Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I cannot say I have much enthusiasm to jump Senator Macdonald. I was keen to hear what he had to say about this. But that is all right; I will go first. The Fisheries Legislation Amendment (Foreign Fishing Offences) Bill 2006 predominately deals with custodial penalties for foreign fishing offences in those parts of the Australian territorial sea that are within what is known as the Australian fishing zone. As I understand it, the waters that become subject to the proposed custodial penalties as a result of this legislation are those that are between three and 12 nautical miles offshore from the Australian mainland or from most islands, including those in the Torres Strait.

The Democrats, along with, I imagine, pretty much everybody in this parliament, have a concern about illegal fishing in Australian waters, particularly in respect of the environmental impact of uncontrolled or unregulated fishing. We have a concern in some areas, certainly not universally, about the environmental impacts of some legally authorised fishing as well. It is wider than just saying all environmental problems are due to illegal people and everything else is fine. Nonetheless, illegal fishing is a significant problem and one that does need to be dealt with more effectively. It is, of course, almost impossible to eliminate. I think we need to acknowledge and be realistic about that. But at the same time we need to do all that is reasonably possible to reduce its impact and extent.

The main aspect of this legislation is to deal with bringing in custodial penalties. That is an aspect that I have mixed views on in relation to the people that are likely to be predominantly caught by it and also how much actual practical benefit it will bring, purely based on a cost-benefit analysis and leaving aside the human consequences for those that get caught. There is also the issue of the disparity that will still be in place. These penalties will not apply for those areas outside the Australian fishing zone, further out into the exclusive economic zone, the EEZ, which goes out to 200 nautical miles. Custodial penalties will not apply in those areas because that would be not in compliance with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Article 73 of that convention requires that:

Coastal State penalties for violations of fisheries laws ... may not include imprisonment—

for areas in the EEZ—

in the absence of agreements to the contrary by the States concerned ...

I did find it interesting to discover when looking at this area that we do not have such an agreement with Indonesia. I am a bit perplexed about why that is. I am sure Senator Macdonald, with his experience in this, would be able to tell us why. It is obviously crucial for us in making significant progress in reducing illegal fishing in Australian waters to have as much cooperation as possible from Indonesia in particular and also from some other countries in the region, most notably PNG, and further afield. But Indonesia is critical in this regard.

An aspect that also concerns me is that predominantly it will be poorer Indonesian fishing folk who will be likely to be caught up in the custodial aspects of this legislation. I am not convinced that locking up a lot of not terribly well-off Indonesian fishermen is necessarily going to lead to a dramatic increase in the environmental benefit, not just from the Australian point of view—environmental benefit is from everybody’s point of view. I note the comments made by Mr Wilson Tuckey, the member for O’Connor, in the other place in his speech on this legislation. He said:

… for the lesser individual, the crewman, this process of incarceration has not worked.

We do currently have scope for incarceration in some state waters, out to the three-mile limit. As I said, there are already some crewmen locked up as a result of fishing offences. I note Mr Tuckey’s view that that has not worked. I presume when he says that it has not worked he means that it has not provided an adequate disincentive to have a significant impact in reducing the extent of illegal fishing. I certainly find that a useful assessment of his. If that is the case, as he states, then I am not sure that expanding the number of people likely to be locked up or the length of time they are likely to be locked up for will be a net positive gain for Australia.

Leaving aside an examination of the human impact of locking up some of the poorer people and looking at it in terms of a purely dispassionate cost-benefit analysis of the extra expense to Australia of imprisoning people—which is usually not that cheap—and the overall net gain, as a consequence of that, with regard to reduced problems from illegal fishing, I am not necessarily convinced that that is the best way for our resources to be devoted. I am not just saying, ‘It’s terrible to lock people up and we shouldn’t do it,’ although I am not saying it is good to lock people up either; I am also saying that I am not convinced that being more hardline with imprisonment is the best way to direct our resources.

Clearly that is not the only area to which we are directing our resources, and I am not suggesting that it is; I am merely expressing my lack of certainty that this will be a particularly useful piece of legislation or the best way to direct our resources. I am sure it will be useful in a political sense. It is always useful to governments, when there is an issue of people infringing on an area, to say: ‘We’re going to be tough on this. We’re going to lock people up. We’re going to take a more hardline approach.’ When looking at the federal parliamentary arena, I often get the sense that, whilst in the broad, most people prefer to have the more national scope for taking on issues compared to the restrictions of people in the state parliamentary arena, sometimes there is a bit of wistfulness from some that they do not really get as much chance to jump on the law-and-order bandwagon as much as their state colleagues.

I occasionally see that they would love more of a chance to jump on the law-and-order bandwagon, do some chest beating and say: ‘We’re being tough on this. We’re locking people up.’ Obviously there is still some scope to do that, as we all know. Those chances are often taken wherever possible. It seems to be an almost irresistible instinct of politicians at all levels, wherever they can, to jump on the law-and-order bandwagon as a way of looking like they are tackling a problem. Again, I am not saying that such approaches are ineffective all the time. But I can certainly say that there are many times when they are not effective—sometimes they are completely counterproductive. I think we could be much more judicious with regard to that.

So there may be some political benefit in looking tougher in this area. I am not convinced that it will actually have a positive benefit in the area we are trying to deal with. It seems perplexing to me that there appears to be such a difficulty in detecting illegal fishing—and not just the act of illegal fishing. There are numerous reports—sufficiently numerous so that I find it difficult to believe that they are all made up—of many illegal fishing people stopping on Australian soil for a break, to recuperate and the like, before going back out to sea. Obviously there are issues there in terms of quarantine and other matters, but for me it is more a somewhat sad irony, I suppose. For all the farcical ranting that we have about border security and asylum seekers—who, of course, have nothing to do with border security at all because they pose no challenge to our security—we are somehow incapable of stopping fishing people from getting to Australia. And we are incapable of stopping them illegally operating in Australian waters. But as soon as there are refugees on these boats, we have the Navy at our disposal to go charging all around the place trying to stop them getting here.

Maybe if the fisheries department just pretended that these were not fishing people, that they were refugees, then they would be able to detect them all immediately. We seem to be quite happy to lock up refugees for many years at a time, certainly much longer than we lock up fishing people, so I am amazed that the fisheries department has not taken that approach. They might suddenly find themselves more able to detect all of these fishing people in Australian waters. It is astonishing that there can be literally thousands of illegal fishing vessels in Australian waters that we are not able to detect but, as soon as there are asylum seekers on a vessel, the Navy gets called out.

We have all of those resources used to grab a few refugees who present no threat to Australia at all, who do not challenge our borders and who do not impact on border security, but we cannot use those resources to deal with what is a threat to some extent. It is not a border security threat in any true meaning of the words—not that this government worries about the true meanings of words, of course—but there are certainly threats with regard to quarantine and impact on the environment, and to some extent there are economic threats. We do not have the resources available for that, but we can bring out the Navy to deal with asylum seekers.

I guess that shows the reality of this government’s priorities. But a bit of legislation saying that we are being tougher by locking up a few poor fishermen is not necessarily an adequate response, from my point of view. I suggest we redivert some of the literally hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone into intercepting asylum seekers and put that towards intercepting and dealing with fishing vessels. I am sure that when Senator Ian Macdonald was the relevant minister he would have loved to have had a few extra hundred million dollars to deal with this issue rather than them being diverted to deal with asylum seekers. It is a bit of a shame that we have those distorted priorities, but I guess that is a reality we have been living with in the political arena in Australia for some years.

To conclude, on behalf of the Democrats I voice my scepticism about how effective this will be and I reinforce the point and join with all speakers, I suspect, in this debate in seeking to ensure we have more effective activities to reduce the amount of illegal fishing in Australian waters. It is important that we do have more successes in that regard. I do not dispute that other resources have been put into this area, some of which have had some effect. However, more needs to be done in that respect and I would suggest that there are better ways of directing resources than will be taken up as a consequence of legislation like this.