Mr DANBY (10:01 AM) —I am pleased to rise this morning to support my friend the honourable member for Oxley in his perceptive comments on the Protection of the Sea (Shipping Levy) Amendment Bill 2005. Previous speakers have outlined the general provisions of the bill. It amends the Protection of the Sea (Shipping Levy) Act 1981. The original bill enabled the government to impose a levy on shipping at the rate of 6c per tonne of a ship’s tonnage to fund the national plan to combat pollution of the sea by oil and other noxious and hazardous substances. The original bill was passed with bipartisan support and has generally served the nation well. This bill removes the maximum level of the levy, enabling it to be set by regulation. This will allow the levy to be increased to fund a national approach to maritime emergency towage while still continuing to provide funds for the national plan to combat pollution of the sea.

For a number of reasons, outlined by the member for Oxley, this is a sensible and necessary measure and it has the support of the opposition. Worldwide shipping is growing at an exponential rate, and Australia is a major user of shipping services for both international and domestic trade. As trade will grow, particularly in Australia, there will be more and more use of ships coming through Australian waters. This is particularly true of my home city of Melbourne. This means we need to adopt innovative measures to ensure both maritime safety and environmental protection of our waters and coastlines.

It is essential for Australia’s maritime emergency services that they be maintained at a high state of readiness so that the ever-present threat of a catastrophe, such as the Exxon Valdez, can be prevented. Most Australians live within a short distance of our very long coastlines, which are seeing an ever-increasing volume of shipping as international trade grows. We therefore have a major responsibility to prevent maritime ecological disasters. We must protect national treasures such as the Barrier Reef. I was pleased that my friend the member for Oxley pointed out the very regrettable pollution of the Barrier Reef in 2002 by the Panamanian registered flag of convenience ship the Pacific Quest, which left an oil slick of 70 kilometres along the Barrier Reef. We must do everything possible, including passing this bill—and the member for Oxley suggested an amendment—to prevent that type of incident occurring in the future.

It is appropriate that these services be paid for by the shipping industry itself through this levy, and it is also appropriate that the government have the power to vary the rate of the levy so that it produces enough revenue to meet the need for maritime emergency services and to prevent pollution of our maritime environment by oil spills and other discharges from ships in Australian waters.

It is commendable that the member for Oxley has taken such a close interest in this subject, since he represents an electorate which has no coastline. I, however, represent a waterfront electorate containing both the great port centre of Port Melbourne and a long stretch of beachfront in Melbourne’s beautiful Port Phillip Bay. My constituents take a close interest both in maritime safety issues, since many of them work in the maritime industry, and in the maritime environment, since they enjoy the beachfront lifestyle in areas like South Melbourne, Middle Park, Albert Park, St Kilda and Elwood. They do not want to see a maritime environmental disaster such as an oil spill in the enclosed waters of Port Phillip Bay.

I agree with the comments of the member for Oxley that, while we support this bill, we have some doubts that the government will carry through their good intentions. This government have shown in the past that their relationship with some shipowners and stevedoring companies is far too cosy for the national good. To make this arrangement work, the government need to cooperate with industry, unions and state governments. But this government’s record is not one of cooperation with state governments and certainly not with unions. It is one of special deals for some corporate friends, especially in the maritime industry, where some people in particular are very high on the list. For example, the government tell us they will undertake a roll-out of upgraded emergency maritime towage operations at strategic locations around the Australian coastline. They have committed to consulting with the industry on that roll-out of the national emergency towage scheme, including identifying the locations of these operations.

No-one knows the Australian maritime environment better than the people who work in the maritime industry, including of course the maritime unions. But we know that this government is deeply hostile to the maritime unions. It is true at the moment that the chief object of its hostility—and we see this particularly from the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations—is the CFMEU. But I am sure the minister has not forgotten his predecessor’s and this government’s dislike of the MUA. This is a pity, because I know there are many local leaders of the MUA, particularly in my home city of Melbourne. As far as I am concerned there is no-one who knows more or cares more about maritime safety than they do. If this government is serious about consultation it will swallow its ideological extremism and talk to the people who know the industry and Australia’s maritime environment the best.

The bill provides that the levy will apply uniformly to Australian and foreign flagged vessels. This is an important provision because the share of Australian owned and Australian crewed ships involved in Australia’s shipping industry has steadily declined under this government and so, therefore, has Australia’s ability to protect both maritime safety and the marine and coastal environment, which is increasingly out of our hands and in the hands of foreign shipowners, some of them reputable and some, as you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, less so. It would be interesting to know how many single-voyage permits this government has issued to foreign shipping companies. That is why I asked the Minister for Transport and Regional Services in February 2000 how many single-voyage permits had been issued to single-hulled vessels over the previous five years. Of course, Deputy Speaker, as you know, single-hulled vessels are older kinds of ships which are particularly polluting when they have accidents, because a single hull means that the materials they have inside come straight out. More modern ships are double hulled. The minister has told me, in response to this question:

In other words, the then minister for transport and shipping, the former Deputy Prime Minister, did not know and he was not prepared to find out. In my view, this is a disgraceful state of affairs.

As part of its general policy of undercutting industrial standards and favouring some corporate friends, this government has allowed the least reputable shipping interests to take increasing control of Australia’s maritime trade. These companies, many operating under flags of convenience and therefore in some respects beyond the reach of the law, undercut Australian vessels by paying extremely low wages to their crews, many of them recruited in countries much poorer than Australia. These crews often operate in conditions which would be outlawed in Australia now and in fact would have been outlawed in Australia a century ago, thanks to the actions of Australian trade unions. These companies frequently default, even on the wages they agree to pay, leaving their crews stranded—as we saw recently in Adelaide, where a Filipino crew was left with no money and no redress.

The relevant point in relation to this bill is that these cut-rate shipping owners operating in Australian waters, with little regard for the environment or other standards, are an ongoing concern to this parliament. So while the government, on the one hand, is bringing this bill in with the aim of strengthening maritime safety and protecting our environment, its other policies are working in the opposite direction, making it more likely that sooner or later one of these shonky shippers—say, a single-hulled older ship from one of these flags of convenience countries—will be responsible for a major industrial accident in one of our busy ports or for a major environmental disaster along our coasts.

I want to turn to another aspect of this bill, one that was mentioned by the honourable member for Oxley and also recently by the Leader of the Opposition. This is a national security issue. The sad fact is we live in an age of international terrorism. We know that, after the Bali and Jakarta bombing attacks, regional terrorist groups such as Jemaah Islamiah have made Australia a target. Australia has a long and vulnerable coastline and, as I have outlined, is heavily dependent upon the maritime trade. Few countries are more open to a maritime terrorist attack than Australia. It was therefore shocking to learn that last week an Antiguan flagged vessel with a predominantly Ukrainian crew carried 3,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate between Newcastle and Gladstone.

I have talked about ammonium nitrate in this House before and I will go on doing so until I am satisfied that this threat has been seriously addressed. In fact, I think I was one of the first people to raise this matter in this House. Ammonium nitrate is a common fertiliser and I quite understand that farming interests need to have ready access to it, but in certain circumstances, such as the outbreak of fire on a cargo ship or if it is mixed with fuel oil, it is an explosive of devastating force. It was used by American neo-Nazi Timothy McVeigh to carry out the attack on the public service building in Oklahoma City which killed 168 people. We had two members of the government, the member for Flinders and the member for La Trobe, raise this issue in the newspapers, and perhaps there is some dissent in the government about whether the issue of ammonium nitrate has been properly handled or not. I am pleased to see that, because obviously members of the government place the security of Australians at a very high level, as does the opposition.

Ammonium nitrate does not have to fall into the hands of terrorists to be a threat to Australian lives. Let me relate to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, what happened in Texas in the Port of Galveston in April 1947. A French freighter, the Grandcamp, carrying 7,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate for export to European farmers caught fire and exploded. Another ship moored alongside was also carrying ammonium nitrate and it exploded as well. The resulting explosion broke windows in Houston, 60 miles away. People felt the explosion in Louisiana, 250 kilometres away. In Texas City the blast and resulting fires destroyed most of the town. At least 581 people were killed and more than 5,000 were injured. It was the worst industrial disaster in American history. This is what the shipping of ammonium nitrate can lead to, and there have been a number of other explosions on ships and in ports caused in this way.

The government will reply, of course, that the ways in which ammonium nitrate is handled have changed greatly since 1947 and that Australia has strict regulations which—if observed—make a disaster impossible in Australia. Theoretically I suppose that is true, but the revelation last week that ammonium nitrate is being shipped along the Australian coast by cut-rate shipping companies under flags of convenience makes a mockery of such claims. How can the government regulate the safety procedures of a ship registered in Antigua whose real origins and ownership are unknown—probably there is some shonky shipowner in the Middle East—which is crewed by underpaid Ukrainians who have no knowledge of what they are carrying or how to prevent an industrial catastrophe? Clearly they cannot, and it just shows the lowest common dollar value foolishness that underlies the entire extremist ideology of this government. There should be Australian crews who have some knowledge of safety managing the Australian coastal trade, not the kind of ship that I have just outlined, carrying ammonium nitrate.

This situation is made even more urgent by the security environment in which Australia finds itself now. It would not be very difficult for Jemaah Islamiah or some other group to take control of one of these foreign owned and foreign crewed ships, full of ammonium nitrate or some other dangerous cargo, and make use of it in an attack on an Australian port. After September 11, Madrid and London, is there anyone prepared to say that this is impossible? I have great confidence in our intelligence services and police preventing an attack on Australians. I believe—and it is a well-informed belief—that they have been very effective in preventing the infiltration of terrorist cells into Australia. But their work is made more difficult by a government which is so keen to please some of its friends in the stevedoring and shipping industries that it fails to take elementary precautions such as banning the carriage of ammonium nitrate by ships operating under flags of convenience.

The minister has advised me that the Australian Customs Service records the identity of all crews entering Australia from a port overseas and that it maintains these records on its database. But, as we have seen in recent times, this provides no real guarantee that the people intent on carrying out a terrorist attack will not succeed in getting themselves onto a freighter. None of the September 11 terrorists showed up on the databases of US security services when they entered the US, and they walked onto airliners on 11 September with no difficulty. Does the government really claim that it can investigate the background of every crew member of every foreign flagged ship that enters Australian waters? If it does make this claim, I for one am not persuaded.

Earlier this year I asked the minister a detailed question about the shipping of ammonium nitrate in Australian waters. He advised me of the measures which the government had taken to regulate this, including on foreign flagged vessels. Of course I do not assert that nothing has been done to prevent the possibility of an ammonium nitrate explosion. In 2003, with bipartisan support, the parliament passed the Maritime Transport and Offshore Facilities Security Act, under which every ship carrying ammonium nitrate in Australian waters is subject to a regulatory regime and is required to meet the requirements of the International Maritime Organisation’s international maritime dangerous goods code and the code of safe practice for solid bulk cargoes. In addition, all ships seeking to enter an Australian port are subject to Australia’s system of port state control. Under this system Australia, as a port state, undertakes risk assessments and can impose, when required, measures to ensure the ship meets Australia’s requirements with respect to a range of matters including safety and security.

I do not dispute any of that. But the minister also told me in an answer to a question last year that since 2000 four cargoes of ammonium nitrate have been carried into Australian waters by ships registered in the Bahamas—a notorious haven for unscrupulous shipowners—as well as by a ship registered in Antigua that I mentioned earlier. Why does the government think that shipowners register their ships in places like Antigua, the Bahamas or Panama? It is to evade shipping regulations, safety standards and environmental laws which they know are imposed by legitimate shipping nations. Ships registered in such places are by definition unlikely to have any interest in complying with Australian law, whether to do with safety, labour standards, the environment or security. It may be that the security regime the minister outlined to me in his answer will ensure that most of the shippers will comply with the law, but its chances of effectively regulating all of them are greatly reduced when ships under flags of convenience are allowed to carry dangerous cargoes into Australian waters.

My view is that such vessels should not be allowed to carry ammonium nitrate into Australian ports. The minister told me that Australia’s regulatory framework for the carriage of ammonium nitrate, together with the preventative security framework for maritime transport, has been recognised as amongst the world’s best. I have to say that I do not draw much comfort from that. There are not many countries which use as much ammonium nitrate for agricultural purposes as Australia does and still fewer which transport so much of it by sea. I dare say there is no other country except the United States which combines a high exposure to the threat of terrorism with a high vulnerability to ammonium nitrate. I would like to be assured that our security regime is not just the world’s best—whatever that might mean—but as tight as it reasonably can be. So long as the government permits flag of convenience vessels manned by underpaid crews whose real origins cannot be investigated to carry ammonium nitrate into our ports, it cannot make that claim.