fact, it will probably increase. We have one of the longest coastlines in the world and the fifth largest shipping task of any nation. This is not an industry in decline. This is not an industry that you walk away from as a government, let alone one that you actively seek to crush out of existence. Ten per cent of the world's trade, by weight, is carried by ship to or from Australia. This is an industry that should be a significant part of our economy, as it is now. This is an industry that a decent government would be working to protect and revitalise, not to crush. It is in Australia's economic, environmental and security interests to have a viable shipping industry and it is essential for the thousands of people who are currently engaged in that industry for their livelihood. There are thousands of them.

Is the government following other countries with this strange legislation? Perhaps there are models overseas and the government is saying, 'We'll bring our shipping legislation or regulation in line with that of other countries.' That also might be a reason. But, again, if you look around the world to equivalent countries, it is not the case. In fact, we would be alone in this. Comparable nations all strongly regulate their coastal shipping for national interest reasons—that is, domestic shipping, or shipping from one port to another within their borders. They have the kind of regulation that Australia currently has, which provides preference for their locally flagged ships. This includes the United States, which, via the Jones Act, bans foreign ships and crews from its coastal trade. Canada, Japan and the nations of the European Union do so similarly. In fact, Australia already has a coastal trading policy that allows participation of foreign ships where an Australian ship is not available. So we are already more flexible in our approach to preference for Australian ships than comparable nations. We already have legislation which many in the shipping industry would probably argue should be strengthened to bring them into line with comparable nations. We are already less regulated than our comparable nations. This piece of legislation will essentially remove all of that protection and wipe out what is an incredibly important industry.

Let us have a look at what the effect will be. It is not an overstatement to say that this legislation is Work Choices on water. In fact, it is worse than Work Choices on water—Work Choices essentially reduced the wages of Australians; this essentially wipes out the jobs of Australians. So it is probably an understatement to call it Work Choices on water. Eighty-eight per cent of the government's estimated savings from this bill are due to the sacking of Australian workers, replacing them with 90 per cent foreign crews being paid Third World wage rates. Eighty-eight per cent of the estimated savings comes from sacking Australian workers. What a government! They would walk into this place and argue for that; they would deliberately set about developing a policy where they openly admit that 88 per cent of their estimated savings are due to the sacking of Australian workers. The government's official modelling does not account for the cost of lost Australian jobs, lost local spending and local tax and higher welfare spending resulting from the sacking of those workers. The government's official modelling assumes that removal of Australian workplace standards will occasion significant sackings, including in Tasmania and in the Australian cruise sector based in northern Australia. Again—new head, same rotten carcass of a government. It is job destroying every day and continuing to do so this week in spite of the new rhetoric.

What should happen here? What should the government be doing here? I would argue that the fact that ships are plying our waters does not make them a different case than the trucks that ply our roads. It would not be acceptable, and Australia would be up in arms, if suddenly we allowed foreign registered trucks that did not meet our safety standards or our industrial relations standards to ply our highways and put Australian trucking companies out of business. We would not allow it. The population would be up in arms. In fact, there would probably be members of the government—even this government—who would be up in arms if that were the case. Yet this government is prepared to do that on our waters.

The issues with this legislation are not just with the jobs themselves but also with environmental protection. Australian flagged ships have very high environmental standards, especially in heavily used areas like the Great Barrier Reef. Recent incidents such as those of the Shen Neng in 2010 on the reef, the Pacific Adventurer in 2009 off the Sunshine Coast and the China Steel Developer in 2015 off Mackay—all foreign flagged vessels—underscore the risk that we put our natural assets in when we take this path.

There is also a security interest which is worth mentioning. We have a government that talks the talk—and has done for two years now—on security interests, but the screening of foreign crews is nowhere near as comprehensive as the screening of Australian crews. The Office of Transport Security acknowledges this. Without the kind of screening that this country needs in our waterways to keep us safe, there would be many more foreign sailors moving in and out of our ports.

On the whole, this is a dreadful piece of legislation that will decimate an incredibly important industry and that will leave thousands of Australian seafarers and their families in a position where they are much worse off than they are now. We will see our environmental protections weakened and our security protections weakened. I would urge the government, with its new head, to perhaps use it to rethink. It is not a good sign of a new supposed change in direction to be sitting in the House today debating a bill that will remove jobs from so many Australian workers in such a deliberate way. I condemn the government for this bill.

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