Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to share with the chamber my adventure last Friday down on west Swanson Dock in Victoria, in Melbourne, alongside Senator Tony Sheldon. We joined the International Transport Workers Federation inspectors. These inspectors go onto the foreign flagged ships, these flags-of-convenience ships, and check on a myriad of employment and living conditions for the seafarers. Sadly, the ITF's campaign, Nowhere to Hide, says it all.

I was on a Chinese flagged container ship, and I joined Mr Christian Roos from Belgium, one of the senior inspectors and a 27-year legend at this game. This is a ship that carts on the Australian coast. It starts its voyages in Shanghai and goes down to Taiwan and then into Sydney and Melbourne and then does the round between Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. There are thousands and thousands of tonnes coming into this nation.

We'd love to know the clients—companies that espouse that they wouldn't dare buy unethical furniture or wood products from certain parts of the world. They certainly wouldn't partake into exploitation of children in Bangladesh and buying clothes from these sweat factories. But they're happy to turn a blind eye to the exploitation of foreign seafarers along our coastline, plying freight into our ports. It's sad to say that back in 1996, under the Howard government, there were 96 Australian flagged vessels on our coast, but we now have 13. I could go on all day.

Congratulations to the ITF. Congratulations to Ian Bray and his team. It is more important now than ever that we honour the promise of the Albanese government that, when we got into government, we would have a strategic fleet that would give the opportunity for Australian flagged vessels with Australian workers paying tax in Australia.