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

I compliment the previous speaker for his very excellent contribution in the debate on the Fair Work Bill 2008. Obviously it was one that came from his personal experience and from the heart; I think it was a very excellent contribution.

I will just give a quick history of the union movement in Australia. There were the great strikes of the 1880s and the 1890s—you hear a lot of talk about this being the worst drou-ght in our history; it is really mild com-pared with the Federation drought. It was called the Federation drought because it did not rain much between 1884 and 1914. But it precipitated the union movement because the wool cockies were in terrible straits. They felt that they should pay the shear-ers less and the shearers were not on particularly glamorous wages, and the fight was on. It is a very sad aspect of our society that not many Australians really know the history of their country.

I come from Waltzing Matilda country; it is just a few miles down the road from my hometown of Cloncurry. There was a shoot-out at the homestead where Waltzing Matilda was written. It left one man dead on the day, but another one died of wounds later on in the week. The shearer Hoffmeister, according to historian Richard Magoffin, was probably shot by the other shearers because there was a huge reward—it was one of the highest rewards ever offered in British history—for anyone to dob in the strikers at the station property. The owner of the station property, ironically, was very sympathetic to the shearers’ cause. In fact, he shouted grog down the pub and handed out the grog at the pub. He would not dob anyone in.

It told you a lot about the real Australia, but the people in Brisbane—the government of the day—sent more than 1,000 troops with cannons and gatling guns down into western Queensland, to Claremont and Winton. Most of the state executive of the AWU were thrown in jail. The AWU, who were really the cutting edge of this movement, saw their membership fall from about 15,000 to about 5,000. They saw all of their men who had done the right thing, as they saw it—who had gone out on strike, gone without pay, gone hungry with their families and lived in galvanised iron lean-tos—go back and work with all the scabs who had had a good income throughout that entire period. Of course, a lot of men lost their faith in unionism and simply would not touch it again. It burned into the memory and the soul of the AWU. Today many people say it is a supine union, and it is not strong enough, but really, if you know the history, it is very interesting.  Even to this very day, that history still burns in the memory of the AWU in Australia.

I do not come from sheep country—it starts a few miles down the road from my hometown. I come from mining country. This time last century, one in 32 Australians who went down the mines never came back up again, or came back up and died the most dreadful death of miners phthisis. There was only one person in my class whose dad was a miner, and his dad died of miners phthisis. One in 32 is the actual figure. EG Theodore, who was the founder of the AWU as we know it today—there was an AWU, but Theodore refounded it, if you like, in Queensland as a mass union. And to this very day the AWU has been dominated by the huge numbers out of Queensland, where his brother organised the canecutters. Again, in the big strikes in the cane industry, there were two men shot dead in the main street of Innisfail during the strikes and upheavals similar to in the shearing industry.

I have to pay tribute to the Christians in Australia, because the first president of the AWU and I suppose the great driving force behind it was a lay preacher in the Wesleyan Church, and a very committed Christian. My own great-grandad, who gave, in today’s money, nearly $1 million—I repeat that very slowly: gave, in today’s money, nearly $1 million—to the strike fund in the late 1890s, was also a very committed Christian. He saw it as his duty as a Christian to do everything humanly possible to help these people who lived in such terrible circumstances.

Debate interrupted; adjournment proposed and negatived.

I was saying that my great-grandfather contributed a very large sum of money. I think it was out of his Christian commitment. The two sisters of Theodore, whom I was also referring to, became nuns, and his brother was a Christian brother. So the Christians were very much amongst the people who fought this battle, and I think that that must be recognised in a debate of this type.

Henry Bournes Higgins, when addressing the opening of a big AWU centre in Saint Arnaud in Victoria, said—and I remember the Prime Minister quoting this in the House some time ago: ‘A contract made by one person is not a contract.’ Of course it is not—and that is what was proposed in this House with the IR legislation which swept away the last government. If they thought that Australians were so stupid that they would accept that proposition and not understand it, then they were badly wrong. A lot of people were deceived, but the vast bulk of Australians were not. The then government launched the biggest political advertising campaign I have seen in 35 years as a member of parliament, and it was the most counterproductive of exercises because it just reminded every single person in Australia that they no longer had protection.

The people on this side of the House really amaze me. They must have absolutely no experience of the real world, but it was clear to me as a young man 17 years of age when I started my first job at Mount Isa—and I had a lot of years at university, so I would like to say that I did it hard, but I did not in that sense—that if you complained about something you were called a troublemaker and you would be out the door. If that something happened to be a dangerous work situation then you were in a very bad spot if you did not have a trade union so that you could make your complaint through the union without having your job threatened. If the people on this side are naive enough to believe for one moment that you could complain or say, ‘We should get extra pay for doing this’—most seriously, particularly in mining, if an issue of safety were concerned—and do it without a union, then they believe in the tooth fairy. All that the now opposition did was demonstrate their towering ignorance of the real world out there, where 90 per cent of the Australian population live. It was staggering for me. If you had told me that in my lifetime someone would take the arbitration commission away, I would have thought you were mad. If you are naming the great pillars upon which freedom and democracy are built, I would say private property comes first, but I would say No. 2 might well be the arbitration commission.

I played rugby league for much of my life and I have been an official since I gave up playing. The thought of playing rugby league without a referee—sometimes I would have enjoyed it, I must admit, but at other times I think I would have come off very badly indeed—is quite something. But, in the far greater and more important game called the Australian economy, the then government foisted upon all of the Australian people its plan to play without a referee. Of course, the concept then becomes: who is the most powerful? I can tell you that it is the employer that writes the cheque at the end of the week—there is very little doubt about who is the most powerful figure.

The other thing that convinced me to be so passionate about this issue was that, as a very young man just out of university, having done economics—or economics having done me, to be more accurate—I went out with this free-market concept. When Doug Anthony introduced the wool scheme, I thought that it ran against everything that I was taught at university and that it was going to fail. Then I watched the price of wool double over the next two years and I saw the enormous value of collective bargaining. I still thought it would probably fall over, but for the next 20 years I saw a nice, steady, stable increase in the price of wool that we enjoyed throughout all of rural Australia. It was just one of the most magnificent success stories and achievements of government in this nation’s history. And I regret to say, to put in a discordant note as far as the government is concerned, that Chifley considered wheat stabilisation one of his greatest achievements.

All of the history books nominate the Snowy Mountains scheme, the Holden motor car, the campaign for the eradication of tuberculosis, the housing commission, which built so many much needed houses in Australia, and wheat stabilisation as the five great postwar achievements. And it is not to Labor’s credit that it was responsible for removing wheat stabilisation. The then government applied one set of rules to the employees of Australia and applied another set of rules to the poor old farmers. Let me say, for anyone who had any doubts about the value of collective bargaining as far as wool went, it was removed by Mr Keating and within three years the price of wool had dropped clean in half. The wool industry in Australia is simply closing down. We have lost 50 per cent of our sheep, the numbers are continuing to fall and the price has been abysmally low. There was no doubt in my mind about the fate of wool producers in Australia. Within three years of the destabilising deregulation by hypocritical Mr Keating, we were averaging a suicide every two months in rural Queensland.

The egg industry was deregulated, and the right of egg farmers to collectively bargain was taken away. Sugar was deregulated, and the right of sugar producers to collectively bargain was taken away. The right of tobacco farmers was taken away. The right of dairy farmers was taken away. I recently brought into this House a litre of milk, a dozen eggs and a kilogram of sugar and I said, ‘The mark-up on this is 270 per cent, the mark-up on this is 270 per cent and the mark-up on this is 270 per cent.’ I am sure Mr Samuel, the champion of competition in Australia, does not believe in what the government is doing tonight—or maybe he does because maybe he thinks his job might depend upon having the attitudes that reflect the government’s attitudes. Mr Samuel said that there was no problem then. God is good, because those three items that I just mentioned were in fact under a fair claims tribunal, if you like. They were under statutory marketing arrangements and, when you had to justify how much the farmers should get and how much the retailers should have to pay and that was decided by a fairness tribunal, the difference was 80 per cent. It was 270 per cent under the free market—the magnificent magic mother of us all—but under a fairness tribunal it was 80 per cent.

I think everybody here knows the fate the sugar industry is facing. For those who do not know, there were 2½ thousand egg producers in Australia before deregulation and there are fewer than 300 now. In the dairy industry, the price of eggs dropped by 30 per cent within one month of deregulation. So, whilst it was never going to happen that dramatically to the Australian employee, there was never any doubt in my mind that it was going to happen. Harking back to my old great-grandad, he was not all just totally Christian; he was a shopkeeper. So long as the average worker had money in his pocket, his cash register was ringing. If you take the money off the ordinary worker, as they did in America in the late 1920s, then there will be no money going through the till. And then you have a thing called a depression, when there are a lot of people up here who have got all this money in their pockets and want to keep it there and there are a whole lot of people out there with no money to spend at all. That is the logic of the current government in giving handouts before Christmas—to enable the economy to boost up.

I do not come in here one-eyed. I admit that I was very briefly a union spokesman—I might even say a union rep. I do not come in here with any starry-eyed notions that the unions are saints or anything of that nature. In Queensland, the electricity union stood us up. They just turned out the lights. They left the lights off for a significant proportion of Brisbane—about one-seventh of Brisbane—for about 11 days. Parts of Brisbane were out for 14 days straight. Two people died at intersections where there were no traffic lights working. Whether that was entirely attributable to there being no traffic lights working, I do not know. That was the situation with which we were confronted. These were people who, in today’s terms, were on about twice the average weekly earnings, so about $100,000. A large proportion of them, if not most of them, were on a nine-day fortnight.

A lot of us had made great sacrifices to deliver great power to the unions. Some of those unions abused that power most irresponsibly. That caused a lot of people to be anti union. It was not Mr Howard who removed our automatic right to arbitration but Mr Keating with his legislation of 1993. I remember being quite staggered at the time and thinking, ‘If the Labor Party got away with doing this, what is going to happen when the other mob get in?’ I must admit I did not think they would abolish the arbitration commission entirely. But that was what they did. If the union movement let the ALP get away with doing what they did, they sure were asking for trouble. They had opened the door and the other mob was going to walk through it. There was no hesitation. There was no doubt in my mind that that was going to happen.

Whilst we have made a great song and dance about what is happening here tonight, and I think many aspects of this show a degree of application of intelligence and responsible government, I probably am a lone wolf once again here. You do not have the right to arbitration in this legislation. The only way you can get the referee to act is if there is damage to the community as a whole or damage to one or other of the parties. Lockouts are very, very rare, so I doubt we would be getting the arbitration commission for a lockout. I can only remember one example of that in my whole lifetime. I know that has happened, but it is not a regular happening. The other occurrence is a strike. I could not get the figures tonight, but strikes are almost negligible these days. I cannot remember the last time we had a strike in North Queensland. The worst strike in Australian history and the worst strike in the last 40 years happened in my electorate at Mount Isa. But a stoppage is just not conceivable. It is not part of the modern lexicon. I do not know whether that is entirely a good thing, but the reality is that it is not there. So, if there are not going to be any lockouts and there are not going to be any strikes, you will not be able to get arbitration. That is where I regret that this legislation is very deficient. It has not returned the right of the worker to arbitration. The circumstances would be very peculiar if you got that right to arbitration.

I think the bill lacks the most fundamental of propositions, which the Prime Minister himself espoused in this place when he quoted Henry Bournes Higgins at St Arnaud’s: ‘A contract made by one person is not a contract at all.’ Let me conclude by quoting a person in my electorate. He said: ‘I was given the offer. They said: “Take it or leave it. There’s the door. It’s my way or the highway.”’ That is now the law. (Time expired)

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