Matt Burnell (Spence, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to give my support to the Maritime Legislation Amendment Bill 2022, after receiving it from the other place. The passage of this legislation may not make it to the front pages of the national broadsheets, but I don't want to be too needlessly pessimistic. Bipartisanship rarely attracts that level of attention.

Despite this fact, this bill is important. It is deserving of our time to consider it, as I'm sure we all have while waiting to see if or when the House would receive this bill. It's also worthy of support from across this chamber, and we are closing in on doing just that today. It's importance—the need to maintain and look after our oceans—makes perfect sense; as a nation, we are girt by sea.

As those who were present for my first speech would know, I was—a number of years ago—a seafarer out on open waters before continuing my career's journey to election to this place. It is due to this time at sea that I feel especially responsible to ensure that everyone is doing their bit to look after the sea that looks after you. Out there, though, that phrase doesn't always ring as true as you'd like it to.

This bill brings us in line with our international obligations, which is something that Australia should be taking seriously, to show that we are leaders in this area and model international citizens. Further to that, this takes us one step forward in demonstrating to the world that we take our marine environment seriously and we take the world's marine environment seriously. I'd also like to note the candour of Senator Bragg during the debate in the other place. We've not been early movers in fulfilling our international environmental obligations for quite some time. These obligations are taken seriously by the Albanese Labor government.

This bill amends the Protection of the Sea (Prevention of Pollution from Ships) Act 1983 and the Protection of the Sea (Harmful Anti-fouling Systems) Act 2006 to ensure that Australia is meeting what it has committed to do in line with the International Maritime Organization and its conventions, of which we are a signatory. The first of these international maritime conventions is, namely, the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, also known as MARPOL. Those that deal with the subject matter on a more regular basis, or if you've been on my staff listening to me talking about the issue passionately over the last couple of weeks, will know Australia is in, in fact, a founding member of the International Maritime Organization, which is a specialised agency of the United Nations. The second of these conventions is the International Convention on the Control of Harmful Anti-fouling Systems in Ships.

Particularly the amendments to the convention on harmful anti-fouling systems on ships outlaw the use of the toxic chemical cybutryne, a substance that my staff in their research discovered is definitely not the home world of the Transformers, which is of course Cybertron! However, their research also uncovered that this substance, according to the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, has never been registered or approved for use as an anti-fouling agent for ships in Australia. Anti-fouling agents such as cybutryne are often applied to the hulls of ships to prevent molluscs, barnacles and the like from attaching themselves to those hulls. Whilst it's true the aims of these chemicals are to increase fuel efficiency and improve the performance of vessels, it is the case with these particular substances that the risk of damaging the marine environment and other marine life in the process is unacceptably high. I look forward to these chemicals being phased out in the not-too-distant future. We may not utilise them here, but we must show that we are acting on these changes to the convention so that other countries may follow suit.

The bill also aims to limit the discharge of what are known as persistent floaters. For those of us unfamiliar with the terminology, it refers to slick-forming substances. Certain grades of vegetable oils and paraffin are examples of that. The reason why they are called 'persistent floaters' is that in the event of a discharge or spill into the ocean they can mix with other materials, such as plastic debris, to form a floating crust on the water or sink to later be washed ashore to cause more damage to the environment that has been unfortunate enough to find itself in their path. By strengthening any provision out there that protects our marine environment we will all benefit from a cleaner ocean. This is also achieved by more countries doing the same by ratifying these conventions into their domestic laws in the same way that we are doing here today.

We all share custodianship of the ocean. The oceans, after all, do not exist solely for the purpose of trade, cargo and shipping goods across the continents. The oceans also provide a rich canvas for: scientific research; fishing stocks, which provide a cheap, stable form of protein for many across the globe; and tourism, an industry that is worth billions to Australia each year alone.

Some stretches of the ocean that are intended to be included in this bill are the pristine waters of the Arctic. We can only hope that they remain this way, and this legislation will help to ensure that. It will do this by banning the use of heavy fuel oils across these waters after 1 July 2024. A similar ban has been in place throughout Antarctic waters since 2011. It is about time we ban heavy fuel oils along both the waters surrounding our north and south poles. That's as it should be. These fuels pose such a significant threat to the marine environment, sticking to surfaces like sea ice or wildlife in the event of a spill.

I also note that the shipping industry has been aware of these amendments in advance through negotiations at the International Maritime Organization in order to develop these new controls to prevention pollution from ships. In fact, the exposure draft of this bill was published on the website of the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts on 24 August 2022. Ultimately, the exposure draft was met with no strident opposition, just a willingness to engage and see that we are falling into line, effectively, with the vast majority of the world that are signatories to the treaty. If the altruistic urge to preserve our environment was not going to garner the requisite support, I think those reasons above will go a long way towards winning hearts and minds.

I would also like to thank the previous speaker, the member for Barker, for his contribution—from one South Australian in this place to another. We can achieve great things when in lockstep, and, in that spirit, I thank those senators for their contributions to this debate in the other place on Thursday. For these reasons, I am pleased to commend this bill to the House, and I hope it receives support from all sides of this chamber.

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