Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying last night, the BCA estimate there are 90,000 manufacturing jobs in Australia relying on coastal shipping—jobs in cement, oil refining, steel and aluminium—relying on a service costing more than double that which our international competitors face. As I said, when these industries fail—when they go offshore—then not only do the manufacturing jobs go but so do the shipping jobs, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Let us have a look at what has been happening: there was a 63 per cent reduction in deadweight tonnage on the Australian register in the two years following the Labor government legislation; the number of ships in this category fell from 30 to 15 during the period of the Labor government; the number of ships on Australian transitional licences halved in that time; and, most tellingly, shipping's share of the total Australian freight has fallen from 27 per cent to 17 per cent since the turn of the century. What a disaster.

In the rest of the world, sea freight is seen as the most efficient way to shift commodities over large distances—and so it should be in Australia. We have large distances. One of the great challenges of this nation is the distances between our production and consumption markets. And, largely, Australians live on the coast—we live near the biggest freight-line in the world; it is called the sea. You do not have to fix up the rail; you do not have to grade the roads; all you have to do is put boats on it. It should be the most efficient way to ship freight, but in Australia it is not; that is because we have priced ourselves out of the game.

As I said earlier on, I do not actually think it is because Australian workers are overpaid; it is because a workplace has been engineered where their performance is way below what is acceptable on a world standing, and their unions and their companies need to sit down together and get a more efficient outcome. We are more likely to get that if there is some competitive pressure placed upon both those unions and the companies that employ the workers, because in fact they are operating a closed shop—the companies themselves—and it is their customers that are paying the price. And, as I said, the price is the jobs of their workers. I commend the Shipping Legislation Amendment Bill 2015.

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