MILESTONES: The end of an era

AT THE end of September, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority will farewell CEO Mick Kinley – a leader and luminary who has been with the national maritime regulator for 30 years, and part of the maritime industry for even longer.

Mr Kinley grew up in Gosford on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where a newspaper ad for a BHP Transport cadetship launched him into marine engineering. He’d been bent on engineering and working with machines, but hadn’t encountered a ship up close until he arrived in Newcastle ahead of an adventure at sea.

“Finding yourself in an engine room in the tropics with your earmuffs on, and it’s 50 degrees, you do question that choice down the track,” he said.

Reflecting on those early memories of cadetships and studying at the Australian Maritime College, the first time Mr Kinley mentions AMSA is in relation to a “dreaded oral exam” in the 1980s.

“I did some ship conversion work up in shipyards in Singapore, and then spent a year up in Korea with the Iron Chieftain, with the construction of her as an assistant site supervisor,” he said.

“I had a terrific grounding with BHP in shipping, and I was married at some point along the way there, and wanted to come ashore, as you do.”

Mr Kinley joined AMSA in 1994, initially heading north to Cairns as a marine surveyor. He’d never been to Cairns in his life.

“It was a bit like the Beverly Hillbillies; I packed my wife up in the car, and we set off for Cairns. I was the only marine surveyor responsible for Townsville North, so spent a lot of time in Weipa, over to Karumba … and it was a fantastic job. But there were a lot of incidents that were happening.”

Mr Kinley recalled three groundings in the Great Barrier Reef during his first year in Far North Queensland. The Australian maritime space in the early 1990s was also the backdrop for the Ships of Shame inquiry and report into ship safety, with AMSA ramping up port state control inspections and detentions of offending vessels.

Mr Kinley’s career took him to Brisbane as a principal surveyor, then to Canberra in 2000, where he progressed to deputy CEO in 2008 and ultimately took the helm as CEO in 2014.

At the helm

Broad leadership experience throughout AMSA made the CEO transition a natural one for Mr Kinley, but despite his experience as deputy chief executive, the decision to apply wasn’t immediately obvious. He made the next step not with a clear vision of himself as the organisation’s future leader, but because he’d kick himself if he didn’t apply and the next chief executive was no good.

Suddenly the buck stopped with Mr Kinley, and at a rather critical time in AMSA’s history. In 2013, the National System for Domestic Commercial Vessel Safety commenced, initiating a five-year transitional period whereby the marine safety agencies of each state and territory acted as delegates for AMSA. The national system replaced eight sets of rules with one regulatory scheme.

“In 2014 the decision had been made that we were going to take over service delivery of domestic commercial vessels,” Mr Kinley said.

“Picking up the service delivery for domestic commercial vessels was probably the biggest [challenge], because there were so many questions about it, and so many people suggesting that we were going to fail in that, and that the world was going to end. And we picked it up and it all went very seamlessly.”

Another milestone for AMSA, under Mr Kinley’s leadership, was Australia’s shift from category c to category b as a member of the IMO Council in 2017. The change recognised Australia as one of the 10 IMO member states deemed to have the largest interest in international seaborne trade.

Mr Kinley also highlighted an incident which, on its 10-year anniversary earlier this year, resurfaced as a collective memory for Australia and the wider region. On 8 March 2014 Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished over the Indian Ocean. Mr Kinley noted AMSA is responsible for search and rescue for aviation as well as maritime, covering one tenth of the earth’s surface.

“MH370 was a was a fascinating one, because we had no inkling it was potentially in our search and rescue region until eight days after it had gone missing,” he said.

Mr Kinley recalled a handful of maritime incidents throughout his three decades with the safety authority, from the Montara oil spill in 2009 to the YM Efficiency losing containers off the Hunter Coast in 2018. But the time between incidents nowadays is a double-edged-sword, he said; not having incidents is a good thing, but it means AMSA has to work especially hard to keep up the response frameworks for pollution response and maritime emergencies.

“And the longer there is between incidents, the harder it is to get people to remember why you have to have those frameworks in place, and why you need to keep practicing and training.”

Thoughts on direction

A lot has changed in the past three decades, including the number of Australian-flagged ships. When Mr Kinley joined AMSA 30 years ago, marine surveyors had a significant role in carrying out statutory surveys on the Australian fleet. As for foreign-flagged vessels, the frequency of detentions and bans imposed by AMSA in recent years suggests safety failures and poor living conditions are an ongoing problem, but a lot of the offending vessels have been driven away from Australian waters, according to Mr Kinley.

“Seafarers are still dying from confined space entry fall from heights, and no one’s held accountable still in the shipping industry,” he said.

“You very rarely will see a flag state prosecute a ship operator for someone dying in the industry, [but] if you get a workplace fatality ashore in Australia, that is a big issue, and there will be action taken by regulators.

“There’s a long way to go [in terms of] accountability and valuing human life.”

As Mr Kinley prepares to step down, he hopes the industry will keep working towards better treatment of seafarers. He said the industry also needs to keep working on decarbonisation. 

“There’s been a lot of hype about the green fuels and ammonia and methanol and hydrogen,” he said.

“I think the hype has now sort of worn off, and the harsh realities of the difficulties there are going to be, and actually decarbonising, are really coming home now. And yes, [ships can have] engines that can be ready to burn ammonia, hydrogen or methanol, but unless anyone is producing those fuels at scale, then it’s not going to happen.”

Combining new fuels with bigger ships and increasingly severe weather events is a recipe for risk. AMSA is enhancing its emergency response capabilities accordingly.

Mr Kinley highlighted the increased bollard pull on the emergency towage vessel Reef Keeper in Cairns, and second second-tier emergency towing contracts in ports.

“They’ve been adequate, but frankly, they’re not going to be adequate for the future”, Mr Kinley said of the emergency towage arrangements.

“It’s not just AMSA’s problem, it’s all of our problem: How are we going to up the level of emergency response for the increased hazards and the more complex hazards that we’re going to see coming out of bigger container ships, alternative bunker fuels, ammonia and methanol? How are we going to be able to set ourselves up to respond into the future?

“The Australian public, in particular, are very unforgiving, and that’s the only time you often see shipping in the news: when it’s doing something bad, or when suddenly we realise we’re at the end of a supply chain.”

Mr Kinley said the industry has to prepare for the future and think about how it’s going to manage the changing risks.

“And some risks are going up, some are coming down. But it’s going to be a more complex world into the future.”

The next adventure

But the industry’s future will unfold without Mr Kinley at the helm of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. On 30 September, he will step down and transition into a retirement that will likely involve motorbike riding, fly fishing and dabbling in maritime history. Travel plans are currently non-existent; after a job like his, Mr Kinley doesn’t want to see the inside of an airport for a long time. He is confident AMSA will get on just fine once he’s gone.

“I don’t believe in legacies. I remember an old, wise general manager said to me … ‘When you leave an organisation, it’s like pulling your hand out of a bucket of water’,” he said.

“AMSA will get on and keep doing what AMSA needs to do. I hope I’ve left it in a better place than when I started; everything seems to be more complicated and more difficult to do these days, but that’s just the way it is. But I think leaving an organisation that’s in a good position to face the future, a more complex future, a more uncertain future, is the best I can hope to leave it as.”

This article appeared in the August | September edition of DCN Magazine