Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Maritime Transport and Offshore Facilities Security Amendment (Security Plans and Other Measures) Bill 2006 amends the Maritime Transport and Offshore Facilities Security Act 2003. It does so to simplify the procedures for changing maritime offshore facilities security plans and to make various technical amendments to clarify the intent of the 2003 act. As such, it deals with the framework of regulations which safeguard against unlawful interference with maritime transport or offshore facilities.

With the close proximity of this debate to the fifth anniversary of the events of September 2001, this bill may be seen as very appropriate in tightening up our maritime security. Indeed, it is. This bill makes some valid and long overdue improvements to our maritime security and, if we think about it, maritime security is indeed very important. One shudders to think what might happen if maritime security were breached by a boatload of explosives.

In my own electorate in the Northern Territory, one can only imagine the horrendous potential of a security breach with any of the now numerous liquid natural gas ships that load up not far from Darwin city. Just over the harbour, you can sit down and dine on the Darwin wharf with LNG ships loading just over the other side of the harbour at the Bechtel plant on Wickham Point.

So maritime security is essential, and it is not to the government’s credit that there are many areas of maritime security where it has been lacking. The government has been lacking in allowing vessels carrying ammonium nitrate to move around our coast and our ports, as my colleague Senator Sterle so aptly described. These are foreign flagged vessels with foreign crews who are given minimal, if any, security checks. It is indeed ironic to think of these flag of convenience vessels moving around quite freely with holds full of ammonium nitrate and minimal security checks on crews, but heaven help any individual who buys it in bulk without good reason once that cargo is unloaded—ASIO will be on their doorstep in very quick time.

Considering the potential of ammonium nitrate as an explosive agent, this lack of checking on foreign vessels and crews is unforgivable in this day and age. With the international shipping market being wide open, any terrorist group with the funds could, it would seem, charter a vessel from a foreign owner and go wherever it liked—certainly into Australia, with our lack of security checking of crews. Put such a vessel together with a hold full of ammonium nitrate and you have a sailing bomb moving around with minimal checks, all but free to sail into whichever Australian port it decides on.

The Labor Party has long been calling for improvements to our maritime security, but with little or no recognition from this government to date. We therefore welcome this bill, although it falls far short of meeting all of our concerns. With the help and support of Labor, this government was able to enact legislation requiring all ships entering Australian ports to give 48 hours notice about details of their cargo and crew. Despite this, recent information given to the Senate was that only about two-thirds of the vessels entering our ports actually comply with this requirement. So this government has totally failed to enforce compliance with this part of our legislation dealing with maritime security. It seems, like so many other pieces of legislation forced through by this government, these requirements are poorly administered and implemented. My various speeches and comments on Indigenous education in the last 18 months indicate that this is another area that lacks such detail.

In the United States they have a similar requirement of all vessels entering their ports. Any such vessel failing to give details of cargo and crew 48 hours ahead of arrival is simply not allowed in. Instead, it is required to anchor offshore. If need be, the US Coast Guard makes sure the vessel does not get close to port. Here, we do little or nothing and we have no coastguard anyway.

So one-third of ships entering our ports do not comply with the requirement of giving details of cargo and crew. They could be carrying anything, and the crew could be legitimate or illegitimate—indeed, they could be terrorists. One-third of ships have no checks carried out before getting alongside the wharf, and many of the others have minimal crew checks anyway. This is doubly ironic when one considers what checks Australian maritime and port workers have to go through to get their security card in order to work on a ship or in the dockside area. But foreign crews seem to get away with little or no checking. Who knows who is entering our ports, and anyone wishing to do so for illegitimate purposes will do so and may well be away from the ship before their identity is discovered. As was said by my colleague the honourable member for Batman in the debate in the other place, flag of convenience crews are, frankly, floating terrorist opportunities to do serious damage to Australia.

To make things even worse is the fact that when cargo is unloaded, only about 10 per cent is actually X-rayed to check its contents. This must be one of the lowest ratios in the developed world. Again, if I may use figures from my colleague the member for Batman, in Hong Kong, certainly one of the busiest ports in the world, up to 100 per cent of containers unloaded are X-rayed—a major difference between them and us. We can only wonder why an equal proportion could not be X-rayed in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, for example.

But an equally poor failing from the point of view, certainly, of my electorate in the Northern Territory is the government’s failure to properly police and secure our northern waters. The situation in our northern waters has gone from bad to worse over the past couple of years, with more illegal vessels being sighted but a decreasing proportion being stopped or caught.

This government has been very well aware of this worsening situation but has steadfastly refused to consider options such as paying Indigenous marine rangers to do that sort of job or setting up a proper coastguard. Instead, it has consistently claimed that our security is good, that we are detaining boats and illegal fishers. But the truth is that more and more boats are entering our waters, plundering our fishing stocks and often, it seems, landing on Australian soil and seriously threatening our biodiversity and security with quarantine risks.

The truth of the matter is that under this government our coastline has been and remains extremely vulnerable. The government policy that is in place simply is not working efficiently or effectively. Authorities are unable to track illegal vessels or to reach them in time to take any action. Last year alone, 13,000 illegal vessels were sighted in Australian waters, but only 609 of those were apprehended or detained—let alone those that get right in close to our shores, in the mangroves or up the rivers, as we have seen and heard reported time and time again by our Indigenous marine rangers in places such as Maningrida and Groote Eylandt. Any of those vessels could have had people come ashore and enter our country illegally. Most probably, that has happened.

What this government has done is to have the occasional blitz on illegals, catch a group of them and then turn the event into a media stunt, just as it has done with the odd burning of boats and those ceremonies along our northern shores. As reported on the ABC news back on 9 May, Customs caught 12 boats in the Gulf of Carpentaria in the previous fortnight. That was good, and we are sure Customs are doing their best with the resources they have, but how many other boats were in the gulf that were not caught? An average of over 30 a day are spotted across the top—in a fortnight, that could be as many as 500—but only 12 were detained.

I emphasise again that I fully agree with my NT colleague in the other place in saying that both Navy and Customs are doing their very best, in a very professional manner. There has been many a time that I have had a briefing at NORCOM or have been with Coastwatch and had an opportunity to witness the way in which these people work. But they do it with limited resources for the total job on hand and for what is expected by the Australian community.

The government has changed coastal surveillance and now has more aerial surveillance flights with the sophisticated Orion aircraft, but this will just mean that they spot more, not catch more or stop them from coming. Illegal incursions by foreign fishing vessels are at record levels and appear to be on the rise. This threatens not only the NT Fisheries resources but our national security and biodiversity.

The Labor caucus Transport and Maritime Security Taskforce, who have spent some time over the recent months investigating and reporting on this matter, described in their report Maritime security and illegal fishing: a national disgrace the situation where illegal fishing has become a highly organised, sophisticated and criminal activity. Vessels are now being used more and more, and modern ships are equipped with modern technology—they know precisely where they are at all times. They are not innocent traditional fishermen anymore. Evidence given to the caucus task force was that as many as nine out of every 10 illegal fishing trips are in fact successful, so in most incursions into Australian waters these vessels could be up to anything, in addition to the illegal fishing that is occurring.

The real truth is that anyone could be entering our nation via the sea and our coast. They could be doing so on vessels carrying anything from high explosives to rocket launchers, to rabid dogs or other major diseases. And of course all of this has been helped along quite nicely by the Howard government allowing Aussie flagged and crewed vessels to fall by the wayside and to be replaced by these foreign-crewed flag of convenience vessels. This has all been part of this government’s campaign against Aussie workers. These ships have been allowed to replace Aussie ships around our coastline on a regular basis, in the process sacrificing the safety of our sea lanes and ports.

Thank goodness that up to now an exception has been on the LNG vessels working on the North West Shelf. There Australian tankers are crewed by Australians, with a strong commitment to best-practice safety and security procedures. This stands us in good stead not only at home but in the trade of LNG, where we are reputed to be good, safe and reliable carriers of this product. However, we also need to ensure the security of not just the LNG vessels and the Wickham Point gasworks but also, of course, the many oil rigs based off our coast.

If all vessels were forced to report details of cargo and crew 48 hours before entering any port, this might also help to further protect the safety of our offshore rigs. This could be done if only this government would listen and form a coastguard service. We seem to follow so many other things the Americans do; why not this? Maybe because it is a Labor idea, and the government is too strong-headed to adopt this one. The Navy is here to protect our nation from hostile actions, not from illegal fishing and foreign-crewed flag of convenience cargo vessels roaming our shores.

Maybe if we had a coastguard we could enforce these laws. We could ensure that vessels reported details of crew and cargo 48 hours in advance, or we could force them to anchor offshore, as is done by our American allies. We could check out many more of those vessels spotted in our waters, often illegally fishing but also potentially bringing in undesirable illegal entrants. We have a coastline of around 37,000 kilometres. We absolutely rely on maritime transport for most imports and exports. We are indeed a maritime nation.

We support this bill but condemn the government for the many failings it has had in maritime security in ensuring the safety of our vessels, our ports and our people. We can only hope that the government will be better at administering this bill than others in the past.

In conclusion, I want to reiterate the second reading amendment that was moved by Senator O’Brien. We suggest that the Senate, in passing this legislation, condemn the Howard government for its failure to provide necessary maritime security and to protect Australians. The government has not done that, because it has failed to conduct security checks on foreign vessels. It continues to fail to ensure that foreign ships provide manifestos of crew and cargo before arriving at an Australian port. There is the ready availability of single and multiple voyage permits for foreign flag of convenience ships, including the ready availability of permits for foreign flag of convenience ships carrying dangerous materials in Australia’s waters and ports. This government has failed to examine or X-ray 90 per cent of shipping containers. It has failed to create a department of homeland security to remove dangerous gaps and to better coordinate security in Australia. Finally, of course, there is this government’s reticence and failure to establish an Australian coastguard, as suggested by the Labor Party, to patrol our coastline.