Barry Haase (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Unionised Australia will at every turn choose to bring the employer down because this is a battle that was born some hundreds of years ago and they have never matured to the point where they are over it. They still believe that they are fighting to get the small children out of the depths of the coal mines, and because there are no small children in the depths of the coal mines today they have to pick on someone else. Who suffers? The travellers of this world have suffered in the last 48 hours, needlessly, because of the games that they play. They do not have the intestinal fortitude, the wherewithal or the motivation to invest their money like the shareholders of this company do in service industries that provide and make assets and life better for Australians. They do not endeavour to keep their unions down so they can be on top dictating, looking from on high; they absolutely represent the worst aspects of a small group of the Australian population and they ought to be damned for it.

I have no fear of going out into my electorate and facing unionists, because in the main, in my vast Durack electorate, unionists these days are members of unions because they have been forced into it. It is not a voluntary situation, because the industrial laws today still demand on building sites in Western Australia that they be members. We still have the jackboot attitudes of union leaders in Western Australia demanding that unionists are such and have a job or they leave the site. They still use their jackboot tactics and disrupt concrete pours. I wonder if you guys know about concrete pours. What do you know about hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of concrete, and reinforcement estimations—

Government members interjecting—

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