Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Road Safety) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, I find that bitterly disappointing. I find that the height of hypocrisy when we're discussing a bill that goes to 'clamping down on crims and drugs coming into our nation'. I asked a simple question of the minister and the department officials, or the ministerial officials sitting there. You're pushing a bill down the throat of this Senate on falsehoods. The minister can stand at the table and read her notes—I'm not blaming the minister; she's just parroting them—and tell me: 'Nothing gets past us. We would know. There was nothing on Captain Salas.' I have just laid out what I know, what the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee in the Senate knows, and what all of us who have sat there know—and, Senator Sheldon, thank goodness you've joined us in the last couple of years too. I asked a very simple question on national security, and I stand here gobsmacked that I'm now to be shut down, pushed off; that hopefully I'll go away; that maybe the tucker bell will ring and I forgot to pick up my pie and it will be all over by the time I get back.

I'm giving you the opportunity, Minister, to please either correct the record or put someone in a headlock in the adviser's box and send them upstairs. I cannot let go of the fact that I asked a very simple question. I outlined my concerns and you very clearly answered them: 'Every list that comes off that vessel, whether it be 48 hours or 24 hours, nothing gets past us.' The ABF have their assessments and their range of whatever it was that you said, yet Captain Salas had two years—or two voyages, or whatever it was—in which someone mysteriously fell overboard, two people were murdered on the vessel and there was a confession to gun running. Two years later, Owen Jacques, a reporter with News Corp, brings to my attention that it's not Salas's first trip and that he's coming into Gladstone, as Senator Keneally clearly outlined: Gladstone, Weipa, there are a couple of things. I ask a simple question and, Minister, you can't answer. You are far more intelligent than the persona you've just portrayed to me. You know I always give credit where credit is due. I said very clearly that the chameleon in this place is in another portfolio at the moment. That whole office knows darn well every secret—every dirty, filthy and sordid detail—of this shocking bit of our maritime history. Yet no-one can give me an honest answer.

I say to the people of Australia and I say to the crossbench—I don't have to say it to the Greens or Labor, because we've got it—please get me by the nose and take me in a direction that tells me I've got this wrong—'you' being the LNP Morrison government; we'll forget the dopey Nat half—that this is a massive plus to stop criminality and the influx of illicit drugs coming through our ports. I'm not even talking about aviation. There may be the odd stupid idiot who tries to smuggle something through in an envelope or their bags, but both you and I know, as does everyone in this building, that these drugs are coming on foreign flagged vessels crewed by foreign captains and exploited foreign seafarers.

There's a terrible exploitation of the temporary voyage permit in this nation. When Mr Howard was the Prime Minister and this nonsense first started: if you couldn't find an Australian flagged vessel, you'd go and find a foreign vessel, 'because we've got to move the freight'. We dopey ones thought, 'That sounds fair; we don't want to stop productivity in this nation,' when we should have realised that was the thin edge of the exploitation. We had 95 Australian flagged vessels when Mr Howard was the Prime Minister. Do you know how many we have now? 13.

I asked a very simple question: should every single Australian believe the Morrison LNP government says, 'Nothing gets past us; we know who's coming to these shores. We get a list'? How wrong could you be? 'We get a list, and not only that but it's an email list and it's come to us from 48 hours earlier. Guess what? There were no red flags.' No red flags? You couldn't even find a confessed gun runner who had been working on our shores, in and out, for two years. Who the hell's feet do I lay the blame at? Should I stand here and belittle the poor devils trying to make this crap ball work at the ABF or the Australian Federal Police? No. I think they do a magnificent job. But this government comes in here to pull the wool over the eyes of the Australian people, and you dare go out there and you attack Labor: that we're soft on drug importers because we want to do this properly. You bag us, because we're saying, 'If you're fair dinkum, go all the way.' How can you convince the Australian public that when you stand up there and say you're strong on drugs and you're strong on crime, and then this side of the parliament, Labor and the Greens, and some of the crossbenchers, say, 'Good. Flow that toughness on to the foreign seafarers, the foreign captains, the exploited ones and the ones who may not have had a red flag in 48 hours'?

After all the work I've done on this committee in 16 years—I've sat on eight inquiries into maritime—do you think I'm going to be fooled? Do you think the Australian people are going to be fooled because you people gave us a nod and a wink?

So I will ask one more time, Minister. I will give you the opportunity now that hopefully there's been a flurry of paperwork around. Can you please explain to the Senate and to the good people of Australia how the hell you could look us in the eye and tell us that there were no red flags on Captain Salas, two years after one of his crew went overboard, two years after two deaths on the same voyage, on the Sage Sagittariusthat he's coming to our shores and you don't know?