Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Coastal Trading (Revitalising Australian Shipping) Amendment Bill 2017. It may have escaped some people's notice, but there is a fair bit of water around Australia, and some ships move in that water. We are an island nation where a lot of the goods get moved from one part of the country to another by ship and have done so for a while. We are an island nation that at some times in the past has had to rely on having a merchant navy. We are an island nation that could, if we had the right approach, have a shipping industry and a shipping workforce which we could be proud of. Some other countries have done this. They don't have to be island nations to do it; they just have to have significant coastlines. They have worked out that, when you regulate the movement of ships between ports on your coast, you can actually increase employment; you can increase the control and safety of the ships that are moving around, which is good for people and good for the environment; and, when you have the appropriate tax arrangements in place, you can generate revenue for the country.

So, if we think about it and decide that, as a country which has got so much coastline, it is a potential advantage for us to build and regulate our shipping industry, it could be a source of economic wealth and environmental protection. But, instead, we are suffering from a series of crazy decisions that have been made over many, many years. We now find ourselves increasingly without a shipping fleet or a shipping workforce to speak of. Why? Because over many, many years, the tenets of neoliberalism have taken hold. What that looks like when spread on an international scale is selling off the coastline and more or less saying, 'We do not care about the ships that come here or the conditions of the workers on those ships or whether or not we generate any return to the Australian taxpayer through the form of the revenue that we could be raising.' We have opened up a series of holes in our employment laws as well, which means that currently, after both Labor and Liberal have had a go at it for a few decades, we can have people working on ships under enterprise agreements that were signed by a small handful of workers—

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