Lee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens do support the Transport Safety Investigation Amendment Bill 2012. If there are many people listening to this debate, having listened to Senator Joyce you might have wondered if we were back speaking about the supertrawler. I think the fact that he spent so much time berating some of his favourite issues rather than dealing with the essence of the bill and the important safety measures it covers was informative about how the coalition works.

The Greens, as I mentioned, do support the bill, but we think it is one where we need to see how it plays out. In essence, what we have here is that we will have nationally consistent laws covering maritime safety, rail safety and the safety of transport in general. The Greens certainly acknowledge that enormous work has been put into all sectors that make up our transport industry in this country and the various governments at different levels.

What we have seen from various times when there were attempts to homogenise our laws across this country is that there can be a dumbing-down of safety, and that is where we really do need to watch how this plays out. Certainly the minister has given great emphasis that it is about improving safety, and that is certainly what we hope is the outcome here. What we really need to now watch is how the Australian Transport Safety Bureau undertakes its work, because a key part of this legislation is the creation of this body. The body will cover the national rail safety regulator. I note that part of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's work is that state and territory ministers can request that the bureau conducts an investigation in their jurisdiction. I think that is a very important aspect of the bill and do hope that a number of those jurisdictions take it up. What could be another very useful aspect to the work of the bureau is in terms of the information that it collates, because it does have considerable power in accessing information and generating its own data. Hopefully, this will provide various benchmarks for how we can improve safety within our rail system and also identify safety developments and trends in different jurisdictions so that we can improve in this area.

As so many of my Greens colleagues have said in many debates on climate change, transport issues in general and also equity issues, public transport needs to be vastly improved. It needs to be expanded. The 21st century should be the century of public transport, because it will be the way that we can make our cities, our regional areas and our whole country much more liveable. The environmental benefits are enormous. We know that the carbon footprint of public transport is much smaller, and what needs to go hand in hand with that is top safety provisions.

Another interesting aspect of the bureau is its reporting. This is another area in which the Greens will be interested to learn more about how it will work once the bureau gets going. Some of the bureau's reporting can be confidential, and there is certainly often a justification for that. But, as we know, that can also often be a means to reduce transparency—and transparency is important if we are going to have a culture where safety is paramount and it is not relegated in a way that the profits can be increased or so-called productivity can be increased at the expense of the safety of passengers, workers and all the other people involved in this industry.

Overall, we are hopeful that this legislation will bring great benefits to maritime, aviation, rail and other transport industries. It is one to be watched closely because the benefits are considerable, but we need to ensure that at no point do we go backwards now that we are moving from, I think, more than 20 regulators to only three regulators. So, again, the Greens are happy to support this legislation, but we will certainly watch how it plays out in our different sectors of transport around the country.