Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

The Fisheries Legislation Amendment (Cooperative Fisheries Arrangements and Other Matters) Bill 2005 will help to ensure that the Commonwealth’s fisheries resources and marine environment are managed in an ecologically sustainable and efficient manner.

The amendments to the Fisheries Management Act 1991 and the Fisheries Administration Act 1991 will clarify the meaning of two important fisheries management objectives. The bill will also ensure that the cooperative fisheries management arrangements between Australian jurisdictions are improved.

Firstly, the bill inserts into the fisheries acts principles of ecologically sustainable development consistent with those in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. The need for consistency between the fisheries acts and the EPBC Act was a key outcome of the 2003 Commonwealth fisheries policy review. The review recognised that, while the fisheries acts require the Australian Fisheries Management Authority to ensure that the management of the Commonwealth fisheries resources is conducted in a manner that is consistent with the principles of ESD, the legislation currently provides no guidance on how this objective should be interpreted. The bill will rectify this situation.

The amendments provide a more solid basis for economic, environmental and social factors affecting the fisheries to be considered in Commonwealth fisheries management decisions. Having the principles consistent with those in the EPBC Act also creates a uniform framework for decisions across the government that affect the marine environment.

In addition to inserting the principles of ESD consistent with those in the EPBC Act in the fisheries acts, the wording of the current economic efficiency objective in the acts will be restated in terms that are easier for people to understand. The existing objective will be changed from ‘maximising economic efficiency in the exploitation of fisheries resources’ to ‘maximising the net economic returns to the Australian community from the management of Australian fisheries’. This change will provide certainty to stakeholders about what this objective means.

The amendment will not change the underlying meaning of the economic efficiency objective. That is, AFMA will still be obliged to manage the effort and catch of a fishery to maximise the difference at a fishery level between total revenue and total costs, taking into account the impact of current catches on future stock levels.

This bill also contains administrative amendments to improve the operation and efficiency of the offshore constitutional settlement (OCS) fisheries arrangements and facilitate cooperative fisheries management between state, Northern Territory (NT) and Australian governments.

The OCS arrangements provide for state/NT laws to apply inside three nautical miles and for Commonwealth laws to apply from three to 200 nautical miles.

The intention of these OCS fisheries arrangements is to provide for the holistic management of fisheries—recognising that fisheries do not align with boundaries drawn on maps. More than 50 active fisheries arrangements have been agreed between the Commonwealth, the states and the NT. The FMA refers to these as ‘arrangements’ but the term ‘OCS’ is used colloquially.

The 2003 Commonwealth fisheries policy review identified inadequacies with the current OCS fisheries arrangements. The review highlighted that there is a general lack of consistency and effective cooperation on the management of some fish stocks straddling Commonwealth, state and NT jurisdictions.

It is important that our fisheries are well managed to ensure they remain productive and sustainable. This is best accomplished when a fishery is managed consistently throughout its constituent species range. If we can achieve this goal then our fisheries and, accordingly, the commercial fishing industry will have a solid base on which to grow and prosper.

The bill contains amendments that enable the government to adapt the OCS fisheries arrangements to reflect improved understanding of fish stocks and their dynamics, contemporary management issues and provide flexibility for cooperative agreements between the state/NT and Australian governments.

Specifically, the bill seeks to address a major concern held by the Commonwealth and state/NT governments, as well as by industry, that the government is unable to amend OCS fisheries arrangements. If we wish to correct any errors, clarify ambiguities or vary jurisdiction in an OCS fisheries arrangement, the original instrument must be terminated and an entirely new agreement created. This process impacts management plans, permits and other instruments which are established under an OCS fisheries arrangement. It is also inefficient, being time and resource intensive, and leads to greater uncertainty for fishers.

This bill also provides a broad, express power in the FMA to change existing and future OCS fisheries arrangements. The bill amends the FMA to give the powers to create and terminate OCS fisheries arrangements, which currently rest with the Governor-General and state/Northern Territory governors, to Commonwealth and state/Northern Territory ministers. Approval through the Governor-General and state/Northern Territory governors is considered to be a formality and creates an additional administrative step.

The bill will also allow for a more flexible application of Commonwealth and/or state/territory law in fisheries managed by joint authorities. Currently, where the fishery involves only one state or the Northern Territory and the Commonwealth, either the Commonwealth or state/territory law must apply to that fishery. Where the fishery involves the Commonwealth and two or more states, or a state and the Northern Territory, only Commonwealth law may apply. The bill will change this by allowing state/territory laws to apply to a fishery which is managed by a joint authority involving the Commonwealth and more than one state/territory.

Australia’s fishing industry will benefit from the amendments to OCS fisheries arrangements as they will provide for better and more flexible management of Australia’s important fisheries resources.

In summary, the bill will clarify the meaning of two important objectives in the fisheries acts and support more cooperative regional fisheries management arrangements between the Australian, state and Northern Territory governments. I thank the Main Committee and present the explanatory memorandum to this bill.

Gavan O'Connor (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Fisheries Legislation Amendment (Cooperative Fisheries Arrangements and Other Matters) Bill 2005 before the House today makes a number of amendments to the Fisheries Management Act 1991 and the Fisheries Administration Act 1991. In summary, these amendments include clarifying the meaning of the existing economic efficiency objective, allowing for the amending of fisheries agreements made under the offshore constitutional settlement, the OCS, and inserting an ecologically sustainable development principle consistent with the ESD principle contained in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, the EPBC Act. I understand that these measures have the support of state and territory governments and have the support of the industry, so the opposition will be supporting their passage through the parliament.

The provisions of this bill are broadly consistent with longstanding Labor policies aimed at ensuring that our fisheries are sustainable and that they are efficiently managed. The current legislation requires the Australian Fisheries Management Authority to pursue the objective of ‘maximising economic efficiency in the exploitation of fishery resources’. The objective has now been clarified in this amendment bill as ‘maximising the net economic returns to the Australian community from the management of Australian fisheries’. It has taken too long for the government to clarify this—the industry has been asking for this ever since I assumed this portfolio. I think we can reasonably ask why it has taken so long to put these measures in this legislation for the industry and to bring it to the floor of this chamber.

This bill also addresses concerns that the exploitation of fisheries resources be consistent with the ESD principles contained in the Environment Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. This bill introduces the triple bottom line—economic, environmental and social outcomes for fisheries—into the considerations of AFMA. This industry is very important to regional communities. There are social implications of government policies as well as substantial local and national economic impacts. If these fisheries are not managed well, we will have an environmental problem on our hands. The long-term economic sustainability of the industry depends on the environmental management of the fisheries.

With regard to the offshore constitutional settlement provisions, it is very important that we get the highest level of cooperation between state, federal and territory governments in the management of our fisheries. Sadly that has not been the case in recent years. We know that Australia’s current illegal fishing problem, which is now out of control, is fairly and squarely a policy failure of this government.

The government has taken a high-handed approach in dealing with states and territories and indeed with the fishing community. On a lot of these issues, it has failed to take advantage of the limited available resources, particularly in the illegal fishing area. The member for Lyons, who joins me in this debate, will remember one fisheries minister that the opposition dispatched out of the portfolio for other reasons went so far in an industry meeting as to physically threaten a fisherman who disagreed with the government.

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In my electorate.

Gavan O'Connor (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That caused a great amount of bad blood between fishing industry representatives and the government. Thank goodness he was removed from the portfolio for other reasons. However, I know the parliamentary secretary is far more rational and intelligent than her predecessors in this portfolio, and we have great expectations that at least some of the longstanding problems of this industry will be addressed. The opposition will support the bill. My good friend and colleague the member for Lyons, who has a deep and abiding interest in this industry, will expand on many of the views and points of the opposition in the context of this debate.

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As has been said, the Fisheries Legislation Amendment (Cooperative Fisheries Arrangements and Other Matters) Bill 2005 gives effect to the recommendations of the 2003 Commonwealth fisheries policy review and to work done by the Natural Resource Ministerial Council. I am speaking on this bill because I want to highlight some of the problems Tasmania has been facing recently with the negotiations on the maritime protection areas, the MPAs, which are covered under another piece of legislation which deals with sustainable development.

This bill talks about the economic efficiency principle. There has been concern for some time among commercial fishers about the meaning of the economic efficiency principle in Commonwealth fisheries legislation. Currently legislation requires AFMA to pursue the objective of maximising economic efficiency in the exploitation of fisheries resources. This has led to some confusion and a number of court cases. Some commercial fishers have read the objective as requiring AFMA to maximise returns for the fishing industry rather than to maximise net returns to the whole of the Australian community, as was originally intended. The objective has been reworded in this legislation to ‘maximising the net economic returns to the Australian community from the management of Australian fisheries’. However, this is still a little ambiguous, because one would have to ask which part of the Australian community is meant.

Those who rely on fishing and the fishing industry for their living are those who buy and eat the fish or those who spend a lot of time worrying about whether there will be any fish left in the sea to catch and eat. To my mind, there are some difficult priorities here, and, once we start trying to legislate between them, we are going to run into trouble. The key word here is ‘management’; if that is correctly spelt out, I believe this could work.

Obviously, we want to have economically sustainable development—ESD—of our fisheries. However, outcome 3 of the 2003 fisheries review found that, while current Commonwealth fisheries legislation requires that fisheries are managed in a way that is consistent with the principles of ESD, there is no legislative guidance on how this objective should be interpreted. It is believed that this concern is addressed in this bill by including ESD principles consistent with those contained in the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, the EPBC Act.

AFMA was required, in its management of the Commonwealth fisheries, to attempt to balance the triple bottom line of economic, environmental and social outcomes for fishers. In Tasmania, we know this as the three-pronged stool. It is an approach that we have used in forestry; it has been effective as long as there are no wild interpretations or misinterpretations of the concept.

Finally, we have the offshore constitutional settlement, the OCS proposal. The offshore constitutional settlement is the jurisdictional arrangement between the Commonwealth and the states and territories which sets out responsibilities for offshore fisheries, among other matters. The OCS provides for state and territory law to apply inside three nautical miles and for Commonwealth laws to apply from three nautical miles to 200 nautical miles.

It is here that we in Tasmania are having a problem with the development of the environmental side in the maritime protection areas. The consultation has not been done. In 2003, the Commonwealth fisheries policy review highlighted a number of concerns about the operation of fisheries agreements under the OCS and noted that there is currently no provision for the amending of fisheries agreements. This bill will allow for the amendment of fisheries agreements without having to terminate the original instrument and create an entirely new instrument.

In addition, this bill will allow for the management of multijurisdictional fisheries under state or territory law, where appropriate. At present these fisheries can only be managed under Commonwealth law, even in cases where it is entirely appropriate and sensible that they be managed under the law of a state or territory. Now we are told that, in future, when states, territories and the Commonwealth are involved in regional fisheries, they will jointly decide which party or parties will have legal jurisdiction to that fishery. In practice, this will work by defining areas within the fishery to which each law would apply. The areas would be adjacent to each other but could not overlap. This is fine in principle, but it seems that with this legislation we start getting overlays that appear to take precedent, such as with the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, which comes under the federal government, as it arbitrarily sets up these maritime protection areas without consideration of the economic returns to the Australian community.

Management is one thing but prohibition of fishing is another, and that is what is being proposed in Tasmania by the habitat protection zone that just happens to have popped up in our east coast fisheries through other legislation. And it is not only on the east coast; the south-east fisheries and the west coast fisheries are being targeted too.

All this so-called negotiation has been going on with who knows who, where few details have trickled down to those who are most affected—the fishers and their families. Suddenly they are faced with what appears to be a decision without any consultation whatsoever. It appears that Minister Campbell is trying to curry up some green brownie points on the carcass of poor old Senator Macdonald, who I believe was trying to do the right thing but who got the sack.

Now I want to ask some questions on all this; in fact, I want to ask a lot of questions. Firstly, what exactly have we signed up to under the World Conservation Union, the IUCN? What exactly are we trying to achieve by doing so? As far as I can make out, there are no targets for allocation of MPAs to any particular IUCN category. Under the act, all MPAs are assigned to an IUCN category and must be managed according to principles specified for each category. There is no mention of the regulations under which they are to be administered. But if there are no targets, it makes it hard for anyone to know the potential impact of the activities on conservation values as well as on economic and social values. So why are we doing it? What is going to be achieved?

Is the argument: we will lock it up and see what happens? Is that the principle that is at work here? I find this a bit like the climate change or global warming argument—this is something that has a doomsday feel about it without anyone really sitting down and going through the science to make it a rational argument. One scientist says that the ice cap at the North Pole is melting; another says that the ice is getting thicker. Plenty of work has been done but there has been no definite conclusion, which leads me to think that although we are applying the precautionary principle we should not go overboard with draconian legislation which prohibits ordinary working folk going about their chosen and often hard fought for business. Particularly in the case of maritime protected areas there is the possibility of voluntary participation together with sensible management of those areas that are still to be fished and reasonable and just compensation for those who have to give up their livelihood.

The problems are not only in Tasmania. I note the article in the Australian on 28 February this year entitled ‘Trawling for answers’. The locking up of the Great Barrier Reef has been an unmitigated disaster. The areas that can be fished have shrunk to the point where they are overfished and recreational fishers can no longer be guaranteed a catch. This has put hundreds of Queensland fisher folk out of work and is now costing the federal government millions of dollars in compensation that cannot really cover the cost of the loss of the industry. No-one had estimated what the rezoning of the reef could do both to the fishing industry and to the compensation projections. There was a mistaken prediction that the expansion of the no-go areas would only have a modest toll on commercial fishing. But no-one has done the sums or the science—we just made decisions. That is not good decision making.

Even one of the government’s own backbenchers, Warren Entsch, the member for Leichhardt, was disgusted with the outcome. He says in that same article:

We have destroyed the livelihoods of so many people, and these people are traditionally the eyes and the ears of authorities ...

We have to consult; we have to include people who are being displaced by this type of legislation. Compensation has to be on the table at this time, too. People cannot be expected to throw away their lifetime of work and experience for nothing. As we have proven in the forestry industry, proper management of a resource is a lot better than locking it up and forgetting about it. If a natural resource is not managed after it has been intensively used, then it becomes more of an environmental problem than one that is sustainably harvested.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Hear, hear!

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Kennedy for his support. If there is a case of environmental degeneration in one area and it is affecting the sustainability of an area, rest it for five years, like we do with our scallop decks. Explain what is going on and why this is so to the fishing people and they will join in and make sure that the site is properly rested because it is in their interests to do so. But to legislate it away forever is just plain stupid.

According to a fact sheet put out by the federal government, public input is an essential part of the development of our new marine protected areas. The document goes on to say that consultation with stakeholder groups has been a feature of the development of a set of candidate MPAs. I wonder who those stakeholder groups are, because the people I have talked to and those who are really concerned about their livelihoods have not discussed it and have heard sweet diddly-squat about this very matter.

It seems that the same thing has happened in Queensland. Many areas have been declared and no-one is owning up to having done the research on the exact locality. No—more likely no-one knew anything about it because they did not consult with the people whose livelihoods were affected and who have been fishing in those areas for a long time.

According to later reports that I have scrounged from various sources—including the library, which seems to keep all the documents; I suppose that is their role—it appears that all this paperwork and research is only a draft; that consultation has to begin, that nothing is set in concrete and that there is still an opportunity for people to comment. All I can say is that a hell of a lot of work has been done perhaps to no end and that people in regional Tasmania that have any interest in sea fishing whatsoever should now get up and state their case as to why and where MPAs should exist, how they should be managed and whether we need them at all.

This government needs to know it cannot keep on making decisions that affect regional people and their work without consulting them. Tell it we want our fisheries controlled by us. Once the fisher folk are kept out of areas, it leaves them wide open for other fishermen from other countries to just wander in to help themselves—and we have heard about this. We just do not have the resources to mind ‘parks’ without any return.

Warren Entsch has reminded us again today in that very article in the Australian that we are unfortunately now seeing the void created by the forced eviction of Australian fishing families from those waters being filled by illegal fishermen from Indonesia and other foreign countries. It is pointed out that at the top-end of Australia there have been several boats from Indonesia in there fishing where Australian fishing used to take place. In the past, fishing boats have provided a good network of information and are our first line of defence against our fisheries being plundered. Now some idiot wants to lock up the sea to us and open it up to the world. Our usual voluntary patrol mechanism has been decimated. I am afraid that is not what I see as environmentally sustainable. I think we should think again.

I am going out into my electorate to tell all the fishing people—and my electorate contains a hell of a lot of the fishing grounds of Tasmania—how they can have a say in their future and, if they are not happy with the present government, how they can change it. As for this bill relating to cooperative fisheries management, let us get some sense into maximising the net economic returns to the Australian community from the management of Australian fisheries. Unless there is considerable understanding of what it means to lock up areas, there will be no net economic return to the Australian community, because management will not be achieved properly and resources will not be there to police our locked-up sites.

I would like to see a regional fisheries agreement with Tasmania that takes in all these arguments and looks to see how we can help the renewal of the industry, with funds put aside for research and development, along with the full cooperation of all those in commercial fishing, to lay down a blueprint for our industry. Let us forget about all this other ‘greeny’ mumbo jumbo. That is not doing anything for anybody. It is doing nobody any favours. Throwing money as compensation does nothing for our industry or for our people, who should be able to continue a viable fishing industry. We want a properly thought out, researched and sustainable fishing policy that allows commercial and recreational fishers to continue to provide Australians with some of the best fish in the world to eat and some of the best game fishing while also providing the fisheries authority with detailed information on what fish are about and who is fishing for them. And that is not to mention their role as guardians of our offshore areas and their unofficial ability to patrol our seas for illegal intruders and rogue fishers. This legislation must take into account the real cost of locking up water or land, and we must know exactly what is going on and what is going to be achieved before we enact legislation.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In rising to speak in the debate on the Fisheries Legislation Amendment (Cooperative Fisheries Arrangements and Other Matters) Bill 2005 I do so as someone representing one of the areas hardest hit by what will be looked on by future generations of Australians as an appalling series of decisions. Recreational fishing is a very important industry in the electorate of Kennedy. The town of Lucinda, which, as you would be aware, Mr Deputy Speaker Lindsay, is north of your own electorate, burgeons to an estimated population of 2,000 people during the winter season. I meet many of them in the little supermarket in Lucinda and they tell me that they are there for the fishing.

This government cannot resile from the responsibilities of office. I find it extraordinary that people can come into this place, and into other places, and represent themselves as something entirely separate from the government. If you want to disempower people then you tell them that they have no power or influence. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority is an organisation known over a long period of time for its deceitfulness. If it is trying to make amends of late then it has left its run very late. The authority told us that it was going to close 15 per cent of the Queensland coastline but it also said: ‘Relax; don’t worry. It’s not locked in concrete.’ You were at one of the meetings, Mr Deputy Speaker, when we were told that it is not locked in concrete. Some 6,000 people in North Queensland attended the public meetings. They said, ‘Don’t do this.’ Well, the authority did not close 15 per cent; it closed 32 per cent.

If there was the remotest justification for this, it would be that we were protecting these fisheries for future generations of Australians—or for the trees. The greenies seem to hate people and do not want people to be here, so I presume that it is for the bioecology of the area. Whatever the justification may be, we have reduced the number of licences, in addition to the closure of 32 per cent of the marine park, which is effectively the whole of the Queensland coastline. So in that area from five kilometres off the coast, to 200 kilometres from the coastline of Australia, we have reduced the number of licences to about 6,000.

I do not often get to watch television in the early hours of the evening, but I most certainly dug out of the library a recent recording of 60 Minutes which featured a report on that poor naval commander. I do not know where he has been sent to—he is probably tendering a boat on Lake Eyre at present. From that report we discovered that, whilst only 6,000 Australian fishing vessels are allowed in our waters, last year 8,000 foreign vessels had been sighted in our waters. So, whilst only 6,000 Australian vessels are allowed in our waters, we know—because we have seen them—that there were 8,000 foreign vessels in Australian fishing waters. If 8,000 were sighted, there would most certainly be around 20,000 vessels in our waters. So it is very good that we have excluded Australians—recreational fishermen and commercial fishermen—from our waters! It is wonderful! The foreign countries that are enjoying those waters and taking huge fish harvests from them must be saying, ‘What a bunch of fools those Australians are!’

I had discussions with GBRMPA and, as I have done on many occasions in this place, I stated what GBRMPA’s position is. When I met with them, I said: ‘You are going to take away the livelihoods of some 2,000 Queenslanders—most of them North Queenslanders—with these proposals of yours. Have you no heart? Have you no thought for these people? Do you just want to carelessly go out and destroy their lives?’

Apropos of this, a gentleman came into my office. He later walked up the street and when I saw him he was slumped over a table crying his eyes out, because his whole life had been taken away; it had been completely destroyed. A lady who came into our office lost complete control: she was running around screaming at the top of her voice. She was out of her mind with worry and despair. That is what GBRMPA have done—they torture and torture and torture until we commit suicide, until we throw away our lives through drunkenness or until, through stress, we have a heart attack and die. They continually torture us. They do not care about human beings. They have the most callous, vicious attitudes towards these people. At the very least, 2,000 people in the commercial fishing industry in Queensland lost their livelihoods. I am not talking about the recreational fishing industry.

Then there was the little matter of theft. The anthropologists and the palaeontologists tell us that we North Queenslanders have fished those waters for some 20,000 years. No person in authority has come along in a uniform and said, ‘You can’t fish these waters.’ That only happened in the year of our Lord 1990, when people in this place and in the Queensland parliament were so arrogant that they took away from us those rights that we have enjoyed for 20,000 years.

If you want to see the result of that, come to my house in Charters Towers. I am 150 kilometres from the coast. Two of my five neighbours have boats in their backyards—tinnies. I do not hesitate to quote one of those neighbours; he and his wife are great local citizens. In fact, the park opposite my house is named after them—McCormack Park. I said to Jack McCormack, ‘I don’t notice a boat around.’ He said: ‘No, mate, we sold it. We can’t buy GPSs and I can’t read those navigational charts. I’m going to go out there and have the coppers chasing me all over the place—it’s no fun anymore.’

The little people, the ordinary people—a truckie with the council—do not have money to go overseas or to go to Surfers Paradise for holidays or to buy a house at Mission Beach. They can’t afford to go to the cinemas. They are retirees and they do not have much money. They live in a town where housing does not cost very much. This was their recreation; this was their fun. But this government and the state government in Queensland took that away from them, thieved it from them. They paid them no compensation. They just said: ‘You no longer have that right. We have taken that right away from you. We have taken that freedom away from you.’

As young blokes, we used to go fishing down the river and go shooting, because I lived in a very inland town. But people on the coast did the same thing. Then the guns were taken off us, and now the fishing has been taken off us. What fun can we ordinary Australians have anymore? What can we do? We cannot break branches off trees in our state any more—that is all illegal—so we cannot go camping or take the kids camping. What exactly can we do in this country? These were all the things I did. I enjoyed a wonderful boyhood in North Queensland, as did many others—and there are a million of us now living in the northern part of Australia. It was said northern Europeans could never live in the tropics. We proved them well and truly wrong. In spite of it all, we are flourishing in numbers. However, I do not know whether we are flourishing in freedom.

Let me move on. This government in its wisdom signed the free trade agreement. That means that Americans can sell boats to us but, under the Jones act, we cannot sell boats to them. This is a pretty good free trade act. The Americans can sell sugar to us, but we cannot sell sugar to them. I always call it the American free trade act, because it certainly was an American free trade act. It was not an Australian free trade act, that is for certain. They have the Jones act in the United States. I strongly believe that Canada has completely ignored the WTO agreements with respect to government purchasing arrangements. The United States has most certainly ignored them, and Japan has most certainly ignored them. I would most strongly recommend that we simply ignore them, and we will use the same pretext that those people have found.

That brings me to the policing and protection of our waters. In Queensland we have a government that cannot supply electricity, medical services or water, and yet they call themselves a government. I am sorry to say that the federal government cannot defend its waters. If you cannot defend your country, then you are not a government. The government have also abrogated the control of money to the international speculators; that is a free market now. There are two important things that we gave to the federal government upon Federation. We gave them control over the money, which they have abrogated to the likes of the international money marketers—it is in safe hands, I am sure—and control over our defence.

We have two destroyers, proposed to be the defence of Australia, and a number of patrol boats that have machine guns on them. In the year of our Lord 2006, we are going to defend Australia with a dozen patrol boats with machine guns on them. Is it any wonder that there are 20,000 foreign fishing vessels in our water treating the Australian government and the Australian people with absolute contempt, raping and pillaging our waters and taking fish that should be available for the Australian catch? We have about a dozen of these patrol boats, and we are proposing to have two destroyers. For the information of the House, in the war between Argentina and Great Britain, the Argentineans had five Exocet missiles—just five, like the fingers of one hand. With those five Exocet missiles, they took out two destroyers. So, if one of our neighbours happens to buy themselves five Exocet missiles, I think we can fairly safely say there will be no Australian Navy—and those missiles were mark 1 missiles.

There may be members here who attended the briefing by the head of the missile program in the United States. When some imbecile asked him, ‘What about a threat from a low-technology country?’ he said, ‘What would you consider a low-technology country?’ I burst out laughing, because there are no low-tech countries now. Those countries are sophisticated. But he said, ‘If you are thinking of Indonesia as a low-tech country, they have contracted to buy the Exocet mark 3.’

It was the Exocet mark 1 which took out the two destroyers in the battle with Argentina. This is Exocet mark 3, which has much more ability to evade and invade the interception systems of our boats—not that our current Navy, with its patrol boats, has any interception capacity. There are some frigates too. They are a little bigger than a patrol boat but not much bigger. Indonesia had contracted to buy the mark 3 and their economy collapsed, but they most certainly will be buying the mark 3 in due course.

I suggest that we look at countries like Israel, which are able to defend themselves against overwhelming forces because they have a commitment to it, an intelligent determination to protect their borders and to protect their people. I suggest to the government in the strongest way that I possibly can that they purchase for themselves 100 patrol boats with guided missile capacity—which the current patrol boats do not have—and with interception capacity. The guided missiles are very cheap—$5 million for a patrol boat. Interception capacity is not; it is $35 million a patrol boat. I suggest they also buy helicopters so that they can see as far as they want to. You can go 400 or 500 kilometres over the horizon with radar, and that is in just about all types of weather. If you do that then you will have an adequate coastguard system for Australia that can police our waters and remove those fishing vessels currently violating our waters.

For those of you who like reading history books, I recommend that you read a bit about the history of Texas. The Mexicans felt that it was all right to allow the Americans to come in there. Then they woke up one morning and found that there were a hell of a lot more Americans in Texas than there were Mexicans. The Americans said, ‘This belongs to us now, not you.’ When they had a fight about it, the Americans won because there were a hell of a lot more of them than the Mexicans.

If someone else controls your waters then you have to decide whether or not they own them. If they happen to be very big, as our neighbour happens to be, and if about 100 million of them are going to bed hungry—of their population of 200 million it is estimated that some 80 to 100 million are going to bed hungry every night—it might be that they have a fairly moral sort of an argument for coming into our waters. It might make them very angry indeed when we start to try to eliminate the 20,000 boats that are out there, some of them owned by very influential people in that government.

We have a saying in the bush that good fences make good neighbours. It is about time that this government did some fencing. If we want to apprehend them, why are there 8,000 vessels? Those who watched 60 Minutes would have seen the bloke on the patrol boat, the naval commander, who called out through a loud hailer in English to the Indonesian fishing boat: ‘Halt! Heave to. We are boarding you. You are in Australian waters.’ The Indonesian, it appeared to me, gave him the equivalent of the two of the valley, as we call it in North Queensland, and took off into international waters with the Australians trailing along behind. This is farcical! You might say it is difficult to deal with. No. We lead the world in corralling fish down off Port Lincoln. You simply drop a cable off behind with buoys on it and you surround a vessel with that. If he crosses that it fouls his propeller, so you can easily capture these vessels.

But there is no commitment to this because there is no coastguard. There are patrol boats and naval officers but they do not want to be cast in this role. We need a serious coastguard, and I think that one of the reasons this government has shied away from that is that it was suggested by the opposition. The opposition proposed it for just one purpose: apprehending fishing vessels or smuggling—having that sort of role—but with no defence role. But to put out the money on 20 or 30 patrol boats when they cannot effectively defend us would be an act of criminal stupidity. Surely you would use those patrol boats to work in a defence role. If they throw out half-a-dozen Exocet missiles and take out half-a-dozen boats, if there are another 60 or 70 patrol boats there all throwing missiles at them, it will not be a lot of fun for anyone who tries to take our waters from us. Good fences make good neighbours and that is what we want to have in the relationship with our neighbours.

Those vessels can be built in Australia. Yes, they will cost about $8 billion over 10 years. That is a lot of money, and I do not like to get up here and say that we should spend this money without saying how we get so much money. Arguably, we have the longest coastline of any country on earth, so we have a right to a huge customs duty of 10 per cent primage charge on everything coming into this country. Billy Wentworth—no fool, one of the finest intellects to set foot in this place—constantly advocated that sort of tax, a simple 10 per cent charge on everything coming into our country. We are entitled to it. It does not breach WTO regulations and it will pay for those patrol boats. In addition, we will have a technological industry in this country, which we do not have now. We have no manufacturing left in this country, but suddenly we will become the leading small boat builders in the world. We will protect our waters. Finally, give us back our waters. Give back to Australians our waters. (Time expired)

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank the honourable member for Kennedy for his rather loud but I think very informative speech. There are probably not too many times that I am going to be in fierce agreement with the member for Kennedy but I am on this occasion and would like to echo his concerns that fences make good neighbours. I am speaking to the bill before us, the Fisheries Legislation Amendment (Cooperative Fisheries Arrangements and Other Matters) Bill 2005, which seeks to clarify certain things about the meaning of ‘economic efficiency objectives’ and also to insert an ecologically sustainable development principle consistent with the ESD principle contained in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. It also allows for amendments to the fisheries agreement to remain under the offshore constitutional settlements. While these are all good things and the Labor Party are supportive of them, they are irrelevant if we do not know what fishing catch is being taken out of our waters by illegal fishers. We are asking our fishing industry time and time again to reduce its catch to ensure that our stock is sustainable and to ensure that the biodiversity of our waters is maintained, and they are happy to do that.

I was in Broome last week meeting with the Western Australian fishing industries and with the many fishermen who are there. They were also meeting that day with various representatives of the state government to determine what their catch would be for the next year. They had agreed to take a reduction in their catch. As I say, they were happy to do that. It will cost them; it will hurt them in some regards, but they realise that if they do not have a sustainable catch they do not have a catch. It is fished out; it is no longer there. But they said, ‘Why are we taking a reduction time after time after time when we have no idea what the stock is because it is being raided and taken illegally, predominantly by boats coming down from Indonesia, and the government is doing nothing about it?’

It was fascinating at question time today that the foreign minister got up and said he had recently been to Indonesia to have talks about joint patrols with the Indonesian government. Funnily enough, the previous fisheries minister, Senator Macdonald, who has gone by the by because, I think, of his total lack of action with regard to illegal fishing, also said he had been off to Indonesia to have talks with the Indonesian government and they were going to have joint patrols. That is well and good. It is a long time overdue. Something should have been done. But it is not just about joint patrols. Where was the discussion about the MOU box off the northern coast and particularly off the top of the Kimberley? Where were the discussions about where that box begins and ends? The illegal fishers coming down from Indonesia are saying: ‘We were in the box. We thought we were in the right space.’ Where was the discussion that was needed about defining where that area is so that it is clear, or saying that it is time to renegotiate that whole thing, that it is no longer traditional fishermen coming in and out of our area? The illegal fishing operation coming into our waters is actually very commercial, very high tech and very well resourced. We can have these measures as introduced in this bill. We welcome them and they should be done, but they are totally and utterly irrelevant if we do not do something about people plundering our fishing stock illegally. They are continually coming down here and taking our fish and nobody is doing anything about it.

In Senate estimates last week we learnt that, in 2004, 9,600 boats were sighted. In 2005 that went up to 13,000—an increase of 35 per cent. And how many boats were picked up? Somewhere in the order of 400 to 600 boats were picked up. A fraction of the boats sighted are being picked up. A large number of those boats are, as opposed to being taken and destroyed, undergoing what is known as forfeiture. The boat is not taken and destroyed. Whoever has picked it up—be it Customs or the state fisheries—takes their fishing equipment and allows the boat to head on its merry way. Funnily enough, they probably head back to the mother boat, get another load of fishing gear and then go out plundering our waters. There are recidivists who are being seen coming in, time and time again, through the boats, by captain and crew. They are coming back to the Kimberley, back into Broome. Everybody is getting to know who these individuals are, but there is no database about who these people are. There is no consistency; there is no coordination.

This government can talk all it likes about sustainability, economic efficiency and biodiversity, but if it is doing nothing about the illegal fishing issue this will be meaningless. This will be completely and utterly meaningless.

Talking with the fishermen in Broome was very eye opening. Two things were clear. They want to preserve their industry. They love their way of life; they enjoy it. It is generally a family business, passed down from father to son—or, in some cases, from father to daughter—and on and on it goes. They enjoy what they are doing and on the whole they can make a livelihood out of it. But it is getting harder and harder, with the restrictions, with the cost of fuel et cetera. So they are worried. They want to maintain their industry; they want to do the right thing by their industry. But if the government is not doing anything to protect their industry they have no industry.

The other thing they are very concerned about is their own personal safety. Out at sea, it used to be a situation where it was all kind of nice. The Indonesians—the traditional fishermen—would come along. But it is all getting a bit aggro out there on the sea. One man said: ‘What is my legal requirement on a boat? Where do I stand in regard to my crew? What is the legality about safety for me and my crew in our workplace? Our workplace may be a boat in the middle of the ocean, but it is still our workplace. How do we protect ourselves?’

The majority of these boats out off the Kimberley and off the Northern Territory are fishing for shark. They are legally allowed to carry firearms. If you get a fairly large shark on board that has not died, the only way to deal with it is to shoot it, so they are all carrying firearms. It was constantly said to us when we were on this visit, to Broome, to Perth and then further up to One Arm Point, that it is not a matter of if an incident with a firearm occurs or if a tragedy occurs at sea; it is a matter of when that is going to occur at sea.

They are very nervous. They are very scared about an incident occurring. The illegal fishermen are getting more aggressive. They are getting better stocked and better equipped and they are becoming more protective of their catch and are set on not being caught. So we have got a whole lot of Australia fishermen at sea feeling very insecure and very vulnerable and worrying about their security and their livelihoods.

It was quite extraordinary that these individuals that we met in Broome were all trying, through their industry associations and their various networks, to do something to maintain their industry. But they also turned around and talked about what they could actually do for the Indonesians to ensure that they had livelihoods. They talked about aid programs and about discussions. But they wanted more action. They need to see more action from the government.

The Labor Party believes that this is such a serious issue that we have commissioned our own task force, because we just do not see the government doing anything about it. We have established the Labor caucus transport and maritime security task force. We are out there, we are listening and we are hearing.

Funnily enough, after we had left Broome the new minister in charge of fisheries, Senator Eric Abetz, turned up in town. There was a big fanfare—he was coming, all the press were very excited and they thought that an announcement was finally going to be made. Previously they had been told that the federal government was taking all the money out of the Kimberley, that they would lose the eight staff that the federal government is currently funding and that those staff would be transferred to Darwin—not all of them, but they were losing the funding for the eight staff. So the state fisheries body is now diverting its resources. The resources that would actually patrol things like the amount of catch and the biodiversity of the stock are now being diverted to doing the federal government’s task: patrolling the waters and catching the boats.

One of the biggest issues is that when the state fisheries, a local Aboriginal community or someone sights a boat they ring Canberra and say: ‘We’ve seen this boat. It’s sitting out there.’ Then there is a mad flurry of phone calls and nobody knows who is meant to do what, where or when. There might be a Navy boat in the waters, but their rules of engagement are so unclear that they do not know whether they should go and pick it up, shoot across the bow or do whatever. On the whole, it takes three days for someone to come out and check out the boat. Funnily enough, after the three days the boat has gone, and the boat has been so close to the shore that people in various communities have seen the boat. The issues are not then just about the plundering of the fishing stock; there are also great concerns about quarantine and the issues of communicable diseases coming to our shores.

One of the most fascinating sessions we had in Broome was with the AQIS officer, who went into great detail about what they have to do when they actually bring one of those boats to shore. It is an amazing process of fumigating, removing food, going through the water and taking out all the water, which is contaminated with dengue. There are dengue mosquitoes sitting in the water that is then brought to shore at the Kimberley. I am not sure whether anybody here knows someone who has had dengue fever—I do; it is a terrible thing. Why do we want this brought onto our shores? The fishermen were adamant, time and time again, that they were calling on the government to do something.

So we were in Broome and Senator Abetz turned up a couple of days later and talked the talk, but he did not walk the walk. He did not offer them anything: he made no announcements and no promises. He gave them false hopes that he would maybe call a national summit. There have been discussions throughout the state governments, particularly led by John Ford, the Western Australian minister who has a huge problem on his hands in his area. He has talked to his Northern Territory and Queensland counterparts about this issue because he cannot get anywhere with the federal government. So we have a situation where the state governments are trying to take the charge. They are actually funding the patrolling of their areas, funding the security of their industry and trying to talk about a coordinated approach.

Senator Abetz then went to the Northern Territory—our task force will be going there in a week or so too—to talk to the people there, including the Indigenous communities, who are being seriously impacted by these issues. He again talked the talk but did not walk the walk. He came back to Canberra and said, ‘No, there is no need for a summit; there’s no need to get anything together.’ Prior to his visit to Broome, the member for Kalgoorlie had to fly to Tasmania to meet with the minister to say, ‘Finally, can someone listen to this massive issue in our backyard?’ As we have heard time and time again, one of the issues was: ‘Do you think that if this were happening in Sydney Harbour people would care? Is it because it’s happening at the far end of the Kimberley, at the top of Darwin and way off the top of Queensland that nobody cares? If it were over in the east, do you think people would care and worry about us? Do you think it’s because we’re not a big, sexy and viable industry that they just don’t care?’ This is an issue that is growing. It is a huge issue and it is destroying the livelihoods of so many people and more needs to be done by this government. They are sitting on their hands. The previous minister sat on his hands.

It is a tragedy today, when we have this bill before us talking about fisheries, that not one government member sees fit to speak to the bill. Not one government member has come down to talk about the fishing industry. The fishing industry operates probably more predominantly in the seats of coalition members. Where is the member for Kalgoorlie? Where is the member for Solomon? Where are they talking about their industry and the protection of that industry? I would like to know.

The task force also went to a place called One Arm Point, where I, the member for Chifley and one of our esteemed colleagues in the other place, a senator from WA, met with the phenomenal Bardi community who are operating out of One Arm Point. They are truly in the middle of nowhere. It is incredibly hot but it is one of the most stunning and magic places I have ever seen. Instead of meeting an Aboriginal or Indigenous community ground down by CDEP and ground down by their circumstances, this is a community who wants to look after themselves and are doing everything they possibly can to become self-sufficient.

They are doing everything they possibly can to provide for their community and for future generations. They have turned back to their traditional areas. They have turned back to what they always did, which was fishing, harvesting and collecting a thing known as a trochus shell. I am terribly sorry that I do not have my trochus shell with me, because I have to say that it is the most stunning thing I have ever seen. It is a beautiful thing. The trochus is generally harvested and then sold to be made into buttons—something like pearl buttons. Predominantly, the catch from One Arm Point is shipped to Italy. Last year they made $85,000. That might not sound a lot to us, but for a remote Indigenous community it was an enormous amount of money. And they did that off their own bat—without any support.

They are hatching the trochus on shore, so they are creating and regenerating their reef, which has been plundered by the Indonesians. The Aboriginal community up there has put a limit on their catch so that they will not destroy their reef. They have a limit on bag catch, a limit on size of shell and a limit on what they do. They are very responsible about this. They harvest their own shell and then go out and reseed the reef. But what do they find? When they get out there, they discover the whole lot has been plundered again by Indonesian fishermen—the whole lot has been taken. That is theft, by anyone else’s standards. If it were happening in our backyard, we would be jumping up and down in outrage. But, because it is a remote Aboriginal community, it seems that nobody cares. These people have spent an enormous amount of time, energy and heartache to produce this beautiful trochus and create an industry that is sustainable. They want to take control of their own destiny, get off CDEP and move to where they are sustainable. They want to be able to go to the bank and say, ‘Lend us the money, because we’ve got a viable business and we want to do it.’ But we are not protecting these shores, these waters or their livelihood.

To understand this situation, one needs to know that the trochus must be collected. You have to get onto a reef, get down on your hands and knees or swim around and snorkel. So the boats from Indonesia must actually land on our shores. They are landing on our reefs. That is how close they are getting. Twenty-five people at a time get off, harvest the trochus and get back on the boat—but they stay there for a couple of days. So they arrive on our shores, in Australian waters, and plunder the livelihood of the Bardi community. They are also bringing with them their diseases and their food—which may have other diseases—and we do not care. We have done nothing about it. The minister has done some gladhanding and the previous minister did some burning of boats and did a bit of media, but we have not actually seen any action. We have seen nothing concrete take place—and we have this enormous increase in boats coming to our shores.

To give you an idea of the cost of this, a recent report by the Western Australian government says:

The increasing number of incursions, combined with the growing marketability of key target species (mostly sharks for fins) points to a highly organised commercial system. Heavy fishing pressures and the loss of marine habitats in Indonesian waters have made fishing in the AFZ increasingly attractive. Returns from illegal fishing are high when compared to those available to villagers in eastern Indonesia.

With a ‘beach price’ return on catch of about $120AUD per kilogram for shark fin, only about 5 kilograms is required to cover the costs for a fishing trip (generally one large shark). In general, this can easily be achieved in the first day of fishing. The replacement cost of a boat by an indentured fisherman (approximately $5,000AUD), should the fisherman be unlucky enough to get caught and lose the boat, is the equivalent of 40 kilograms of dried shark finance at ‘beach’ prices. High quality fin is on-sold by owners for $250AUD per kilogram (wholesale) so for them the replacement cost of a boat is 20 kilograms of shark fin.

So you are talking about big money. We are talking about big, organised money. If the poor villagers from Indonesia who come on these boats are taken and, in some cases, put in jail here for six to 12 months or put in camps and deported, it does not hurt the organised criminals. Nor does it hurt the people who have created these boats. We were given examples of one fishing village in Indonesia where 20 of these boats are turned out each day. They just keep producing them.

Recently, a very large vessel, the Chang Long, was taken in Indonesia. It was a large vessel with ice on board, what they refer to as a ‘mother boat’. It was a very large boat sitting in the middle of the water and the smaller boats would come to it. We are talking about organised criminal activity. We are talking about fishermen losing their livelihoods because the Australian government is doing nothing about this organised crime.

It is all very well for the foreign affairs minister to state in question time today that he has gone and had a chat with his counterpart in Indonesia about patrols. What is he doing about having a chat about the illegality of the syndicates in Indonesia? Where is he having the discussions about the illegality of these boats coming to our shores? They seem to have been able to have a chat when illegal people smugglers were coming in—they seem to have done a lot about that—but they do not seem to be caring about the people within the fishing industry.

Whilst Labor is supporting this bill today because it does go a way to protecting the viability of the fishing stock and our biodiversity, if we are doing nothing about the incursion of illegal fishing then why bother? In some respects, why bother? As the fishermen in Broome said: ‘We can reduce our stock and we can do all the right things, but if somebody else is coming and taking it illegally we have no way of protecting that. We have no way of controlling that. Our livelihood has gone and we have borne the pain for no reason.’ So while this bill will help in some measure, unless something is done about illegal fishing it is pointless. (Time expired)

Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I certainly support the remarks of the honourable member for Chisholm on the Fisheries Legislation Amendment (Cooperative Fisheries Arrangements and Other Matters) Bill 2005. I am interested that we are changing the objective to ‘maximising the net economic returns to the Australian community from the management of Australian fisheries’ rather than, as it is today, ‘maximising economic efficiency in the exploitation of the fisheries resources’. The size of the industry is about $2.2 billion. As the honourable member for Chisholm has said, we visited Perth, Broome and One Arm Point and talked to a range of people about the illegal fishing problem.

But I do not want to call it an issue of illegal fishing; it is really an issue now of international organised crime. There is a big difference. Traditional fishermen have been coming down our coasts, and we have tried to prevent them. There have been previous programs of going to those specific villages and encouraging the fishermen to do the proper thing. The fishermen are not coming from those villages anymore. These boats are being financed and crewed from different villages.

Last year there were 8,000 sightings of these boats, a product of international crime. The latest figures indicate there were 13,000 sightings. Members of the opposition side have been bashed by the government about illegal boat people coming to Australia. The number of fishermen under the international organised criminal syndicates coming out of Indonesia exceeds the number of boat people many times. As the honourable member for Chisholm has said, they are actually landing on our coast and this government is completely unconcerned about it. It is a problem that is a decade old—10 years old—and I might say that 10 years is how long the Howard government has been in office.

Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Ten long years!

Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Ten long years! The boats are faster, and today they are coming in starbursts. What that means is that they come in groups of 30 so that if they are intercepted they can disperse and escape. The best the government can do now, 10 years on, is to say that we are having talks with the Indonesian Minister for Foreign Affairs and that we might be able to have an Indonesian patrol boat and an Australian patrol boat trying to intercept 13,000 illegal boats coming to this shore. This is an absolute scandal and disgrace.

I will talk about the pearling industry, which is at risk. Why is it at risk? It is the last wild harvest pearling industry in the world. What we have there in Broome and on our north-western coast is unique in the world. Every federal member, not just those who come from that area and are supposed to represent it, should take pride in the pearling industry. Darwin Harbour has already had a strike of black stripe mussels. It cost the authorities $3 million to clean out Darwin Harbour. I say to the parliamentary secretary and the officials: what are you going to do if black stripe mussels hit our pearling industry? It is a world renowned industry, and Australia, through great entrepreneurs, is adding value to the industry as well. That industry can be wiped out because of your indifference to the threat that these 13,000 boats represent.

The honourable member for Chisholm mentioned One Arm Point and the Bardi people. Their entrepreneurial spirit, I thought, was refreshing. They said—not as eloquently, perhaps more bluntly—that they just wanted to be free of government interference. They wanted to be able to get on and manage their own lives.

Like the honourable member for Chisholm, I wanted to bring home a trochus shell, because I had never seen a trochus shell before. I did not have any idea of its size or, when polished, its beauty. I agree with everything that she said. This community at One Arm Point, with not one lousy dollar out of the environment budget, are re-seeding the reefs that the Indonesian fishermen are completely stripping of trochus shell, whether full sized, medium sized or undersized—and anything else that is on the reef, such as clamshell or turtles. They are stripping everything bare. They have wrecked their own reefs. But there you have an Aboriginal community investing their CDEP money, $30,000 each year, in hatching trochuses and re-seeding the reefs. Not one Commonwealth dollar is going to that, which I think is an utter disgrace. But congratulations to the community.

It takes three years, once you put it back on the reef, for a species to regrow. We and the Bardi people cannot keep up with the way that the shells are being ripped to pieces. Sooner or later there is going to be an international incident. The community is not going to put up with it. If the government refuses to protect Australians, Aboriginal communities on the coast of Western Australia will take matters into their own hands. This is not a prediction; I regret to say that it is a promise. That is why I appeal to government members: do not be indifferent, do not be lethargic and do not be inert. Please do something to protect our heritage and their heritage.

I concur with what the honourable member for Chisholm has reported to the chamber. We heard a fisherman saying, ‘I fought in World War II so that we could have safe workplaces all over Australia.’ He was an ordinary sort of a guy. He was pretty impressive because he was a genuine Australian. He said that there is going to be a shooting incident, because Australian fishing boats are already being boarded. I am not predicting that they are going to be boarded; they are already being boarded. Wouldn’t you think that that would ring alarm bells amongst the coalition? Sadly, no. He said that it will not be a case of if; it will be a case of when. I think that that is really terrible.

It is true that the government does intercept some of these boats outside the coastal waters. Do you know what they have? They have what they call a ‘catch, kiss and release’ policy. I think it is dedicated to Rex Hunt, who has really pioneered it! What they do is catch the boat and they say: ‘You naughty fellows! We’re going to take your fishing gear off you. Off you go, and do the right thing.’ You could not send a bigger and clearer message to these people: ‘Come back.’ You could not say more clearly to those people who are financing this international organised crime of illegal fishing: ‘It’s risk free. All you’ll lose is your gear’—and sometimes that gear has actually been pinched off Australian boats. What is the policy, Mr Deputy Speaker Lindsay? I know you take a great interest in defence and national security matters. Let me repeat it for you. It is ‘catch, kiss and release’. It is an utter disgrace.

Sometimes your political party develops a policy and occasionally you have a couple of doubts. That is the case for me, I must say, in relation to the coastguard. But if anything has convinced me of the utter need for an Australian coastguard so we have boats available to intercept these illegal fishing vessels 24/7—that is 24 hours a day, seven days a week, not just on some random defence exercise or having one Indonesian patrol boat and one Australian patrol boat—it is this issue of illegal fishing. Of course we want to get the Indonesians to pressure those fishermen who are coming. But I say with great respect to the parliamentary secretary: you really need to crack down on the financiers. You will always be able to source cheap Indonesian fishermen. I do not mean that pejoratively, but they are very poor and of course they are only too willing to try to earn a dollar or two. If you really want to close it down, go for the financiers; and the first thing you need to do is stop this ‘catch, kiss and release’ policy. You actually have to make it difficult for those who are financing these boats. The loss of the gear is utterly and completely inadequate.

There are a couple of other things I want to say. If you are an Indonesian fishermen unhappily incarcerated in Broome and you have any medical problems that cannot be solved locally—and they do put great stress on local health systems—you will be flown to Perth, where a medical problem will be attended to. Or if you have a dental problem—some problem with your dentures, for example—it will be attended to. If you are a local Broome resident you might not be able to get those fixed. But if you are an illegal fishermen, don’t worry; the Commonwealth will fly you down to Perth with a guard, get your dentures fixed, get a tooth pulled, get a filling done and then bring you back. I am not saying we should not have humane treatment of these people who are paid to crew these boats. It is just a pity that some of the dollars that you are prepared to put there you will not put into detecting and capturing more, and killing the trade off.

In conclusion I want to make these points. There are issues for Aboriginal communities in terms of the trochus shells. They have been doing this for hundreds or thousands of years—and, gee, they are doing a good job and it would be nice to see an environmental dollar out of the Commonwealth’s purse going to encourage what they are doing in the hatchery. There is the trade in sharks and also the illegal fishing of fish. There are three separate issues. Not all of them do the same thing.

One of the scariest things that was said to us was that, if you are successful in cracking down on trochus shells, if you crack down on the sharks and if you are able to crack down on the fishing, then, because this is international organised crime—and that is what it is—they will move into your pearling industry. They are flexible, they are adaptable and all four are at stake. It is an absolute blight on this country that this government has ignored the problem and will not do anything. As the honourable member for Chisholm said, the most distressing thing in going to Western Australia and listening to those people was this sense that we do not—

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I want to pose a question to the member for Chifley, under standing orders.

Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Will the member for Chifley accept an intervention?

Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes.

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I ask whether the member for Chifley endorses the agreement that the foreign minister has just come back with from Jakarta this very day in relation to joint cooperation between the militaries and joint cooperation between the two countries.

Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, if the parliamentary secretary had courteously been listening to all my speech, he would have understood that I had already covered that aspect. But I extended the courtesy to him of allowing an intervention.

The worst aspect is that people on those coastal areas, whether they are the fishermen or the Aboriginal communities, think that we on the east coast are indifferent to the problem and do not care. I want to place on record that I do care. It is a decade-old problem. It should be tackled. It is a disgrace that it has not been. Again, if you think one patrol boat from the Australian Navy and one from Indonesia will solve the problem, you have rocks in your head. I would love to be able to pose a question to the parliamentary secretary, but the forms of the House do not let me. In the last 10 years that Mr Downer has been Minister for Foreign Affairs—

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It would be possible for you to finish your speech and then—

Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have a good understanding of the standing orders, thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I want to make this point. Mr Downer has been Minister for Foreign Affairs for 10 years. How many times has he or have his officials—or his embassy officials in Indonesia, in Jakarta—raised this issue? How vigorously have they been pursuing it?

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I can answer that across the chamber. Numerous.

Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You have been terribly effective, that is all I can say, when you get a 35 per cent increase in one year to 13,000 sightings!

Let me finish. The opposition is supporting this bill. I would very much welcome a situation where we can have a further debate about this matter and on both sides of the House agree that we have made great strides in killing this off and protecting Western Australian fishermen and Aboriginal communities in relation to their livelihood and their safety—and also protecting the pearling industry. I think I will have a long wait.

Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

in reply—I thank all those who have spoken today in the Main Committee in support of the Fisheries Legislation Amendment (Cooperative Fisheries Arrangements and Other Matters) Bill 2005: the member for O’Connor, the member for Lyons, the member for Kennedy—who I trust did speak on the bill; there was some doubt earlier—the member for Chisholm and the member for Chifley. I recognise the impassioned support that people opposite have brought to this place about the plight of those suffering at the hands of illegal fishers in Australia’s northern waters, but I do not think that the member for Chifley gave due recognition to the foreign minister’s efforts in this area and I would like to reiterate that the foreign minister has returned from Jakarta and has today launched a joint military initiative. Our departments of foreign affairs, environment, agriculture and defence are absolutely red hot on this issue. However, the matter of illegal fishing is not what this bill was about, so I want to return to briefly sum up on the bill that we have on the table.

The bill contains a number of important amendments to the fisheries act which will strengthen domestic fisheries management arrangements. It will provide increased certainty for stakeholders regarding the government’s fisheries management objectives. It will also improve the cooperative fisheries management arrangements between Australian jurisdictions, which will help ensure that effective, up-to-date fisheries management arrangements can be implemented in Australian fisheries.

The new fisheries arrangement mechanisms have been developed in association with industry—that is very important—and will be implemented on a case-by-case basis through stakeholder consultation and will be subject to the agreement of relevant Australian, state and Northern Territory ministers. The amendments to the fisheries act contained in this bill are wholly related to the management and jurisdictional arrangements for domestic fisheries. I am confident that these legislative changes will improve the general management of Australia’s marine resources and help ensure that our fisheries are managed sustainably and profitably over the long term. I commend the bill to the House.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Ordered that the bill be reported to the House without amendment.