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

The obvious response is that what has happened as a result of the uncompetitive nature of Australia's shipping industry is that the number of people employed in shipping is now down to just over 1,000 people. Presumably, if you go back far enough, there were tens of thousands involved in domestic shipping. Certainly over recent times, since the legislation introduced by the previous government, the number of ships with coastal licences has dropped from 30 to 15, and the number on the transitional register has dropped from 16 to 8. How many jobs were lost as a result of that? How many jobs were lost as a result of the changes introduced by the previous government?

I move on to the job losses occurring as a result of the fact that our domestic shipping industry has been uncompetitive. That has meant that jobs on the land have been lost because they have been unable to be competitive with imported products. But when you have, for instance, sugar coming from Thailand to Melbourne instead of from Mackay to Melbourne, the jobs that are created in Thailand as a result of producing that sugar for the people of Melbourne are jobs that are not being created in Mackay because there was an alternative source of supply. When the cement industry has to close operations in Australia because it cannot be competitive with Chinese cement that is coming in on internationally-flagged vessels which are paying international wages, those are jobs lost in Australia. So the equation is not simply restricted to who may be on a particular boat. It has to be examined in relation to the whole of the economy, and, when it comes to the RISs, that is the basis upon which they are prepared. The RIS has been prepared with a declaration from the Office of Best Practice Regulation as meeting all of the government's RIS requirements—the same requirements that the previous government had in place and presumably with the same kind of findings that there were in the RIS which was prepared by the previous government when they introduced their legislation in this regard. So examining the impacts of legislation in isolation ignores the flow-on effects that there have been as a result of us having an uncompetitive shipping industry.

I want our industry to be competitive, not just because I want to save jobs on the mainland, although that is very important, but I also want them to be able to be effective in ensuring that we have a more competitive transport system in our country. I would like to see the containers that are currently going on trucks from Melbourne to Brisbane every night travelling on a ship. Many of them are not particularly time sensitive in the length of their journey. Those are the sorts of vessels that should be going on ships, but we do not have ships that are able to undertake that task. I hear reports from time to time about somebody who is going to build a ship or might build one in the future, or that they are all going to flock in and join the second register initiative—an idea which of course I welcomed—but the second register has been a complete flop. There have been a number who have expressed interest, but, when they find out they have to pass everything by the MUA and have to have a whole set of regulations in place, it just becomes too hard and they go away.

I hope that with our new arrangements those people may be encouraged to join the second register and that they may be encouraged to employ Australians, because if we keep going the way we are—with the 30 ships down to 15, down to who knows what it will be in another two years time—then we will have no-one being trained to be a pilot to take vessels through the Great Barrier Reef. We will have no-one being trained with the capabilities to run tugs around our harbours. We will have no-one with the skills that are necessary for us, as an island continent, to be able to maintain effective transport systems around our nation.

We are not in the business of destroying jobs. We are in the business of trying to make a more competitive shipping industry that employs more Australians. I have to say that I sometimes wonder why some of these unionists who have lost their jobs in the sugar industry or in the cement manufacturing industry are not complaining that their jobs have been sacrificed for a guy who is on 26 weeks holiday a year on a ship somewhere or other. One job is being traded for another, and I think the union movement is being disingenuous if it counts the job that they want to try and save on the ship when it is costing jobs—eight, 10, a dozen or who knows how many—in land-based industries.

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