Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister and follows the question he has just answered on what is fair and what is a decent thing in the workplace. I refer the Prime Minister to the fact that employees at Boeing’s Williamtown military aerospace support division were forced into a debilitating strike for more than 260 days in 2005 because of Boeing’s refusal to negotiate a collective agreement. Isn’t it the case that the vast majority of those employees wanted to collectively bargain with Boeing? Isn’t it also the case that neither the New South Wales nor the Australian industrial relations commissions, when the matter came before them, had a capacity to require Boeing to deal collectively with its employees? Doesn’t that mean the only choice here was the employer’s? Why can’t a majority of the employees and the independent umpire have a say as well?

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