Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to echo the points made by the shadow minister about this being an island nation and the great national security necessity of having an active merchant maritime. It's a little known fact that, outside Bomber Command, the Australian merchant mariners had the highest casualty rate during World War II. There's a direct link between having an active, skilled and vibrant merchant marine and naval forces, our Navy. This bill undermines it, because this bill weakens the general licensing scheme. It favours more dodgy, fraudulent temporary licences, as we saw in the MV Portland and CSL Melbourne cases. It attempts to replicate the effect of the disastrous 2015 legislation—legislation, as I stated previously, where its own regulatory impact statement had 1,000 of 1,100 seafarers being put out of work. That's the human cost of this deregulation agenda by this government.

I'm trying to work out why they're trying to do it. It can't just be that they're trying to pay homage to their farmers and to their other customers in the shipping industry, because study after study has shown that an Australian industry with true bipartisan commitment so that the shippers can invest in the latest vessels is very cost competitive. God knows, every other advanced nation in the world realises the importance of investing in this. We're alone amongst the G20 nations in not requiring domestic workers be paid domestic wages and work under domestic conditions. As I said, the Jones Act requires that US personnel working on US-built ships be paid US wages. Japan has a similar requirement. Even China has this requirement. We're alone amongst advanced nations in not saying that, for coastal trading, it should be Australian workers and they should be paid Australian wages, and that's a great disgrace.

I'm trying to understand what ideology drives the government on this. They won't talk to Australian shippers. This bill and the consultation sessions that surrounded it didn't even talk to Maritime Industry Australia, the peak body for Australian shippers. They were happy to talk to the foreign shippers—the shippers who have a direct interest in putting Australian seafarers out of work and paying foreign crews on flag-of-convenience vessels $2 a day. They were happy to talk to them but not to the Australian shippers. They also obviously didn't talk to the trade unions involved.

We need to go back to the drawing board. We need to embrace bipartisanship. We need to get rid of this ridiculous attempt to increase the tolerance limit so much that it would make the temporary licensing scheme a mockery—although I would submit that the temporary licensing scheme is already a mockery. That you could replace the MV Portland, which has done the same alumina run from the Kwinana strip to Portland for 27 years, with a foreign vessel, a flag-of-convenience listed vessel, that pays its foreign workers $2 a day for exactly the same route and claim it is a temporary licence is beyond belief. Again, when they did that for the CSL Melbourne, travelling from Gladstone down to my home port of Newcastle, it necessitated frogmarching the Australian crew off the vessel. That 50 New South Wales police personnel were used to frogmarch Australian seafarers off the vessel in the middle of the night was an attack on Australian workers. That's the agenda of this government, and this bill again repeats that. Their wish is for Work Choices on water. The government wish is to pay foreign workers $2 a day on flag-of-convenience vessels. This bill is part of that process.

This bill will lead to the denudation of the Australian seafaring industry. It will imperil our environment, it will no doubt lead to more Pasha Bulker incidents, it will no doubt lead to the Great Barrier Reef being endangered again and it will no doubt lead to all sorts of other negative consequences for maritime safety and the maritime environment. That's a great, great danger of this bill. We had a great tragedy where we had four deaths on flag-of-convenience vessels in the Port of Newcastle in the last few years. Unfortunately, this bill will weaken the current safeguards. The minister needs to go back to the drawing board. He needs to consult with the opposition. He needs to consult, heaven forbid, with the Australian shippers. He needs find a solution that can be bipartisan and that can represent a genuine investment in the Australian shipping industry, rather than repeating Work Choices on water.

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