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

In speaking to the Fair Work (Transitional Provisions and Consequential Amendments) Bill 2009 and the Fair Work (State Referral and Consequential and Other Amendments) Bill 2009, I note that I was a very strong opponent of the industrial relations reforms of the previous government. When we had collective bargaining taken away, the wool industry was the first industry to be deregulated, and then all the other farming industries, in every single case, followed. The last industry to be deregulated was the dairy industry, and within two years of deregulation we had lost 30 per cent of our incomes. Within two years the wool industry had lost 50 per cent of their incomes. If the opposition when they were in government could not see the disastrous outcomes of an inability to collectively bargain, they deserved the fate which awaited them in November 2007, when the people of Australia passed their judgement upon them. The average person in Australia may not think all of the time, but if you assume that he is going to be dumb all of the time you will end up not being in this place.

As a person who worked for a significant period of my life as an employee in working-class jobs and as a person who worked as an employer for most of my life, I can see two sides of the coin. If you live in the real world, if you think that you can negotiate as an individual with your employer, you obviously have never worked in an employee situation—otherwise, you are a very stupid person; that is for certain. I am not going to go to my boss and say I want a 20 per cent raise. I know what my boss would have said to me if I had done that when I was working for Mount Isa Mines. It would not have been very pleasant at all. I would rather have died than have gone to my boss and asked for that.

As a young bloke, I made a complaint about safety. I nearly lost my job over it. They did not like stirrers, troublemakers or people who questioned the way that they were doing things. So I shut up. I was on a lot of money and no-one else was speaking up about it. I am a bit ashamed to admit this, but I shut up and accepted that we would continue to work in an extremely dangerous situation. I do not hesitate to describe it to the House; it was on the shaker. You stood on one of the two platforms that led up to the shaker. When it got frozen, one bloke stood on one side and hit it with a sledgehammer. Then he jumped off real quick. The bloke on the other side would then hit it with another sledgehammer. Eventually it started to move, but it would come at you at 60 miles an hour when it started. The platform we were standing on, of course, was very hot indeed. The thing should have been fixed so that we did not have to go through that ridiculous business of hitting it with sledgehammers and jumping off with a fraction of a second to escape injury. I use that as an example to indicate that I myself was not rocking the boat; I was on big money and I was going to stick on it. I would not have had to make the complaint if I had had a union. The union could have made the complaint. I was stupid enough to make the complaint myself and I learnt my lesson. When I had other situations I made sure it was the union that made the complaint. I know what would have happened to me if I had gone and asked for a raise. I was not one of their most outstanding employees.

That is the real world in which we live. I have used individual situations, but I also use the vast global experience of the farming communities of Australia. Every farming sector that was deregulated went down into the destruction zone. When they deregulated the sugar industry and removed protectionism—which is a dirty word in this place—other countries must have been laughing at us so much. Obama just gave $43 billion to General Motors and we come in here and say protectionism is an evil word. If you read the Australian Financial Review and the Australian, which I do not do and hope nobody else in this place does, you would have all of the economic prerogatives that led to what happened to Australia in the eighties. They lauded all of those people. Six of them got away with $5 billion in the space of two or three years. Those people were lauded in the pages of those newspapers, and we were told that these were the wonders of the free market system.

The wonders of the free market system have removed all manufacturing in Australia. Almost every single bit of manufacturing has gone. Mr Keating was the initial architect of our misery, and the last government continued his destructive work. To use the motor vehicle industry, the biggest manufacturing industry in Australia, as but one example, 72 per cent of cars in 1984 were Australian made. Two years ago, only 19 per cent were Australian made. If you think you can rely upon what comes out of Treasury, have a look at the ORANI model. They produced the ORANI model to prove there would be no intrusion. In my book, soon to be published—a history of Australia—Mrs Orani is told she should sue for divorce and ask for punitive damages because her name was used in such a laughable document. This was put out as gospel by the Productivity Commission and the Treasury of Australia, the same people who told us in 1932 that we should have tight monetary policy. Thank goodness they are not giving that advice at the present moment. They have not had a very good history.

We now have a nation that, thanks to the policies of deregulation, has no manufacturing base and has a collapsing farming base. Cattle numbers are down 20 per cent. Sheep numbers are down over 50 per cent. Manufactured dairying is down about 20 per cent. Even fresh milk is down 10 per cent—I do not understand that, but it is. In the sugar industry, our fourth-biggest industry in Australia, we have been closing four mills every six years. We only have 24 mills left, but there are countries that do not pursue these policies. They are building 40 ethanol plants every year in America and they are building 24 sugar mills every year in Brazil.

The policy outcomes are what governments and bureaucrats should be judged upon, and the policy outcomes have been absolutely disastrous for this nation. Mr Costello kept standing up in here and saying he would balance the budget. Wasn’t he a clever fellow? If you increase taxation by 300 per cent, you too can balance your budget. He came in when the budget take was $90 billion and when he went out the budget take was $260 billion. You can balance the government’s budget quite easily, but he never balanced the country’s budget. Under Mr Costello the country was the most unbalanced in Australian history.

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