Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

Again, my response has to include an element of my previous answer in that the reality is that the current situation is clearly not working. The number of registered ships has halved. Since this legislation has been in, the volume of Australian shipping capacity has reduced by 63 per cent. The current system is not working. It is not working for roads; it is not working for seamen. And it is certainly not working for Australian industry, because the reality has been that our manufacturing has become less competitive rather than more competitive. The number of seamen and, I presume, therefore, the number of members of the Maritime Union—who were obviously key people in drafting this legislation; they took the credit for it at the time and subsequently—must be smaller now than when this legislation was brought in, because there are fewer people employed in their trade. I think that is disappointing and it is something that I want to reverse.

Comparisons between the shipping industry and the rail and road industries do not stack up. Shipping is competing against shipping. But there is a domestic task where the various modes of transport can be involved and can therefore deliver the most economic movement of freight around the country, and they should be encouraged to go towards the most economic element. The obvious facts are that, unless shipping can pull its weight, unless we can have as many ships and, indeed, more ships involved in trade between our major ports then there are going to be more trucks on the road and, hopefully, more trains in the train system. We will have to spend billions of dollars on upgrading the roads and the railway lines so that we are able to effectively meet that task. Currently, what is happening is that business just ceases to exist. It cannot be competitive. We are bringing in, say, cement or sugar from Asia when it could be made and produced in Australia. Therefore, the wage level of the people engaged in transporting it around the country is in fact at an international wage level. They are at that level because we have not been able to maintain an effective Australian shipping industry.

So what we want to do is get rid of some of the red tape that revolves around the system that was legislated a couple of years ago and that has effectively made it so that the permit arrangements are unable to operat We believe in a second register. We supported it at the time that the government introduced it. But there is not a single ship on that register because there is red tape associated with it that is unacceptable to any shipowner. So we want to get away from it. Then it will not be a contest about whether or not we are competing between Australian wages paid in a truck or the part B wages paid on a ship; it will be whether or not there are Australians employed in a task or whether we are instead importing the product from China, Thailand or some other nation. I would prefer to have Australian jobs involved in shipping the product around our shores rather than importing products from overseas, shipped here exclusively by people on international wages.

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