Maritime Union of Australia: General: Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment Bill 2004

Currently there is a Bill before Federal Parliament called Security Intelligence Organization Amendment Bill 2004 which will require all states to regulate production, storage and transport of ammonium nitrate around Australia.
Unfortunately for Australia, the seaborne leg of the transport chain is left open to the lowest bidder using the cheapest ships and crews in the entire world.
Attached is the ALP's Hon. Kim Beazley MP contribution to the debate which supports Australia's Shipping and condemns FOC system.

I will be very brief, because I know that we are all under time constraints. The opposition supports the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment Bill 2004. What this bill does is empower communication between ASIO and various state governments when state governments come to license dangerous substances such as ammonium nitrate so that security checks can be effectively run on those who would secure the licences for it. The Labor Party supports this legislation, just as it has supported a raft of other government bills related to the extreme circumstances in which we live at this time, where we have entered into a form of international conflict with a new source of fascism in the international community.

In discussions in this parliament over the course of the last few years, we in the Australian Labor Party have had to suspend a lot of dearly-held positions that many of us had through that period of time. We have had to make substantial mental adjustments to our international outlook as we have looked at the problems that our intelligence services and defence forces have to confront, the relationships that we have with states in this region and the focal element of those relationships as we join united in this struggle with our friends and colleagues in the region. The Labor Party has made those adjustments. I have to say that I cannot say the same thing for our political opponents. Our political opponents still swing wildly between dealing with the problem that I have just outlined and seeing in all of this a political opportunity. As they have done so, they have failed to make the mental adjustments that they need to make in a number of areas

This issue of ammonium nitrate goes right to the heart of one of those adjustments that they need to make. This bill will provide a process of security checks for those that will have licences to transport ammonium nitrate. That gets to the heart of an issue raised by the member for Throsby in this place and also by a recent committee of parliament in its consideration of our national and international transport arrangements and the issue of single voyage permits for ships of convenience carrying ammonium nitrate around our shores.

This practice must now cease. The practice of shifting ammonium nitrate around our coastline or bringing it into this country via flag of convenience vessels has to stop now. No more. The Americans would never permit it around their coastline; we should never permit it around ours, from this point on. But to do so, to act in this critical way, to secure the safety of the Australian people and Australian ports, would require the National Party in particular but also the Liberal Party to make that ideological shift that the Labor Party has had to make in order to deal with the circumstances in which we now live.

The use of these flag of convenience ships in single voyage permits--and sometimes multiple voyage permits--around our coastline is entirely ideologically based. It is deeply embedded in a strategy of many years ago to destroy the Seamen's Union and the operation of Australian ships around Australian ports. No more can this situation persist. It is now a danger to national security, and that danger to national security must now be dealt with.

The government is doing the right thing here in identifying in its discussions with its state counterparts the need to pay more careful attention to who has control of the movement of dangerous goods around our coastline and around our nation. It must take this step further now, and this means some sacrifice of a deeply held position on the part of our political opponents. They have utilised single voyage permits for the purpose of undermining Australian flag shipping, which is unionised, in our coastal trade. As a result of that--certainly not at the times when these strategies were first thought out, but now, in the current international climate--this represents a danger to us.

Al-Qaeda and its affiliates are thoroughly familiar with the utilisation of ammonium nitrate and with what it is capable of doing when mixed with fuel and other substances. They had the exemplar performance, of course, of that character who blew up a government facility in Oklahoma. They themselves utilised ammonium nitrate in their first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and subsequently in their attacks on embassies in Africa in the 1990s. Of course, they had an example before them.

Let me read to you what the consequences would be of an explosion in a ship laden with ammonium nitrate, which fell into the wrong hands, operating in an Australian port. Unfortunately, we actually know what the effect would be, because such an event occurred in the Port of Texas City on the Gulf of Mexico in April 1947. Let me quote from a book--which must now be read by all Australian members of parliament--entitled A Time Bomb for Global Trade: Maritime-related Terrorism in an Age of Weapons of Mass Destruction by Michael Richardson. It is now essential reading for all Australians who want to take their duties as members of parliament seriously or who simply want to participate effectively in the debate. This is what happened to a ship called the Grandcamp, which caught fire while it was loading some 2,300 tonnes of ammonium nitrate:

Not long after 9 am, barely an hour after the smoke was first spotted, the ship disintegrated in a massive explosion that was heard as far as 150 miles away.

A huge mushroom-shaped cloud billowed more than 2,000 feet into the sky. The rising shockwave knocked two light planes that were flying overhead out of the sky. Steel shards scythed through workers along the docks and a crowd of curious onlookers who had gathered at the head of the pier where the Grandcamp was moored. Many were killed instantly: the ship's crew, bystanders and almost the entire volunteer firefighter corps of the town. At the nearby Monsanto Chemical Company plant, 145 of the 450 shift workers on duty died. A 15-foot tidal wave thrown up by the explosion swept a large steel barge several hundred feet inland, carrying dead and injured people back into the blast zone as the water receded. Ignacio Hernandez, then a five-year-old living in Texas City, ran with his mother away from the blast. He remembers one woman wailing: "The world is coming to an end!"

We know thoroughly, absolutely, what happens when 2,300 tonnes of ammonium nitrate explodes in a port. We can contemplate the fact that on 18 September last year we had the ship Henry Oldendorf carrying over 10,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate as well as hundreds of tonnes of diesel fuel, plying the Australian coastal trade--five times the cargo of the ship which exploded in Texas City. The Henry Oldendorf is a Monrovian-registered ship, presumably operating under a single voyage permit issued by the federal government. Amongst her crew of 20, she had seven different nationalities: Indonesian, Indian, Filipino, Ghanaian, Egyptian, Turkish and Moldavian.

We know now from the operations of al-Qaeda globally that there is a shift--particularly in our region--to a maritime interest, manifesting itself in concerns right through this region about the possibility of a crossover between acts of piracy in the Malacca Straits and acts of piracy that are performed effectively by terrorists. Indeed, one terrorist organisation has already been identified with acts of piracy--that is, Abu Sayyaf, operating out of the Philippines. Abu Sayyaf has links with al-Qaeda. Thus far, the attacks have been for what you might describe as money-raising purposes. Basically, the crew or the ship is ransomed or the cargo is sold. Those are the purposes of the pirate attacks so far, and they have been increasing substantially, one might even say exponentially, in the South-East Asian region.

But it is only a matter of time before the obvious opportunity that arises from the utilisation of a ship as a floating bomb becomes something that strikes al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda related organisations as a possibility for introducing more dramatic horror into a situation than that which occurs with simply the kidnapping of the crew of a ship. This is something that we must be alert to and deal with, and we must make adjustments in our own behaviour against the risk that these sorts of things could happen here. It would be exactly the sort of thing that an outfit like al-Qaeda would contemplate in relation to Australia, if we have so little control over the character of the crews and the flags of the ships that operate in our area.

Having said that, Mr Deputy Speaker Adams, I do not want to trouble Hansard, you and this House any more, because obviously the Labor Party is supporting this legislation, but I want to conclude with a plea to our political opponents opposite: they must now start to change. They must now see these issues beyond their simple ideological preferences and their past hatreds. They must now start to properly treat people whom they have often seen to be among the persecutors of the farmers by the costs of operating the shipping around our coastline that arises from dealing with unionised crews that are paid properly and ships that are maintained properly.

It certainly is the case that crews so paid and ships so maintained are more expensive to operate than flag of convenient ships where people are underpaid and where the provenance of the particular ships is not known. But there are plenty of reports of al-Qaeda `navies' operating under flags of convenience around now. There are plenty of reports of Tamil Tiger `navies' operating under flag of convenience ships, as we know now. This is a situation which can no longer be maintained. It is a situation up with which the Americans will not put. The Americans themselves have made some decisive decisions in the aftermath of September 11, and it must be said that they were always far less liberal than we have been on the issue of single voyage permits and the like. The Americans are now being extremely careful about who brings what into American ports and the way in which they travel between American ports. They would never permit a situation such as we have operating here in this country now in relation to ships of single voyage permits and flag of convenience ships with dangerous cargoes in the region. They would not put up with that and nor should they--and nor should we.ENDS

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Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment Bill 2004

Second Reading: Hansard December 6, 2004