Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

But look at the press release they put out. They suspended it. And that is an act of good faith, is it not?

Mr Briggs interjecting—

It is an act of good faith not to suspend your industrial action. This is not the unions behaving unreasonably. They have taken protective action under the act and it has been pretty moderate. They have not brought the place to a standstill. All they are trying to do is get a pay rise and protect their jobs, and it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

At the Qantas annual general meeting the boss got a 71 per cent pay rise. I noticed on Fran Kelly's program this morning he was arguing that there was a 30 per cent drop last year—but it is swings and roundabouts for some, I guess. So they found time to talk about that but they did not find the slightest amount of time to talk about the extreme path they were about to go down. They had a premeditated assault on the Australian public: 'Shall we tell the shareholders about that … maybe not.' Bizarrely, they then took some weird endorsement of the AGM for their action. I do not know quite how, and he did not tell anybody.

You have to have more front than a butcher shop, I think, to take a 71 per cent pay rise and then turn around and embark on such extreme action. It is a disappointing thing to see. We all know that people have been inconvenienced. We all know people who have been stuck in Melbourne—admittedly they might get stuck there for the races, so that might not be so bad. But if you were going to go to the Melbourne Cup you would have been pretty disappointed. There were people stuck in Perth, LA and Thailand and all sorts of places all around the world. There was no warning for the 68,000 people of what they were about to do. The fact that the government was given very little warning was confirmed by Alan Joyce on ABC radio this morning when he admitted that there had been some misreporting. I wonder whose fault that was—was it the reporters or was it perhaps the people who were briefing the reporters? I suspect that misreporting was not a mistake, as it were. Industrial relations extremism from our national carrier is disappointing. They are supposed to give 72-hours notice of a lockout. That is the requirement on an employer just as it is a requirement—

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