Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

The Trade Practices Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2005, as it is being presented now—and it is being opposed, insofar as the amendments go, by the opposition—provides for collective bargaining. This is supposed to have brought small business on side. I am most certainly an expert in the field of collective bargaining for small businesses and farmers, but the pharmacists, the newsagents and the other very small groups that are left in owner-operated businesses in Australia appreciate the government allowing for some collective bargaining—but it is really not a concession.

In fact, the ACCC have authorised the collective bargaining to go forward. Any time that they have been approached, they have approved the request for collective bargaining. I specifically use newsagents and dairy farmers as examples of that. But, whether you are a collective or an individual, if you are bargaining with the enormous power of the media barons then the newsagents have very little. The only reason they exist is because it suits the interests of the media barons to keep them there. Regarding the collective bargaining of the dairy industry, I praise the people who have attempted to use it, and I thank the government and the ACCC people who authorised it, but it has really been worth absolutely nothing to us, or very little indeed. What we are being given here is fairly useless.

I have a word of advice for the government—and I was in government in Queensland: if you listen to the peak bodies, you will get yourself in a hell of a lot of trouble. You would want to know about the issues yourself and deal with them yourself. Where I come from there is a saying: they call it the ‘peak body disease’. You saw that with the person who now heads Telstra: he became the head of the NFF and ratted on the farmers, then he became the head of the Reserve Bank and he ratted on the NFF, and then the government appointed him to Telstra and now he has ratted on the government. Right at the start, we could have decided that he was a rat. I could have told you that right at the very start. If you listen to these people, you will get a very jaundiced view because they come here and want to be agreeable. So, yes, there are collective bargaining provisions and, yes, they are of help. To quote the great Doug Anthony, about the size of a pea in a 44-gallon drum would be the value that we are getting out of this. The loss of the oversight of the ACCC and their watchdog brief is very serious indeed.

I have to cut it short. Obviously there is Abraham Lincoln and two founders of America up on Mount Rushmore, but, with regard to the fourth one, Teddy Roosevelt, they asked, ‘How did he get up there?’ I will tell you how he got up there: he was the bloke who enforced the antitrust legislation in the United States that broke up Rockefeller’s companies into, I think, 36 companies. He was the driving force behind it. This government will be recognised because they are the people who facilitated the Rockefellers to take control of our petrol industry, our transport industry and our food industry. I must say that the groundwork was magnificently laid for them by Mr Keating and his cohorts previously.

We are very pleased with the proposition on divestiture being put forward by the opposition today. It is going down the same pathway—and a more tight pathway, I think—as the American antitrust laws, and I think that is the direction in which we should be travelling. I very strongly endorse the proposals being put forward by the opposition in these amendments. I have also moved amendments which are in line with the existing legislation but which preserve the rights of the ACCC and their watchdog role on the economy. You need to look no further than the front pages of all of our newspapers today to see the absolute necessity for some watchdog to be out there defending the people of Australia.

Question put:

That the amendments (Mr Fitzgibbon’s) be agreed to.

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