Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak to the Maritime Transport and Offshore Facilities Security Amendment (Inter-State Voyages) Bill 2015. The Australian Greens are opposed to this bill, because we believe the government is yet to make the case for loosening the regulations on registered Australian vessels engaged in interstate trade. It is significant that there is still confusion and a lack of clarity as to why this measure is required in the context that has just been outlined by Senator Collins. It is a context when the job security of people in our Australian shipping industry is under attack like at few times in our history.

I think back to the Patrick's waterfront dispute of the late nineties, which was just down the road from my home in Footscray, when we had security guards in balaclavas locking out workers in an attempt to increase profits. The Melbourne community, the Australian community, rallied around the seafarers and the people working on the ports then and we managed to get change, and managed to maintain, largely, the conditions and the ability for people working in our maritime industries to be able to be paid a fair day's wage and have fair conditions for their work.

What happened on the docks then was supported by the Liberal government of the time; in fact, they were intimately involved with it. Fast forward to 2016 and you have the disgraceful removal of Australian workers who were on board MV Portland over the summer. In the middle of the night, Alcoa's hired goons boarded the ship, kicked off the Australian crew and replaced them with a foreign crew, who immediately set sail for Singapore. This foreign crew, we have heard, were being paid $6 an hour. We know that foreign crews on flags-of-convenience vessels sailing around Australia have been paid as little as $2 an hour.

The crew members of the MV Portland, who were kicked off their ship, are actually in Canberra at the moment. I had the privilege of meeting with some of them yesterday and I understand they are out the front of Parliament House today, and they are telling their stories to politicians. Yesterday, I met with three of the MV Portland crew. I met Liam, who had been on the MV Portlandfor 11 years; Zac, a young seafarer, who was hoping to build his career in seafaring over the coming years and who now faces very bleak prospects of being able to find employment in the industry; and Brett, who lives in Portland. When I asked Brett how he saw his chances of regaining a job in the shipping industry, he thought that he did not have many chances at all.

These are skilled Australian workers. These are people who have spent many years building their skills who are proud of being hardworking Australian seafarers. For someone like Brett, who has spent his life working to build up his skills and who now has very limited prospects of being able to find another job in the shipping industry, it is a very, very sad for him. These are real people. They have real families. They now do not know what their prospects will be and what job opportunities there are for them. There are not many jobs in Portland.

The government actions in supporting the actions of Alcoa in removing these workers from their ship in the middle of the night are not helping the opportunities of these workers to be able to contribute to Australian society. They have real families. They have real mortgages and real commitments. Basically, the reason they were removed from their ship was that they were sacked for being Australians. They were sacked and all they were doing was doing their job and doing it well, and being part of the Australian transport industry. They were sacked because the government agreed with Alcoa that the ship they were on was no longer required and was going to be replaced by a ship that was operating under a flag of convenience, a foreign owned ship, on a temporary licence.

The issue with these temporary licences is that they clearly undermine the full intent of the coastal shipping legislation that we currently have to hand, where the minister is actually meant to be acting to protect Australian shipping. But every time the request for a temporary licence has been put to him, he has signed it off. In this case, and in the case of the other ship over summer that has now been replaced by a foreign ship sailing on a temporary licence, the minister could have said, no, that there was not a strong enough case to show how replacing these Australian flagged and Australian crewed ships with a foreign ship operating under a flag of convenience was in the interests of Australian shipping.

Basically, because the criteria for whether a temporary licence should be issued is that there is no Australian ship available to do the job that is cost competitive, any request for a temporary licence for a foreign ship is always going to outcompete the Australian owned ship—because with the Australian flagged ship we know that we have to pay our workers a fair rate of pay. We know that they have to have good working conditions, whereas when you are competing with foreign ships you have workers being exploited and paid two dollars an hour under atrocious conditions. Environmental standards are being exploited and are totally lax. We know, with very good evidence, of rubbish being thrown overboard and oil spills not being reported. When you are competing with all this there is no way that a well-managed, Australian-crewed, Australian-flagged ship is going to be able to be cost competitive—so the temporary licence gets issued. You cannot be competitive with that sort of appalling regime.

We know that since the MV Portland was replaced three ships so far have done the journey from Kwinana to Portland. Of those three ships, one is under investigation for corruption and one is facing charges of not having paid their seafarers. These are the sorts of ships that are replacing our Australian crewed and Australian flagged ships. These are the sorts of ships that mean we are looking to replace virtually all the ships in the Australian shipping industry. It is an absolute travesty. Here in Australia we are the fourth-largest users of ships in the world and yet we have this government's approach to shipping. They attempted—and failed—to get legislation through the Senate to deregulate the shipping industry, and now they are working with industry to undermine the intent of the existing legislation.

It really is a sign of things to come. The decline in Australia shipping could be arrested, but the legacy of this government seems to be that it is going to destroy Australian shipping. The decline could be arrested. The way to arrest it, the way to revitalise and rebuild Australian shipping, is to provide some certainty to the industry and to be working together, as the MUA and the maritime industries of Australia have been trying to do over the past months with the shipping summits that have been held in Melbourne—trying to bring all players together to work out what the future is for Australia's shipping and how we can rebuild it; rather than the government's agenda, which is basically to say goodbye to it.

There are really good reasons for maintaining the Australian shipping industry, and yet Australian seafarers and Australian shipping have been kicked in the guts and kicked off their ship. This industrial thuggery has been aided and abetted by the Liberal government, who are wanting to deregulate the Australian shipping industry into oblivion. When the local industry most needs our support, the Liberal government is trying to kick it when it is down.

It is a case that is characteristic of this government. It is not just the shipping industry. Whether it is with the Australian Building and Construction Commission or attempts to cut penalty rates, we are seeing attacks on Australian workers throughout the country. These cases show that it is not just limited to the land; we have it happening on land and at sea. So, when the government is talking about loosening regulations and cutting red tape, the Australian people have very strong grounds for scepticism when it comes to this Liberal government.

With regard to the legislation that is before us, I acknowledge that the minister has stated his intention to continue to regulate passenger and vehicle interstate transport, but we are not convinced. As it stands, the security measures in the Maritime Transport and Offshore Facilities Security Act only apply to registered Australian ships that are used for either interstate or overseas voyages, but there is no regulation for intrastate voyages. So currently a journey from Portland in Victoria to Kwinana in Western Australia is covered, but not a trip from Portland to Melbourne. The original bill to create Maritime Transport and Offshore Facilities Security Act in 2003 failed to justify why this was the case.

The Australian Greens broadly agree that it is difficult to argue as to why a ship operating between Portland and Fremantle needs to have extra security regulations compared to a ship voyaging between Portland and Melbourne, as there are not radically different security regimes between the states. However, there are real concerns that this is yet another attempt by the government to lead a race to the bottom by gutting regulations and endangering people at work.

When this government was headed by the member for Warringah, Tony Abbott, we became familiar with, but always dismayed by, the haphazard approach to policymaking of introducing new regulations or tearing up old ones without recourse to evidence or due process. There were high hopes that Tony Abbott's replacement as Prime Minister would relieve us of this approach, but every day, and on every issue, it becomes clear that it is the same old Liberals under Prime Minister Turnbull.

If we want to ensure that regulations are coherent across the country, ensure the safety of people at work and ensure our security, there is another way to do this: we could broaden the regulations to vessels on intrastate voyages and ensure that all vessels, regardless of country of registration, comply with the same standards. The government's logic has the capacity to be extended in both directions. But, for the bill before us today, the Australian Greens feel that the government has simply failed to make the case that this change balances the competing needs of maritime workers, shippers, Australia's international obligations and the broader Australian community, and that is why the Australian Greens will be opposing this bill.