Homecoming

ANL Australia bosun Jon Elmer

Australian crew reclaim ANL Australia

Port Botany, November 1, 2002: Australian seafarers rejoin their estranged ship ANL Australia (alias OOCL Australia) in Port Botany, Sydney after a three-month absence. It is the first time in living memory that an Australian crew has gone back up the gangway of a ship once it has been reflagged and recrewed offshore.

"We're ecstatic," said bosun Jon Elmer. "I've been at sea 25 years and this is the first time I've ever heard of it happening."

ANL registered the liner vessel in the Bahamas in July, replacing all 34 Australian crew with Filipinos under armed guard after the ship arrived in Taiwan.

But not without an outcry from the Australian union movement. The MUA led a push in the Australian Industrial Relations Commission to save the jobs of the Australian seafarers on board the OOCL Australia. And in August the Commission ruled in favour of the union, preventing the crew being made redundant and ordering the parties back to the negotiating table.

Last month ANL and the unions agreed that the ship would return to Sydney and pick up its former Australian crew -- the same crew who had lifted the gangway in Kaoshung, Taiwan and staged a protest while the court battle in Melbourne wound up.

"They are guaranteed their jobs for 12 months while talks are ongoing and the bipartisan independent shipping review chaired by former federal transport ministers Peter Morris and John Sharpe gets into full swing," said National Secretary Paddy Crumlin. "The Independent Review of Australian Shipping (IRAS) aims to find a way to revitalise the Australian merchant marine, which has been undermined and vandalised by the federal government's anti-Australian shipping policies."

The ANL Australia sailed for Melbourne on November 2, then on to Brisbane, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.

"We think we can deliver whatever is needed," said Elmer. "We aim to show them that we're world's best."

The ANL Australia was one of two good news stories this Spring. The second was a decision by the High Court rejecting an appeal by CSL to overrule a Commission decision which roped in the Bahamas flagged and Ukarainian crewed Pacific under the Australian award. The unions have now extended the roping in claim to include the Stadacona and the matter will again go back before the Commission in the New Year.

In other shipping news, in recent weeks a member of the Labor Party's Umina/Ettalong Branch has lodged a formal complaint with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission against the Federal Government and Transport Minister John Anderson for breach of human rights and discrimination against trade activity; the Federal Government over-ruled the Queensland Labor Government refusal to allow the Stadacona to trade between Queensland ports; the Maritime Union has commissioned research on single voyage permits for submission to IRAS, submitting a second report to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade: Inquiry into Australia's Maritime Strategy, from Tampa to Terror, and a visiting United States defence analyst and former consultant to the US Secretary of the Navy, Dr Norman Friedman, told ABC Radio he had concerns about the level of security at sea ports.

Meanwhile negotiations over Australian flagged replacement vessels for the CSL ships Stadacona and Pacific trading cement on our coast are being progressed, while on the ground, community protests gain momentum against the Stadacona in Brisbane.

In New Zealand talks on the possibility of the Clarke Government revitalising the shipping industry in the region to the benefit of both New Zealand and Australian crew were part of the inaugural Trans Tasman Federation meeting. The Federation has determined to co-ordinate a formal proposal which will go the the New Zealand government in the first quarter of 2003, around the same time the IRAS report is due to be released.