Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

I refer the Deputy Prime Minister to page 80 of this legislation as part of the RIS. It relates directly to the comments that he has just made, and it says:

Stakeholders called for policy certainty to create greater certainty in business planning and perceived a propensity in Australia to change shipping regulations on a semi-regular basis, which they felt posed a high sovereign risk for coastal shipping operations in Australia.

The thing is that the legislation that this is amending was from 2012. It amended—100 years after the Navigation Act—the most significant reform that was there. The change of government was in 2013. Throughout that period, where it was clear to most observers that there was likely to be a change of government, the now government made it clear that they would not support that legislation and that they would seek to change it. That meant that investment did not occur to the extent that it would have occurred had that not been put forward. You cannot actually make a decision, in the beginning of 2013, to invest in a new ship, have it constructed and have it operating within a few months. And then companies gave evidence before this inquiry. I refer the minister to the evidence of SeaRoad Holdings, who said things very clearly in a submission to the senate committee. SeaRoad's Michael Easy warned that the legislation before the parliament would imperil the $100 million investment that they had made a decision on to build the first of two new cargo vessels, the first of which they expected to be operating in Bass Strait just next year. So it is pretty clear in terms of those issues.

The minister gave up some of his ideological blinkers when he gave his last contribution. He spoke, again, about the unionists—which is really what is driving this. It seems to me that those opposite have a view that members of the MUA are not worthy of employment and the way that you stop them being employed is to stop there being an Australian shipping industry. That is the logic. The minister spoke about 26 weeks leave in a completely disingenuous way. He knows it is just like a whole range of other fly-in fly-out workers—ships that operate tend to have two sets of crews because when they work they are working on a ship for seven days a week 24 hours a day, literally. So you have one crew on and one crew off. That is the way the industry works. It is just like people who work in offshore oil and gas or people who work away from their home. That is the way the industry works, and the minister is using this in such a disingenuous way, because you have two crews, there are 26 weeks off and they are working 183 days.

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