Shipping in safe hands

And International Maritime Organization secretary general Efthimios Mitropoulos will do its global profile no harm when he makes the keynote speech at the authority’s June 3 to 5 Natship09 conference.
“He has seriously gone out of his way to participate in Natship and it is full credit to him as he does have a tortuous timetable,” Mr Peachey said.
Admiral Mitropoulos would address global challenges on the first day of the event while infrastructure and transport minister Anthony Albanese will take on national challenges on the second.
For the authority, the initial task this year would be to reform the structure of state and federal maritime safety administration under one law to make it more simple, predictable and less burdensome for the industry.
Thus its “Tinny to Tanker” qualifications initiative would allow a nationally-recognised career path to be established.
When asked if the state bureaucracies had been jealous of their patches, he said the responsible state ministers had “shown a willingness to see this through” and the states had been fully involved in the process.
Mr Peachey insisted that AMSA had no interest in empire-building.
“We don’t see . . . AMSA growing into a big bureaucracy,” Mr Peachey said.
“I think one of the strengths of AMSA is that it is a tight-knit group.
“It is not a monolith – and easily accessible and has got the expertise.”
If the states wished to do something for AMSA as the national regulator, “we would set the arrangements in place”.
There would be business opportunities as it stuck fast to its responsibility and accountability roles.
It would expect to go to the market to undertake any survey requirements.
“We will set the standard, we will audit the work, we would make sure it was delivered consistently around the country.
“I do not anticipate having a team of surveyors going around the fleet. We’ll want to do it in the most cost-effective way and if you can do it involving the private sector, why wouldn’t you?
“That is our approach.”
After two rounds of national consultation and the deadline for submissions having passed on April 23, the response had been broadly favourable but analysis would still have to be undertaken to discover the costs or benefits for the industry.
This was unlikely to be known until after ministers saw the results this month. After that it would go the Council of Australian Ministers to be signed off.
That should happen this winter by which time the Federal Government should have also responded to the coastal shipping report.
The authority may well have its hands full with implementation after that.
On the recent casualties, Mr Peachey would only be drawn generally on the Pacific Adventurer spill, given that it was under investigation.
AMSA would review its emergency response procedure carefully but he felt that because the incident began at about 0400 hrs and the national emergency plan kicked in at 0800 hrs, the “scorecard was a pretty favourable one” on first reading.
“That is not a bad response, to get a national team up and running in a matter of hours,” Mr Peachey said.
“I think the lessons coming out of this will be around the practical things that happened, then we can get to the facts, find out how it all went and see whether we can improve.”
While the three most recent AMSA marine notices – on bridge resource management, the national maritime emergency response arrangement and the coming into force of the Bunkers Convention may have looked to have been in response to the spill, that had in fact, been a coincidence.
AMSA would also examine its performance in light of its legislation to see if it had relevant and necessary powers, along with inspection and port state control arrangements.
Mr Peachey felt that the relative dearth of maritime incidents had much to do with the country’s tough port state control provisions that kept substandard ships from Australian waters.
“We are really proud of that port state control stuff, it has had a major impact on shipping over the last decade,” he said.
There had yet to be an appreciable change in international merchant fleet as it visited Australia since the downturn in the shipping market, though he welcomed the increased scrapping of older ships that this entailed.
“We’ve not seen any decline in ship maintenance as a cost-saving measure,” Mr Peachey said.
Mr Peachey revealed that a decision should be made and public tenders sought in a matter of months on the under-keel clearance (UKC) technology for the Torres Strait.
AMSA had separated the UKC and north Queensland pilotage issues onto “different tracks and timelines”.
The time taken on the UKC issue had much to do with the unique and complex environment in the Torres Strait and that AMSA was always going to “err on the side of caution” given it was so unlike putting UKC into a port.
On north Queensland pilotage, Mr Peachey insisted that recent reviews had been conducted because it had not been examined carefully in more than a decade.
While AMSA would seek to strengthen the regulatory arrangements, the competitive model would remain as long as there were no signs of market failure.
“That is the test of a regulator intervening in the market,” Mr Peachey said.
“At the end of the day, we rely on evidence. Hearsay and chatter are not enough –  we rely on hard evidence to support whatever regulatory regime we put in place.
“That was expected of regulators at the national level.”
However, changes would come if improvement in moving towards a “strong, demonstrated, safety culture” was not forthcoming this year.
He admitted there were safety implications in having an ageing workforce but felt that seafarer medical examinations were holding the fort at present without compromising safety.
That said there would “come a time when the industry, AMSA and others involved would need to think about a revised approach”.
Where the authority could have an impact in conjunction with the industry and educators on recruitment was in “keeping the requirements within certificates relevant and up to date; and ensuring proper career paths, so there was a basis for attracting people into the sector”.