Mick Dolman

That's true.

There were some significant changes.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, the relevant authority for seafaring, along with a number of institutions and employers and unions, worked together both at the domestic level but also in the national level, in the international level.

My National Secretary of the Maritime Union, Paddy Crumlin, is chair of the ITF, International Transport Workers Federation, where that body has something like 150 inspectors and organisers in the global shipping industry, making sure that those ships have all the right equipment, making sure that their crew have all the right skills and tools to do the job properly.

They are working also to stop the shonky ship owners who use cheap labour out of the Philippines or Indonesia or wherever and treat them like shit.

Owe them millions of dollars in lost salaries.

The union and the International Transport Workers Federation are doing that.

So we don't have the Bly Stars all over the globe doing these type of things.

And of particular importance is the ship reporting mechanism.

See, nobody knew which way that ship was going.

It was east or west.

Nobody knew, so that meant the search was going to be enormously big.

Nowadays, your ship has to demonstrate to the authority that they are sailing at this date and they're going which direction, and every 24 hours they have to go back to AMSA, the regulator, and say, we're at that spot, we're going further on.

When they get to their destination, they can sign off and say, we've landed.

In some countries in this world, yes.

They're called FOCs, Flag of Convenience, where countries will register their ship in some far-flung country...

And then they will operate under that regime, which is absolute crap.

Captains think that they can do whatever they want.

And there are seafarers, poor seafarers out of third world countries that have been killed over years.

The seafarers have been treated absolutely horrible over those years.