Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to rise following the contributions from the member for Ballarat and the member for Lyons on the ANL Legislation Repeal Bill 2019. As the member for Ballarat made very clear in her remarks, Labor does not oppose this legislation. As she clearly mapped out, this legislation is really tidying up historical errors in two pieces of legislation. The bill before us now will repeal the ANL Act and the ANL Guarantee Act 1994. Effectively it will remove the current restrictions on the protected names associated with the former government-owned shipping line—the Australian National Line. We all know that that shipping line was sold. In recent years it has become apparent that the continued existence of the ANL Act and the ANL Guarantee Act poses a statutory bar for the new owners who are continuing to use the ANL trademarks, IP and web addresses. The repeal of these two pieces of legislation makes sense. It will provide CMA CGM, the new, French owners, with the legal clarity and certainty that they are entitled to in order to conduct business. There is no opposition from the Labor bench here in that regard.

I wish to speak now to the amendment moved by Labor's shadow minister, the member for Ballarat. It highlights the extraordinarily shocking record that this government has in the Australian shipping industry. The deliberate and active undermining of this industry, its representative union and the workforce is literally gobsmacking and completely ignores the critical need for a strong, vibrant coastal shipping industry for this nation. I'm going to come to some of the reasons now.

I come from Newcastle. The port of Newcastle is a key part of our region. Indeed, the people of Newcastle have a very proud maritime history. The port of Newcastle has been in operation since I think the 19th century. It was around 220-odd years ago, I think, that that port first started to be used. The first exports of coal, of course, came from Newcastle, and coal remains the main staple of the Port of Newcastle. It has been a critical link in our national supply chain for a very long time—as I said, centuries. That port in Newcastle is managing movements of more than 4,600 ships a year.

Regretfully, the suite of policies that we have seen from this government and, indeed, from consecutive conservative governments has done nothing but undermine the viability of our shipping sector. It's not just the laws around manufacturing making our shipping industry less and less viable; it's the treatment of the workforce that is particularly astonishing and worrying. Just as the member for Lyons spoke about some of his constituents who were woken in the night to find out that they had no job, I too had men from Newcastle who were on the high seas—on their way to the China Sea, in fact, aboard the MV Mariloulawhen they received an email on their ship in the dead of night saying BHP had cancelled the ship's contract and the entire crew had lost their jobs. This was just last February. This is not old news. It absolutely came out of the blue for those men on the ship.

I remember speaking with David Grant, a seafarer from Tighe's Hill, a community in my electorate of Newcastle. He said that the email was completely unexpected and it certainly didn't help that they were literally in the middle of the China Sea, with a terrible internet connection. So it was very hard for them to get any real information. It was very difficult for them to speak with their families at a time when they needed to reach out and try and reassure each other. Even worse was that those men had taken a two-year wage freeze because the company said they couldn't afford to pay them more. They took a two-year pay freeze in order to keep the company going and those ships running, and that's the recompense they were given. That's how they were repaid. They were sacked in the middle of the night via an email. These were men who had been working at sea for years. In Dave's case, he'd worked at sea for seven years. He wanted to continue doing so. Many of these men are generational workers. They are working in an industry in which their fathers, uncles and grandparents also worked. They're very, very proud maritime workers. They're highly skilled maritime workers. They've finessed their craft and are amongst the best in the world. That is the result of the terrific training that has previously taken place in Australia and of the strength of the MUA and the collective movement for maritime workers.

I know many on the government benches are terrified of the MUA. They speak often about the CFMEU and MUA merger and what that now means for Australia. But I think what often gets lost in all of that is an understanding that that is an organisation that is there to protect and represent the interests of those working men and women, and it has done a great job in doing so. You need a strong collective labour movement to combat shocking exploitation like the sacking of those men without any warning in the dead of night while they were out in the middle of the China Sea. It's not just that they were sacked. They also knew that they were going to be replaced by a foreign crew that would be paid as little as $2 an hour.

The policies of this government are completely implicated in these kinds of actions, because this government has continued to issue temporary licences for routes like the one that was being travelled by MV Mariloula and, indeed, MV Lowlands Brilliance and others that were clearly engaged in permanent work and have been doing so for year after year. This government allows those temporary licences to be issued for those routes and, in doing so, enables that kind of treatment of working men and women—where they can be sacked on the spot and replaced by foreign workers who are often in very vulnerable positions and at the mercy of exploitative practices from a range of foreign flagged vessels.

Again, the work of the MUA in Newcastle in particular—I want to give a very special shout-out to them— combined with that of the International Transport Workers Federation has been extraordinary in trying to call to account those foreign flagged ships and companies that are not treating their workers properly. I was very fortunate, as a candidate back in 2013, to work alongside the ITF when they boarded foreign flagged ships in Newcastle and did their inspections. There were ships where the crew had not been paid for three months. It was unclear whether they had enough rations in the coolroom to get to the next port safely. Without the intervention of an international labour movement, without the spotlight of the media being shone on those examples, I fear gravely for what would have happened to those men aboard that ship. They had no communications with their families. They hadn't been paid, and their food and water supplies were unlikely to last them to their next destination. I praised the MUA and the ITF for calling out those kinds of dodgy, shonky operators in the industry. That's the job of a labour movement. That is the noble cause of a labour movement, and it is so often overlooked by members opposite, who have a very blinkered view about trade unions in Australia. I want to put those examples on record to show why you need organised labour in this country.

I would also like to point out that it's not just this government's propensity to issue temporary licences for routes that are clearly permanent ones travelled by those vessels. There is a whole suite of other policies that are plagued by conservative governments, both federal and state, and this is playing into the decimation of the Australian shipping industry. I would like to highlight the fact that the New South Wales Berejiklian Liberal government have not seen fit to overturn what was very clearly one of the dodgiest secret deals ever done by a state government—when they were selling off our precious ports. They actually have a caveat at Newcastle now. When they privatised the Newcastle port, they did this secret little deal that protects Kembla and Botany from having effective competition from a container terminal there, to inflate prices for the other two ports. So they got good prices into the New South Wales government coffers, but it was totally at the expense of Newcastle. We now have an agreement where the government has imposed a cap on the number of containers that can leave the Port of Newcastle before incredibly onerous penalties will be applied. This is blatantly anticompetitive. Thankfully, the ACCC is taking this up as an issue, and it is a subject before the Federal Court now. I sincerely hope that the court finds that this, as the evidence before me would suggest, is the most dodgy of deals ever stitched up by a state Liberal government, in secret, behind closed doors. That agreement needs to be torn up, and the New South Wales state government needs to take their foot off the neck of our economy in Newcastle, so that we can have a port that is able to diversify its economic base there. It's critically important.

They also took their $12.7 million off the table for a passenger container terminal. We would have liked to have cruise ships calling into the Port of Newcastle. The people of Newcastle were very excited about having a cruise-ship passenger terminal there. We were making some inroads there. I see that they want to build one down in a part of Sydney where the locals actually don't want one. Well, they might want to think about relocating that money and those energies and—instead of trying to force the people of Sydney to take a cruise-passenger terminal that they don't want—taking that terminal up to Newcastle. They might want to put that $12.7 million, and a bit more, on the table so that such a terminal could be built in Newcastle.

We want jobs. We want Australian ships. We want Australian flagged ships back, traversing our nation's waters and our coastline. We want Australian men and women to have good, secure, well-paid jobs on those ships. My colleagues have articulated before that it makes good economic sense. It makes good sense from the point of view of our national security. It is absurd that the world's largest island state would have less than 11 national ships that we could still call part of our national fleet.

Labor had a terrific plan to rebuild a national strategic fleet for Australia. The government would do well to adopt our plan.

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