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

Thank you; I should know that. I stand corrected. To come back to the legislation here, this is all about deregulation of the labour market. I have gone through the hopeless failure of deregulation in every single sector of the Australian economy—through the absolutely dismal, hopeless failure which has left a country with no manufacturing base and a collapsing agricultural base. That is what deregulation has done. If you applied that to the labour market we would be back where we were.

I am one of the few people in this place who has stood up to the unions and copped it as a result. I was one of the ministers involved with the emergency legislation in Queensland—and I do not blame Joh or absolve myself of responsibility. We moved that legislation because we had to move that legislation. The unions had gone far too far. They felt they could attribute to themselves six months annual leave, twice annually. That was the sort of situation we were getting into in Queensland. So there had to be a pull-back, but never at any stage did we contemplate deregulating the labour market. Never at any stage did it get discussed at any level by us. It was utterly unthinkable. I suppose that most of us at one time or another had been in working-class jobs and we had known what it was like to be part of the employee class and to know that you needed the protection of the union in collective bargaining. I am not holding up the unions as any great Holy Grail, far from it, but as imperfect as they are there is a mechanism there that a democracy needs.

For those of us who read history books, we should reflect upon the days before unionism, before 1915. Australia changed so fundamentally when Theodore took control of the running of Queensland and Australia. It was a different nation after that. But before that, in 1909, one in 32 of us who went down the mines—and every single one of my forebears came from mining areas—never came back up again or came up and died the dreadful death of Miner’s Phthisis, which was afflicting one in four miners at that stage. That is why we needed collective bargaining. It would be like little Robbie Katter at Mount Isa Mines back in the 1960s complaining about the shaker. No-one was going to listen to him and he would be shown the door if he started whingeing again about some safety condition.

We needed someone to represent us on a collective basis, and that was the reason why the deregulation of the labour market was so fundamentally bad and why people I had ever seen in my life were handing out how-to-vote cards. They were out there handing out how-to-vote cards and working passionately because they were intelligent, thoughtful and caring Australians and they knew this was wrong and that it had to be reversed. But it does not seem to me that anyone on the opposition side of the House has learnt their lesson. They are still out there—and this legislation is a good example—trying one way or another to nefariously return to deregulatory policies which proved so bad in every form in Australia, and so bad politically I might add as well. They have learnt no lessons at all.

I ask the opposition to please understand that the idea that you sell a commodity like wool with 20,000 people all selling their own little block separately is not a better arrangement than our getting together and selling it collectively. Have a look at the outcomes. When Anthony introduced it, the price of wool in the next two years went up 300 per cent and, when Keating took it out, the price dropped clean in half over the next two years. And that was pure coincidence, was it? Nobody can maintain there was any element—

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