Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to follow the member for Wakefield on this Shipping Legislation Amendment Bill 2015. He is absolutely right. This is terrible legislation. This legislation is not just about shipping—although it focuses on shipping—it is part of the coalition's ongoing strategy to dismantle Australian industrial laws and drive down workplace conditions and wages. It is also about trying to destroy the Australian unions, particularly the Maritime Union of Australia.

Work Choices is not dead—and buried and cremated—as the former Prime Minister has said; it is simply dressed up differently and implemented by a new team. Since its election, we have seen this government watering down labour-market testing for 457 skilled visa entrants. We have seen the outsourcing of Australian contracts to other countries. We have seen foreign workers being allowed into Australia under special provisions in free trade agreements. We have seen the use of student and working-holiday visas being distorted and rorted. We have seen the expansion of the Seasonal Worker Program. We now have a campaign to remove penalty rates and we have seen the outsourcing of government jobs. All of those measures, collectively, go towards putting downward pressure on wages and workplace conditions. They are measures designed to force Australians to work for lower rates, for longer hours and with less protection.

When you put all those pressures on workers, they cannot complain. If they do, they will lose their jobs to people who—either out of desperation or because they are overseas workers prepared to work at a lower rate—are prepared to do their jobs. That is exactly what this government wants, as a means for pushing down wages and conditions.

This legislation is not about productivity, efficiency and competitiveness as the government would have you believe. Australia is, indeed, an island nation and our waters form part of our economy, our economic zone. Within those waters we have mineral exploration, fishing and tourism, and they all contribute to the Australian economy. The Australian shipping sector is an important industry sector, because Australia depends on it so much.

This legislation enables foreign vessels to operate within what we would normally refer to as Australian waters, doing Australian work. It begs the question: would the government have considered doing exactly the same with our land-transport systems? Would we have allowed foreign trucking companies to come into this country using their labour to carry the cargo we see carried across Australia every day? Would we have allowed foreign companies to come in and not only run our rail systems but also bring in their own labour to do it? Would we have done the same with our internal air services? We would not. The Australian people would not have tolerated it and would have made it absolutely clear that this is not what we want to see here. They would have wanted to ensure that whatever jobs were created in this country went to Australians first. And yet this legislation does exactly the opposite. It effectively says that when it comes to shipping—one of the industry sectors of this country—it is okay to allow foreign vessels to come in, and with those foreign vessels will undoubtedly come foreign workers.

There are other concerns about this legislation that I will hopefully get to in the time that I have, but the bottom line of this legislation is that it will cost Australian jobs. As we have seen with other decisions of this government, caring for and protecting Australian jobs seems to be at the bottom of the agenda. We have seen them decimate the car manufacturing industry in this country. This will not only cost tens of thousands of jobs but will also see the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars of research and development that is carried out each year, in addition to the capability that we will lose through the loss of expertise and skills that have been built up over many, many years.

We then have the concern in respect of the environmental risks associated with allowing foreign vessels into this country. I note that in recent years we have had three specific examples—the Shen Neng 1 in 2010, the Pacific Adventurer in 2009 and the China SteelDeveloper in 2015. They were all off the Queensland coast, along the Great Barrier Reef area, and they all caused problems. None of them were Australian ships; they were all foreign flagged ships. It is not Australian crews and Australian vessels that are the ones causing problems for us, it is the foreign flagged vessels. Equally disturbing is the fact that many of those vessels, from allegations made, are crewed by what is virtually slave labour. Certainly, we cannot prove it because we cannot get onto the vessels because they do not come under Australian jurisdiction, but those allegations cannot simply be dismissed. I will come to that a bit later on with some other facts that I find very, very concerning when it comes to literally outsourcing our shipping in this country.

If a foreign vessel comes into Australia and is able to undercut the current price and cost of Australian ships, the most likely reasons it is able to do so are that it can cut wages, it can probably have fewer staff and it can probably make those staff work for longer hours. Again, it cannot be proven, but they are, in my view, the only real areas where real cuts can be made, and from the reports that I have heard that is exactly what happens. When you do that to the crews, they have no interest in ensuring that the ship operates and complies with all the regulations of this country. They simply will do the job that they are forced to do and not complain or say anything about it.

Apart from exploiting their crews, we also know, from a report released only this year by TRACE International—an antibribery and compliance firm—that shipping is exposed to more corruption than any other industry. If that is the case, again, you would think that the government would want to be very, very careful about what it does with industry sectors in this country and the decisions it makes when it comes to the outsourcing of shipping within Australian waters. Indeed, I wonder how many of those foreign flagged vessels, even if they were to be licensed, given the contract and allowed to work in Australian waters, would then open their doors and say, 'We are prepared to take on Australian crew.' I doubt very much that any one of them would do that, because as soon as they took on Australian crew, they would not only be under the watchful eye of Australians who probably would care about what the ship was doing but, more importantly, they would also have to pay them Australian wage rates, and that in turn would make them unviable given that they are operating on cheap or Third World labour, as many other speakers have also alluded to.

I had a quick look at where most of the vessels of the world are registered. My understanding from the most recent list I could get is that Panama has about 25 per cent of the world's registered fleet. Liberia and the Marshall Islands follow. I also noticed that most of the developed countries that are large shipping fleet owners register their ships in one of those countries that I alluded to. In fact, as of 2009 the top five flags account for some 50 per cent of the world's deadweight tonnage in terms of shipping. That says something to me as to what is going on when I look at those lists and see where all of these ships are registered. I am happy to list the top 10 countries that appear on that list: Panama, Liberia, Marshall Islands, Malta, Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Cyprus, Cambodia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Gibraltar, Belize and it goes on. They are all countries that one would have concerns about in respect of the way they would operate their fleets. That is exactly why they are countries where ships are registered—countries that, I have no doubt, do not maintain either the shipping standards or the employment standards that we do here in Australia. This government would be fully aware that they are the most likely places where the ships would be registered and possibly crewed from, and yet it is prepared to say: 'That's okay. You can come into our waters and you can take the jobs of people within Australia.'

Productivity gains do not come from driving down wages or bringing in cheap labour. What that might do is increase the profits of business, but I doubt very much that it is the smart way to improve productivity. There are better ways; there are a smarter ways. As the member for Perth also made very clear in her press release today, what we will inevitably see is a loss of skills in the maritime industries of this country, because as the shipping work diminishes so will the jobs and so will the skills that go with them. That is something that we should be deeply concerned about. We have not only seen it in the car-making industry; we are also now seeing it in the shipping industry. It just makes me wonder: where will this government stop? When will this government realise that it is in the national interest to maintain those skills and to have the ability to make things in this country, to produce things and to market things to other places in the world?

I want to finish with some comments that were made in the minister's speech. The minister's second reading speech on this was filled with flowery rhetoric and vague control and compliance statements. I want to quote some of the words he used: 'simplified permit system' and 'complex and burdensome licensing system'. If those were the problems, one could fix permit systems and licensing systems without sourcing the work to foreigners. Clearly, those were just an excuse for doing what the government wants to do. Then we have comments like these:

… a greater range of cruise ship services around the coast …

… … …

… ships trading predominantly in Australia have Australians undertaking the key skilled positions on board.

… … …

… where these ships engage primarily in domestic trade, in domestic waters, they are covered by domestic workplace relations arrangements.

Lastly there is the comment:

… if a foreign ship is predominantly operating in Australia—that is, for more than 183 days … in a 12-month permit period—it will be subject to domestic workplace relations arrangements.

Who is going to monitor all of those things? I doubt very much that the government has allocated additional resources to do that. If the government truly believes that the ship operators are just going to comply with all of those requirements just because the government writes it into a piece of legislation, then I think the government is clearly deluded. These are operators who know how to manage their shipping fleets, who do so across the world and who, I suspect, know how to get around the obligations imposed upon them. When you have the issue that, after a 183-day period in a 12-month period, they will be subjected to domestic workplace relations arrangements, of course the shipping owners will make sure that, at the end of 183 days, that ship will go somewhere else and do some work in another part of the world, and a new ship owned by the same company will come in and replace it. They are not fools. They will work around these compliance measures and they will do it with ease—not to mention that it will simply not be possible for the government to oversee and ensure that they are complying with the standards that it claims are enacted as part of these measures.

We oppose this legislation and we do so with good reason. It not only destroys an Australian industry but it destroys Australian jobs and it is consistent with the theme of this government of destroying Australian jobs, driving down workplace wages and conditions and destroying unions in this country.

See this speech in context