Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about ongoing industrial action, namely strikes, that is taking place at the Gold Coast University Hospital building site. This hospital is an important piece of infrastructure for the people of the Gold Coast. For too long, successive state Labor governments have ignored the very real and growing demand for health services in our city. This project has already been delayed by a number of years as a result of mismanagement by the state Labor government. Now, to rub salt into the wound for the people of the Gold Coast, for my constituents in Moncrieff, we have a situation where the trade union movement continues to flex its muscles in a way that could only be described as demonstrating that they are completely out of control.

We have had in excess of 16 days of disputes at the Gold Coast site. We now have a strike that is illegal going into its second week. Further compounding the problem is that, earlier this week, apparently somewhere in the vicinity of several hundred trade unionists from the building site made a convoy into Brisbane and blocked all four lanes of the M1 between the Gold Coast and Brisbane.

It is fair enough for trade unionists to argue their case and to seek to do so through strike action, but it is not fair when that strike action adds to the costs for taxpayers. It is not fair when that strike action further delays a project that has already been delayed by a couple of years. It certainly is not fair when they continue to hold strike action even though they have been ordered back to work by Fair Work Australia. It is absolutely not fair to those people from my electorate and its surrounds who are simply going about their business travelling to Brisbane for work on a route that is already heavily congested—again, because the state Labor government has not invested in the M1—for there to be a rolling blockade, effectively, of the M1 with tens of thousands of people delayed for in excess of an hour or two on their commute to work.

The trade union movement are engaging in pure self-indulgence when it comes to their strike action on the Gold Coast University Hospital site. It is taxpayers who end up paying the price for this. This project continues to become more expensive as these strikes continue. Most concerningly, in what is an already depressed construction market on the Gold Coast, this sends a very clear message, and that is that anyone looking to develop on the Gold Coast, anyone looking to do any construction activity, needs to be very wary of the trade union movement adding to their costs substantially, because they will take strike action whether it is legal or not. I say, on behalf of the community, it is time they got back to work and dealt with it in the way in which the law intends for it to be dealt with.

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