2015-12-09
Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) — I welcome the opportunity to make a contribution to the debate on the Delivering Victorian Infrastructure (Port of Melbourne Lease Transaction) Bill 2015. Mr Barber has already made a contribution as lead speaker for the Greens, and he has outlined our concerns. Yesterday, in his contribution on the tabling of the report, he started with about three reasons for not supporting the sale of the port and ended up with a whole lot more after having been through the report of the inquiry.
Like many members in this place, I have really only had the opportunity to look through the report yesterday and this morning, since the report was tabled on Tuesday. I spent some time looking at the executive summary and the recommendations. The voting on the recommendations was very interesting. The two minority reports and some particular parts of the chapters I found interesting, but I have not had a chance to sit down and read the full report in all its detail, which I would like to do because I have a long history of interest in the port of Melbourne, as those who have been in the Parliament with me over the previous two Parliaments would know. I have had an interest in particular in the last 10 years since the channel deepening project was proposed in 2005, and before I was a member of Parliament I was involved in community protests and concerns regarding that particular project that occurred in 2009. I have spoken about it many times in Parliament — in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 — with regard to the concerns that were raised about that particular project and what has come to pass.
Mr Rich-Phillips started his contribution by saying — and in fact the report starts out talking about the fact — that going back 70 years from now, at the end of the Second World War, we would not have been able to imagine what things would be like now. We certainly will not be able to imagine what it will be like in 2085, or even in 2065 which is 50 years from now. Even if we go back seven years to the channel deepening project in 2008, there are a lot of things that were raised at that time that have been raised in the inquiry into this bill undertaken by the select committee. It is a very good report and a lot of work was done. There were 87 submissions, 11 days of hearings and 58 witnesses.
I will take this opportunity to say that while I have not had the chance to peruse this report in detail neither have any of the submitters. That is a point many people have been making to the government — that such an important proposal before us needs more consideration not only by members of Parliament but by members of the community. Those people have taken a very strong interest in it and gone to the trouble of making submissions to the inquiry and appear at the hearings. They deserve the opportunity to see what the report has come up with and its particular recommendations.
As Mr Purcell said, as it is a government-owned corporation the port is a natural monopoly. I am of the view that natural monopolies are best held by the people and not sold off to the private sector. Flicking through the report and listening to Mr Barber yesterday, who I know has sat through the hearings and read the submissions, no credible evidence has been put forward that the port would operate any more efficiently under a private operator than it does now or indeed any evidence that it is not operating efficiently now. We just hear assertions about that, which we also heard back in 2008.
Also back in 2008 we heard the government quote — as did the port — figures of anywhere between 27 per cent and 42 per cent of ships being unable to come into the port of Melbourne and that is why we needed dredging. But if you looked at the supplementary environmental impact assessment, and we know there had to be two of those because the first was not done properly, the true number of ships unable to come through Port Phillip Heads was 3.8 per cent — that is, 96 per cent of ships that came into the port of Melbourne could come through fully laden. The figure of 42 per cent referred to the number of ships that do not come through fully laden, and that is because Melbourne is in the middle of a route. Ships offload some things and pick up other things. Melbourne is neither at the start nor at the end.
The point I am getting to is that I have been sceptical and dubious about any figures put forward by governments, and we are back with a Labor government. It was also a Labor government in 2008 that was running with these figures in the media, which were inaccurate. They were not right.
We also heard about the number of containers that would need to be accommodated at the port of Melbourne. The figure — and it is one that Mr Purcell and others have referred to in the report — is between 7 million and 8 million TEUs within the next who knows how many years, sometime during the life of the proposed sale or lease of this port. Way back in 2008 I pointed out to the Parliament that the total capacity of all the ports in Great Britain, which has a population of 65 million people and which operates in the European port zone, is 7.5 million TEUs. The idea that somehow in the next 25 to 30 years we are going to have 7.5 million to 8 million TEUs going through the port of Melbourne — Australia will not have a population of 65 million people by that time, and Melbourne certainly will not — is just fanciful. There has never been any evidence put forward for that.
In 2008 we were told that very big ships that were able to hold 8000 to 10 000 containers were coming here. At the time, I cast aspersions on that particular claim because the shipping lines were not saying that, so I was interested to read page 41 of the report, which states that Shipping Australia and experts have said there is no chance that ships above 8000 TEUs will be coming to Australia.
It is like Groundhog Day and deja vu for me here. The same old figures are being rolled out by the government and the port which are not backed up by any actual evidence; instead they are contradicted by those in the shipping industry, who know better and are saying that those sorts of large ships are not ever going to be coming down to southern Australia. They are going to go on the main shipping lines between the USA, Asia and the European countries and their big ports. Part of the reason I bring this up is that we have heard it all before; it was not true then, and it is not true now.
I listened very intently to what Mr Purcell said during his contribution. He pointed out that he was very interested in being part of the inquiry because of his interest in the issue. I heard his concerns over how the port was going to attain the price it needed to reach. I am concerned that if it is based on 7 million to 8 million TEUs coming to Melbourne — that that is the fulcrum on which this is based — then we have a problem because that is not backed up by any evidence. It is just an estimation, an assertion and a line drawn in the air, which is what I said way back in 2008 and I have seen nothing that says it is any different now. I think this is a very poor piece of public policy.
Then there is the issue of the lack of a transport plan that has also been raised in the report. We lacked a transport plan back in 2008. It was an issue I raised in questions regarding the channel deepening project and the conversation at the time about the increased container traffic and truck traffic et cetera. I was told that we had a transport plan. That was in 2008 — seven years ago — and we still do not have one. I am not confident we are going to have one anytime soon, even in the next seven years. These things really do concern me, including privatising the port of Melbourne. It should be kept in public hands.
I will now go to my major concern, which is about the environmental effects from the activities of the port. Back in 2008–09 the dredging was going wrong. The Queen of the Netherlands dredger which graced the bay for up to 18 months was smashing up our shipping channels and destroying part of the Port Phillip Heads. It was apparently watched by the environmental monitor, but it pretty much got away with everything it did that was against the environmental plan it was supposedly following. The environmental monitor was a toothless tiger. It was not even charged with monitoring the major issues. At the time, we had 40 million cubic metres of toxic spoil, which still sits in the middle of Port Phillip Bay and is being monitored by nobody. The government is not looking at that. More dredging material has periodically been added to that, but it is not being monitored.
I said at the time that what was really keeping me awake was the removal of 5 to 6 metres of rock from Port Phillip Heads, because the scientists told us that that would result in so much more water coming in and out of Port Phillip Heads, particularly in the south of the bay, and that that would result in damage to the coastal areas in the south of the bay. Lo and behold, has that not come to pass? Portsea beach has disappeared; it has gone. It is not going to return, because every single day ocean swell is coming through Port Phillip Heads, which was a very rare occurrence prior to the channel deepening; there would have had to have been a very big storm for that to happen. Now it is happening twice a day, every day, on the tides. That beach has disappeared. Other beaches all around the south of the bay, including on the western side, are having a lot of inundation and erosion occurring, and this is never going to stop, because you cannot just put that rock back.
No-one, including the original ports minister and the current Treasurer, who I spoke with many times about this, has ever been held to account for that damage. The port of Melbourne was supposed to have paid a bond for environmental damage, but that has never been seen by the people of Victoria. Meanwhile, day after day, damage is being done in the south of the bay, which was foreseen by scientists, by the community and by groups like the Association of Bayside Municipalities, the Victorian National Parks Association and the Port Phillip Conservation Council. I know that the latter came again in this inquiry to talk about the issues. At that time we could not even prevent this damage in a government-controlled port. If this goes ahead and we have a privatised port, who knows what damage could be done to the bay.
The whole thing is based on spurious assertions, as it was way back in 2008. Nothing has changed. I am amazed to see the same figures in here. They are just pulled out of the air. They do not have any evidence base to them. It is also interesting that there is no context here as to how Melbourne sits with the rest of Australia or in relation to the national port and freight strategy or the inland rail, which may actually be built. I was talking about this back in 2008. The inland rail would run from Melbourne to Seymour, Albury, Wagga Wagga and Parkes, where it would intersect with the Perth–Adelaide rail system, then on to Narrabri, Moree, northern New South Wales and Brisbane. Double-stack containers on freight from Brisbane to Melbourne would make a very big difference. It would affect the regional areas of inland Australia. But this sort of thing is not even mentioned in relation to the port transaction. The Deputy President, who has heard me talk about these things before, would know I could go on a lot longer, but I have run out of time.