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

In rising to speak on this bill, the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014, I will address the remarks made by the previous speaker. When I jumped university and went into mining, it took me two months from when I put the application in to take up a mining lease. You did not need anything else except a mining lease in those days; so I went out, pegged the country and put in my application for a mining lease. It took me about two hours to fill out the forms and within two months the dozers were in, clearing the site and the pads in preparation for us to commence mining. I was recently with the manager of one of the biggest mines in Australia. He has opened up a number of mines. I said: 'I'm being told it takes three to six years.' He said: 'Yeah, I'd say you're looking at about four years from when you decide to mine to when it actually opens up.'

Now, I have very great respect for the member for Forrest in Western Australia—she is one of the best members we have in this parliament—but that start-up time has got nothing to do with workers going on strike. It is due to the processes put in place by the state governments, nothing else. We have an LNP government in Queensland and there has been no change in the down time for start-up mining in the state whatsoever. The last mines minister in the Bligh government announced that he would be regarded and judged by history on his ability to reduce that start-up time; he would stake his job on it becoming a reasonable figure of some six months. It probably blew out under him and it has continued to blow out under the current administration.

We are on the cusp of opening up the great Galilee basin coalfields. It will be a great tragedy because the railway line will be owned by Adani, and all of the resource is foreign owned already. This is half of Australia's known coal reserves and the workforce will be section 457 workers. The ALP stand condemned by history. They were the people who introduced the architecture for section 457 workers, not the Liberal Party; but I will bet that the Liberal Party doubles those numbers over the next three years. The country will be submerged—our wages undermined, our pay and conditions undermined and our jobs taken. Jobs that were worth $150,000 a year will be going to foreigners who will be working for nothing remotely resembling $150,000 a year.

This is interesting because this is greenfields legislation. I suspect that this legislation is coming from the mining magnate from Western Australia, Mrs Rinehart, because she has said—as has the leader of the National Party; he uses exactly the same figures as she uses—that people in America work for $8 an hour. The leader of the National Party has said it again and again, so clearly he also believes that people in this country should work for $8 an hour. I would like to know how he would pay just the rent on a house—that is more than $300 a week. I would like to know how he would pay just the rent on a house, let alone food or any of the other costs of living we have to confront, including $7 now for going to a doctor or as payment to a pharmacist. It is interesting that he uses the same figure that she used. She said: 'Australians are lazy. They won't work. I've got to get my workers from overseas until Australians accept that they are going to work for $320 a week'—which happens to be $8 an hour. We can see a pattern of behaviour here where what is left of the National Party, which is really nothing very much, are out there ingratiating themselves to Mr Barnaby Joyce's good friend, Mrs Rinehart.

In sharp contrast to her, and unfortunately for her when the history books are written, the neighbouring mining operation is that of Andrew Forrest. Let me pay a great tribute to Andrew Forrest—a well-deserved tribute. He, in sharp contrast to Mrs Rinehart, has trained 2,000 First Australians to go into this work. Not only do they train them but quite literally they hold their hands. A lot of them are not used to working in a job—they have never had a job and have never dreamt of having a job; that has been something that has been in outer space or dreamland for them. Not all of them are trained to go on to his jobs but of that 2,000, over 500 are still working with Fortescue Metals. I am very proud and pleased to say that one of my own fellow little hometownsmen, Nev Power, a fitter from Mount Isa—educated in the boarding schools of Charters Towers like myself—is the CEO there. It is another wonderful achievement for Nev. The bloke that was handling the Aboriginal jobs there said to me—a big, tall, rangy, ringer bloke: 'It's not what we do at Fortescue. Creating 1,000 jobs for First Australians is not what we do, it is who we are.'

That could have been said of Essington Lewis, the founder of BHP. He took a little mining company that was working at a place called Broken Hill and turned it into one of the 10 or 20 biggest mining companies in the world, and one of the 50 or 60 biggest companies in the world. He started work with a pick—he actually worked at the coalface in those days with a pick and shovel. Laurence Hartnett, the founder of the Australian motor car industry, took great pride in the jobs he created for his fellow Australians and in how much he was able to pay them. Henry Ford in his early days said: 'Not only have I put a car within the reach of every American family but every single year, for 20 years, I have been able to put the wages of my workers up.' Even if he went bad later on, we will remember Henry Ford in his great years for that.

These people constantly advocate that the workers should work for nothing—they hate workers, they hate their workforce and their objective constantly in the media is to bash them. You can see, at the front of the banner newspaper, for want of a better term, of one of the press magnates in Australia, a constant, continuous and unremitting attack upon wage structures in this country. As an Australian, one of the proudest boasts I have is that we pay decent wages in this country. Those people sitting over there are going to be remembered as the people who advocated that we should not pay decent wages in this country. Having said that, the people on this side of the House are actually the bad guys. They are the ones who brought in the 130,000 section 457 workers.

Most relevant to this legislation is that it is greenfields legislation. Guess who has the greenfields in Queensland? Madam Rinehart from Western Australia owns a quarter of the greenfields, and she says she is going to work them with workers from overseas. It will be over my dead body, but, then again, she would probably consider that a bonus! One should be scared of the money and power these people have and their influence, but I think they expended all of their power and influence trying to get rid of me last time. If $10 million last time could not get rid of me, I will be pretty confident next time around.

What we are talking about today is greenfields sites in which, effectively, after three months there will be no arbitration commission, so we are back to Work Choices. The Liberal Party just does not seem to learn anything. It was said of the Bourbon kings: 'They have forgotten nothing and they have learnt nothing.' That would be a very suitable comment upon the LNP. They have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing. You just had your Prime Minister lose his seat in parliament for the second time in Australian history—and why did the first bloke lose his seat in parliament? Because he abolished the arbitration commission. One of the greatest achievements of this nation was arbitration and getting a fair go for both sides of the coin. We can play football without a referee, but it will not be much of a game. We can play the industrial game without a referee too, and I can tell you: you will have mayhem at the end of the day and people working for nothing.

Let me give you a quick picture of what it was like, because I can stand up proudly in this place and say I am a best-selling author of an Australian history book, with over 20,000 copies sold. At this time 100 years ago, one in 31 of us who went down the mines was killed. Almost everyone in my home state of Queensland worked in mining. When the state was settled, goldminers came to Gympie and Charters Towers and more than half the population of Queensland were in those two centres. My own family were there before there was a Charters Towers, so I can speak with authority. One in 31 of those people who went down the mines never came back up again. Whilst the Africans were protected by damping-down laws and whilst the Welsh, who were treated not much better than slaves in England, were protected by damping-down laws, there were no damping-down laws in Queensland. In the building of the sewerage ditches in Sydney, when sewerage was being put in there, there were no damping-down laws, so every single person who worked there for more than two years—I am quoting Humphrey McQueen in Social Sketches of Australiadied a terrible death due to miners phthisis. If there is any doubt in anyone's mind in this place that it was real, the first member for Kennedy left this place dying of miners phthisis of the lungs. The first Labor Premier in world history, Anderson Dawson, left the state parliament dying of miners phthisis, and his father had died of miners phthisis. The second Labor Prime Minister in this place, Andrew Fisher, left this place dying of miners phthisis.

So it was real, and that it was what it was like before we had arbitration. If I speak with passion, I am entitled to. My great-grandad put £3,000, $1 million in today's money, behind the strike fund in 1894, not because we were working class—we most certainly were not. I say that publicly and openly. But he had some moral convictions that this could not go on and that it had to be saved. And I can see today the forces at work taking us back 100 years.

In the cane fields of North Queensland, Mr Deputy Speaker Vasta—your own family were in the cane fields—one in 30, almost exactly the same figure, ironically enough, died because the big plantation owners would not burn. Because they would not burn, we died of Weil's disease. One in 30 of us died of Weil's disease in those days because the owners would sacrifice three per cent of the sugar content in their cane if they burned. So we died. If you have any doubts about what I am saying, in the big meetings and riots that took place in Innisfail there were three people shot dead because some of them were cane cutters at the same time as they were farm owners. Tremendous conflicts and passions ran riot during that period of upheaval.

When we won through on arbitration, what happened was they brought coolies, as they were referred to, to work the mines and they brought Kanaks in to work the cane fields. So they said, 'Two to the valley to you!' It is the same here. Because you lost on the arbitration, the ALP—not the Liberals; the ALP—brought in 130,000 workers to serve their corporate masters. And there is no doubt that the Liberals are going to do a hell of a lot worse—or a hell of a lot better, as they would see it. They will bring in 250,000 instead of 130,000. We are looking at a state where 20,000 jobs are going to vanish shortly; 10,000 have already vanished. We are not going to get those jobs because they will go to section 457 workers. (Time expired)

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