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

I have great respect for the previous member of parliament but, with all due respect, I was reading statements by Senator Madigan yesterday and I most certainly shared the sentiments of a person who was very angry because he saw the coalface—he saw the reality of this place. The previous speaker clearly has never talked to a truck driver, because every truck driver in my area screams and complains that there is no work for them, because of all the big contractors from down south. All the big contractors from down south now complain that they are not getting any work because of the big contractors from overseas. They are not getting any work either. In Western Australia they tell me that a whole mining processing plant will come in from overseas and be loaded and taken on a semi and it is all bolted together. The steel comes from overseas. The work is done overseas. All we get is laying a concrete foundation, and that will be, typically, contractors coming in bringing in 457 workers or whatever to do the work and then flying back out again, leaving no benefit behind for our communities in Australia, whether it is the bloke that owns the truck or whether it is the small contractors and loaders.

Quite frankly, if we were building the Snowy Mountains scheme now, Thiess Brothers would not get a contract. Les Thiess and his seven or eight brothers who worked in the firm with him would not get a contract. In those days we put immense pressure upon government corporations to employ Australians and he was able to get a small contract, and when the tendering was highly competitive he ended up with all of the contracts. Dillingham and Utah were both sidelined. Over 40 per cent of the entire building of the Snowy was done by Thiess contractors and only 20 per cent by Dillingham, Utah and all of the other mostly foreign corporations. When there was a prejudice working to give Australians a fair go, not only did they get a fair go but they were so good that they made sure the others were gone. That was the history of the Snowy.

The previous speaker's husband belonged to a government in which all road construction was done with local owner-drivers. That was the policy of the Queensland government. In that period some 10,000 kilometres of roads were built or sealed in Queensland, all with owner-drivers. This is from a government that was spending $3,000 million—which, in today's money, would be about $6,000 million—a year. The current Queensland government and this one are spending $45,000 million a year and there are no jobs for local truckies at all—and they are not putting down much bitumen at all. In fact, it is quite fascinating to figure out what the hell they are spending the money on. Whatever else may have been said about the government of those days in Queensland, no-one would ever question the economic effectiveness and the great economic success story that was Queensland in the 1970s and 1980s.

The previous speaker said that this proposal is a complete anathema to free trade, and she is dead right—it is. We have a saying in my party that 'free market' means big foreign monopolistic corporations are free to mark up to whatever level they please. That is what 'free market' means as far as we are concerned—free to mark up to whatever price you feel like.

It is very seldom and rare for me to give any praise to either side of this parliament but in this case, with this bill, at least the Australians will be able to have a go. I have a constant and continuous complaint that we did not even know there were any tenders being called for the job. We did not even know that. I think Leighton is a very excellent company. I have had very good experience with them. They are very good Australians. But, at the end of the day, the three Leighton companies are all foreign owned. We will often get three tenders on a job and they will be from the three Leighton companies that are owned by Leighton Holdings in Australia. So whilst I do not in any way denigrate these people—I think that they have done an excellent job—by the same token, the tendering process is not really a tendering process at all. All the jobs have been stitched up and all the tendering has been done long before the action comes down.

I quoted in my book a New Guinea example. Bechtel was contracted to build the Ok Tedi pipeline for $82 million—I think that was the figure, if my memory serves me correctly—and Curtain Brothers came along and said they could do it for $17 million. The American who was in charge of Ok Tedi said, 'Do you know Curtain?' and I said, 'Yes, I do.' He said, 'Not only did I stupidly give him the contract, because I did not think he could do it, when Bechtel had bid $82 million and this bloke was effectively bidding $20 million to do the same job, but he came in six months ahead of schedule and so we made a huge amount of extra money.' In that case the decision was taken by a big American mining company—I think it was American but it was foreign anyway—to do a deal with a big American contracting construction company and no Australian was allowed to go in. But, when the Australian beat his way through the door, he did it for a quarter of the price that the big international corporation had tendered for and came in six months ahead of schedule, which enabled them to make an extra $60 million of profit that year. I am going from memory in that case, but you would have to be blind and deaf not to know that Australian companies are just not getting a look in.

All of the great, giant mining companies of Australia, with the exception of Andrew Forrest, are all foreign owned. There are only front men or front women for foreign corporations. Those that purport to be Australian are just fronts for foreign corporations. They have their contacts overseas and they just simply bring the overseas operators in and do the whole lot. The head of one of the biggest mining companies in Australia—and I will not mention his name—said that in Africa they ring up the Chinese and a huge construction crew comes in and six months later they fly out—you have got a mine and camp living conditions and a town built and away they would go. That is what is going to happen in Australia. That might be all very wonderful for the mining company but it sure ain't very wonderful for Australia. We are being bypassed all the time.

I would say that in most of the little midwest towns in north Queensland, where I come from, they would have had 10 contracted truck drivers. I doubt that I could count 10 in the whole of the midwestern gulf country now, because all of the work is going to big corporations and the locals get no look-in at all. That is on a local scale, a regional scale if you like, but on a national scale it is happening in exactly the same way—the Australians are not getting a look-in at all. If you tell me that this is going to solve the problem, no, it does not. But at least it gives an Australian company and an Australian contractor or subcontractor the right to put his name forward. In 'realityland' this gives the opportunity to someone like me to put up a hell of a stink to ensure that the contractors and subcontractors get a look-in at construction sites.

I quote the case of Adani. It seems to me they are building a two-kilometre airstrip. Some of my First Australian friends said when negotiating native title, 'Why do you need a two-kilometre airstrip?' They said, 'We get big planes coming in from overseas flying in workers.' 'But you said, when Mr Katter attacked you in the paper, that you weren't flying in workers from overseas.' The bloke concerned said there was a thundering silence for two minutes and then they started on another subject. They are going to fly workers in from overseas, thanks to the initiatives taken by the current federal government. Congratulations, you have given to foreigners hundreds of thousands of jobs that should have gone to Australians. You call yourself the Labor Party, but Ben Chifley would turn in his grave and have convulsions if he saw a Labor government flying 100,000 workers in from overseas.

When you walk out of the parliament through the door behind the chair, you see a big picture of Charlie McDonald, the first member of parliament for Kennedy, the seat that I represent. Those men fought and died—literally died with three people shot dead at the picket line at Dagworth Station, where Waltzing Matilda was written a couple of weeks later—for pay and conditions. And when they won those conditions they saw the big corporates of the day simply bringing people in from overseas to work the mines and the cane fields. The entire executive of the AWU in Queensland was jailed for three years with hard labour for having a strike. After all those fights we saw all those conditions being taken away from us. Of the first seven speeches by Charlie McDonald in this place, six were about people coming in from overseas to take jobs away from us.

The root cause of this is that the six great mining companies in Australia were allowed to be sold to foreigners. They were all owned by Australians and now they are all owned by foreigners. If that is a step forward then I think there is a most peculiar value system in this parliament. If it is a sign of free markets then you can stick your free markets up your jumper. I would like to see Australia owned by Australians. If that sounds a bit xenophobic, as TheAustralian newspaper described those attitudes and values, those were the attitudes and values of Essington Lewis and John Corbould who created the Mount Isa Mine and BHP. They created the Australian steel industry and these great structures in Australia. These mines and structures have been sold to foreigners by the greatest group of grubby worms, the slithering suits of Sydney. They have made fortunes selling the country. A lot of the mining magnates of Australia have made fortunes by simply selling their country to foreigners. There is a name for that.

Here today we are moving the Australian Industry Participation Plan. Far be it for me to say anything good about this government, but there is a tiny bit of light, of opportunity, that will be provided to my contractors, the people that I grew up with, went to school with and who are my friends. They have no work, because the contractors are coming in either from down south in the big cities or from overseas. This will provide us with at least the opportunity to put in a bid. All we are asking for is the right to put in a bid. I do not know how many times people have come up to me and said: 'Bobby, we didn't even get the opportunity to put in a bid. It was all over, red rover. The first we knew about it was all the trucks coming in from outside, all the semis, all the D9s, all the scrapers, all the construction crews.' In my little home town of Cloncurry, a First Australian who had a very successful engineering operation told me the five engineering operations in Cloncurry had all gone. They have been taken over by contractors coming in with 457 workers, so there is no benefit for my little home town of Cloncurry. Once upon a time we rejoiced that a mine was opening up in our area. Now it is really a taxing of our infrastructure. (Time expired)

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