Yarra seafarer

JOHN SMITH is an Adelaide wharfie at CSX container terminal and former crew member on the once proud Australian flagged ship CSL Yarra. He was one of the 11 Australian seafarers, who barricaded themselves onboard in the battle to prevent Canadian Steamship Company reflagging the vessel in the Bahamas tax haven and bringing it back onto the Australian coastal trade with a foreign crew on wages and conditions below the Australian award.

"Why will I be voting Labor? Because John Howard wrecked the shipping industry and is trying to wreck the wharves as well," John says. "If he is re-elected I'd say within the next term he'll join up with the National Farmer's Federation, the HR Nicholls Society and that lot and they'll destroy the Australian shipping industry. They'll just use foreign substandard ships and third world crew. There's not going to be much left for Australian seafarers. Just the tugs and the ferries. They'll just keep using loopholes in the Navigation Act to bypass Australian ships and crew and the loopholes will keep getting bigger. Didn't they conspire with Patrick to smash the wharves? And didn't they have a hand in CSL replacing us with foreign guest workers? When we took CSL to court, who was there? It was lawyer representing the (then) minister for workplace relations Tony Abbott. He was on the side of the foreign ship owners against Australian workers.

The Howard Government is casualising the whole Australian workforce. That will be the big thing that will affect workers over the next 10 yrs. As full timers retire they'll be replaced with casuals. They are dividing the workforce. And now they're trying to turn the war on terror into a war on workers and subjecting everyone in the industry to security and police checks.

I'm casual on the wharves now. It's both for family reasons as well as losing the Yarra. But I'd love to go back to sea when the kids are older. I'd love there to be an industry there for my kids if they chose seafaring as a career path. There's no future for Australian shipping under Howard or Costello. Let's kid rid of this dirty rotten Government, protect our jobs and protect our kids' future."