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

I thank the government for the opportunity to say a few words on this bill. My sense of frustration here is that there has been a complete lack of a human side to this—the reaction to human pain. I will try to humanise this is much as I can.

If you walk through that door near the Speaker's chair, you will see two magnificent paintings of the first two Speakers of this parliament. The one on the right-hand side is Charlie McDonald, the first member for the electorate of Kennedy, which I represent. Charlie left parliament after 23 years and, according to the history books and newspapers, died of dust on the lungs, or miner's phthisis.

Charlie McDonald came from Charters Towers—remember, Charters Towers was bigger than Brisbane in those days, with the gold rushes. The state member for Charters Towers, Anderson Dawson, was the first Labor head of government elected anywhere in the world, a person of great historic significance. He also, according to the history books, was dying of dust on the lungs when he left politics. When the third Prime Minister of this place, Andrew Fisher—again, according to the history books—left parliament, he was also dying of dust on the lungs. His father died of dust on the lungs.

In England, even though the treatment of Welsh and Cornish miners was somewhat akin to that of slaves—they actually wore steel bands with numbers on them—they still had damping-down laws. In Africa, where the local indigenous population worked the mines, they had damping-down laws. In this country, we did not, and there is no question that that is why one in 30 miners died. Thirty went down the mines, and one never came back up again.

The labour movement was created by a very great Australian. Malcolm Fraser said his heroes were the American Franklin Roosevelt and the Australian Edward Granville Theodore. Paul Keating said his heroes were JT Lang and Edward Theodore. I have a picture of the great Jack McEwen, of course, and a picture of Theodore on my wall. I am not in their class—they are very important people, as former prime ministers of Australia—and you could not find three people on the planet who are more unalike than Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating and me! But there is one thing that we do agree on, and that is Theodore.

The first thing the labour movement did was pass damping-down laws for mines. It was not really a great cost to put in some water to damp down the dust so that we did not die of dust in the lungs—and it was not just dust in the lungs. Theodore formed the first union because the third time he went down a mine—he was ordered down the mine—it was extremely dangerous and two people died, and he bore the scars for the rest of his life. You can say, 'Well, those days are gone; we have safety now.' But the previous speaker, the member for Gorton, said that there were three deaths in the last two weeks on construction sites. Do we not have a problem when there are three deaths in two weeks on construction sites in Australia?

After we formed our little political party, I went to my first stoppage meeting, which was called by the ETU and the CFMEU in Brisbane because the tunnel was extremely dangerous. They said that the supposed overseeing engineers had driven through in an air conditioned vehicle, put the window down, talked to a foreman, screamed abuse at him and told him, 'We're falling behind on the job and you're going to get sacked shortly.' They said that that was about the only oversight that was taking place in the tunnels. Well, I did not know whether that was true or not. There had been a couple of accidents there. Two weeks later I attended a second stoppage meeting because a man was dying as a result of an accident there. You think that it is somebody out there who is dying, but it turned out it was not. It was the mayor of Charters Towers' brother who had gone through school with my own daughters. I knew Sam Beveridge very, very well, and it hit home to me that it is not just anybody dying out there; it is us that are dying out there.

I have worked on industrial sites. For those who have not worked on industrial sites: there is an intrinsic dangerousness, and we take that danger. I am not complaining about the danger. We were very highly paid in the mines to accept that danger. At my first job they said to me, 'Hey, mate, you better watch out because you know how you got the job?' I said, 'Yeah, because I'm clever and I presented well and I'm tough.' They said, 'No, because the bloke whose place you've taken was chopped up in the pelletiser.' A safety card was put on the chair, and someone came along and tripped over chair. The chair fell over, the door clanged shut and he was inside in this huge, giant 20c piece, if you like, with arms that swung around to break up the lead lumps inside, and he died under extremely tragic circumstances.

The first time I took an industrial action was over a thing called the shaker. We had to jump up on top of the flue, hit it with a sledgehammer and then jump back down before thing came back at you at 60 miles an hour. There was probably about 30 minutes of work needed to fix that thing, but it was extremely dangerous. I was in a lead dust hopper, which is a huge thing—maybe a 10th of the size of this chamber—and a mate of mine, Mal Brodie, yelled out at me, 'You stupid'—I will not say exactly what he said. I asked, 'Why am I being stupid?' He said: 'Well, you're working the air gun to get the hopper working because it is clogged up. When it starts working, you're going to vanish straight down the hopper and be buried alive in the dust.' He burst out laughing and threw me the safety belt that someone should have told me I should have been wearing. I am indicating that, of their very nature, industrial sites are dangerous. We accept that. We people that work in industrial sites accept that.

I am not trying to denigrate other unions by saying this, but the CFMEU are not the trendy Left or the socialist Left union. They are the hard trade unionists of Australia. You break them and you have broken trade unionism in this country.

If you think that we are just a talking about fairytales or fairy floss: at approximately 2.50 on Monday, 10 October, a 27-year-old German backpacker fell 35 metres to her death on a Finbar construction project in the Perth CBD. When CFMEU safety officials entered the Finbar site about 40 minutes after the fatality, the job was still going full steam ahead, with a major concrete pour still taking place. Finbar had not even bothered to contact the police! It took an ABC journalist to ring the police. You understand there was a dead body here. Before they were made aware of the fatality, even the OHS regulator, WorkSafe, did not front up to the job until over an hour after the union safety officials entered site. Finbar failed to close off the second level of the job where the worker landed—and remember it was from 15 storeys up. Blood and strewn work clothing were clearly visible and accessible, and there had been no effort to ensure the scene of the fatality was not contaminated. The deceased construction worker was not wearing a fall prevention harness when she fell from the 15th floor. I might add that she was from overseas. Section 457 visa workers are all over these sites now, taking our jobs and undermining our pay and conditions. The minute something like this happens, they immediately clear all those people off the site.

So I speak with some passion on this, I suppose. I represent the electorate where the worst tragedy ever recorded in Australian mining history took place. Seventy-two human beings were blown to death and every single male member of the Mount Mulligan community was dead within our one hour from that explosion at Mount Mulligan, which is in the heart of the Kennedy electorate. The third or fourth worst tragedy in Australia was when 23 people were blown to pieces at Mt Leyshon, which is in my home town of Charters Towers.

You people over here—and I do not mean to denigrate you—to some degree are super featherweights.

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