Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Hansard source

I can put it no better than how the government is to blame for this than Professor Judith Sloan, who wrote this morning—

Opposition members interjecting—

Oh, they all are. Of course, they are now attacking economists. I recently heard you were not allowed to attack economists. Here we go: the Labor Party just want that on the record. All four of them across the way have just attacked Professor Judith Sloan. She put it very clearly, very simply this morning when she said this in the article in the Australian:

While there are differences in the three separate negotiations—with the long-haul pilots, the licensed engineers and the ground staff—there is one core stumbling block. This related to the right of the company to manage its operations, including using contractors and labour hire employees, changing work practices and separating the working conditions of staff across the various parts of the company. Negotiating the wages and conditions of staff is one thing; restricting the ability of the company to remain competitive is another thing altogether.

She sums it up this way, perfectly:

The key issue is that under the act—

under their Fair Work Act, which they are celebrating here this morning; celebrating this dispute, as intended—

there is essentially no prohibited content in agreements. And because of this, protected industrial action is available for the pursuit of virtually any matter.

That is what we are seeing here. We are seeing the unions empowered and on a frolic, trying to tear down an icon of our country. Tony Sheldon talks about job security for Australians. I tell you what: keep going the way you are going, Mr Sheldon, and you will send this airline offshore, because you will destroy it as they destroyed Ansett before. These people are completely biased when it comes to these matters. They see it from one side and one side only. We have seen that in the last 24 hours. We have seen attack after attack. The member for Throsby was on Twitter on Saturday night after Alan Joyce. The member for Chifley was out there—

An honourable member interjecting—

I am sure I missed the member for Wakefield's contribution. They are all out there personally attacking Alan Joyce and personally attacking Qantas. They will not see the wood for the trees on this issue. They cannot. They are wholly owned subsidiaries of the trade union movement in this country. You cannot expect them to say anything else.

The Leader of the Opposition is dead right when he says that the government should have acted sooner. He is absolutely right, so much so that Professor Andrew Stewart, hardly a friend of this side of the parliament—he helped write the Fair Work Act—said in the Sydney Morning Herald two weeks ago:

It has got to get to a point where it's something more than the ordinary type of industrial action—

that has to happen. He told them this was coming. He told them that this was going to happen, that it had to happen, because Qantas were bleeding. They have bled $68 million in this industrial dispute—and the unions were out there telling people, 'Don't book with Qantas before Christmas.' Apparently, this is all the fault of Qantas management. It is all the fault of Qantas. It has nothing to do with the unions at all; they were all acting in good faith. What a load of bollocks! This act is as the government intended it to operate. They wrote this act for this sort of dispute to occur. There is nothing surer. As Peter Costello, very rightfully, put it yesterday on TV: 'This is a dispute about who manages the company. It is not about conditions, not about pay; this is a dispute about the unions wanting to manage this company.'

We are here not to make decisions on who is right and who is wrong in industrial disputes, because, inevitably, people on both sides do things in industrial disputes which none of us will agree with. Disputes are nasty and they cause a lot of damage. We are not here to make those judgments, even though those on the other side continue to do so. And you just heard, again, the rant from the member for Chifley about the waterfront—the waterfront where, the unions told us, you could not get from 16 to 30 crane lifts per hour at the time. We now average 32. What a surprise! It actually worked.

Those people opposite are obsessed, they are wholly owned subsidiaries of the trade union movement and they cannot see this issue. They automatically take sides. Our job here is to write law so we do not have these sorts of disputes, so we do not encourage one side or the other to take the action that we have seen the unions pursue in the last few months, draining the blood from Qantas, so much so that we saw the absolutely extraordinary intervention this morning by John Borghetti, a competitor of Qantas. He is quoted in the Australianas saying:

But I think, generally speaking, given the perception of Australia overseas at the moment, this would certainly be damaging to Brand Australia …

This dispute is very complex. Even the competitors are saying that this matter has to be sorted out. The Prime Minister knew this was coming. She should have acted when she had the opportunity to act. Make no mistake: the government wrote the law to allow this scenario to occur. Every single one of you is responsible for the 68,000 people who were stuck at airports over the weekend. Every single one of you is responsible for what is going on–the industrial chaos which is now affecting our mining companies, wharves and Qantas. They are trying to kill Qantas, by allowing this outrageous and ongoing campaign and by extending the matters that can be included in disputation. The unions are acting out of control and are being supported by their sponsors in the parliament. They should be ashamed of themselves. This act is a disgrace. It must change. Unless we change it, the economy will suffer. Shame on you.

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