Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

Very seldom do I pay compliments in this place, but that was a very excellent contribution from the previous speaker. The Liberal Party don't understand their own roots. They don't understand where they came from. Bob Menzies's name is synonymous with the existence of the Liberal Party, which he formed. His grandfather was a trade union leader where the Eureka Stockade had taken place, and he was a trade union leader not all that long afterwards. Eureka, contrary to public opinion, were not trade unionists; they were the miners. They were the mine owners that were complaining about government taxation and overregulation. But, all the same, I repeat that Bob Menzies's grandfather, of whom he was very proud, was a trade union boss at the very town where the Eureka Stockade had taken place, which was one of the biggest industrial areas in this country in the days of the goldmining.

To get you thinking right on this, I think one of the great quotes was an altercation between Walter Reuther, head of the motor vehicle builders union in the United States, and Henry Ford. And Henry said: 'Wally, you come here and have a look at this machinery, because this machinery's going to go in here and I don't need your workers. I don't need any workers at all. I'm going to replace them with this machine.' And Walter said, 'Henry, if there are no workers who's going to be there to buy your cars?' There was reportedly a thundering silence from Henry Ford. He hadn't thought about that part of it.

In the Great Depression, the big retail businesses in Australia—the equivalents of Woolworths and Coles in the day and the big general stores in Sydney—were tenaciously fighting for public works and expenditure of government moneys. They were on the side of the worker because the worker had no money in his pocket and the businesses were all going broke. My own grandfather is very famous. He's in the history books. He gave over a million dollars, in terms of today's money, to the strike fund in the 1890s. Those people who didn't like him said he was just giving it to the workers so they would have money to spend in his shops. He claimed, of course, that he believed in the working man and that they were the solid backbone of the nation. They were the ones who dug the gold out of the ground and they were the ones who mustered the cattle and sheared the sheep—that was his reply.

There's a wonderful story told about Les Thiess. He was the first person to import bulldozers to Australia, and when they had desperate coal shortages in New South Wales they brought him in to open-cut mine. At that stage there were still pit ponies working in the mines in New South Wales. There was an enormous reaction against Thiess and the use of bulldozers in open-cut mining, which would do away with their jobs. There were massive strikes. They closed down the whole of the coal industry. New South Wales and Victoria were freezing in the middle of winter. They called a general strike. They were all down at the pub drinking with this new bloke, who was a dozer operator, drinking with them. They said, 'What's your name, mate?' And he said, 'Les Thiess.' 'Are you related to this Tory bastard from Queensland who's taken all our jobs?' And Les said, 'No, I'm not related to him; that's me.' They said, 'What are you doing drinking in the pub with the lot of us? He said: 'Mate, I'm a plant operator. I'm not a rich person. They wouldn't have me in their pub.' They said: 'Hey, fellows, this is Les Thiess. He's not a bad sort of bloke,' and they all went back to work.

I'm afraid that there's a little bit of class connection here with the Liberal initiatives. There are leftovers from a past age when we had working classes. I'm very pleased to see some of the Liberals using the words 'aspirational classes'. I represent the aspirational classes. The vast bulk in my electorate work as miners. If I were representing Cairns, as I do represent the southern part of Cairns, the vast population of the people I represent would be fly-in miners. If I were in Townsville, I'd be representing miners. The farmers I represent—we rang up three people to run for us in the last state election. They were all farmers' sons. They were all working in the mines. I dare say that there would not be a farming family in North Queensland that does not have a relative working in the mines, and I would say that a quarter of the farms are only still owned by the farmers because there is someone working in the mines. So it is vitally important for us to be able to keep up those jobs and our incomes from those jobs.

What's happening to the miners? They have to live two weeks on, two weeks off. They live away from their homes. They don't see their kids play football on the weekend. They don't see their daughters in the eisteddfods on the weekend. They're not at home, so their kids have been brought up, to a large degree, without one of their parents, or, in some cases, both of their parents. We are now working incredible hours and we're working under conditions where we don't live in our home anymore. We were on $200,000—this is very hard and very dangerous work. We have fatalities. There is no way they can be avoided. I worked as a miner myself and I worked my own mines. I own my own mines and I've worked my own mines, so I've walked both sides of the fence. But it is an intrinsically dangerous occupation. It is done in extremely hot, dry, desolate conditions in very remote parts of Australia, and you need that sort of money to be able to justify working in those conditions. We were on $200,000 a year because of active and aggressive trade unionism. We've now been cut back to $100,000 a year and fly-in mining.

I don't want to leave out the ALP here, because it was the ALP who introduced fly-in mining. It was the ALP who took the temporary worker visas from 325,000 under Howard to 640,000 under their government. It was the ALP government in Queensland that privatised the railways and took railway employment from 22,000 down to 7,000. It utterly destroyed the towns from which I come—a series of railway towns in the midwest of North Queensland. Those towns are almost ghost towns today because they stripped us of 1,500 railway jobs. Everything is carried from the coast in trucks now, costing us six times more than when the railways were carrying that freight.

So the railways were privatised by the Labor Party and the Labor Party in Queensland half privatised the electricity industry, which sacked 2,500 workers. I copped a lot amongst my union mates because I was in the government that stood up to them in the electricity dispute—the famous watershed in Australian industrial history. It was a stand-up bloodthirsty battle. I was on the other side of the fence, and I'm proud to say I was because I think the boys had just overreached themselves. They were asking for ridiculous terms, pay and conditions. They wanted a week on and a week off and pay that was superior to the income of a member of parliament. That might have been fair enough, but combined with the fact that they were only going to work one out of every two weeks it was a bit rich—they weren't living away from home or anything. They went too far and we stood up to them, and I'm not going to shy away from being one of the people involved in that dispute.

When the unions go too far, yes, you've got to stand up to them. But at the present moment we're being shredded on all sides. One in two jobs that have been created since 2013 have gone to a temporary visa holder. I will tell you what temporary visa holders work for. I'm not going to name the industry, because I've got a lot of good friends in this industry and I think some of them are doing this. But I'll tell you what it is: they work a 60-hour week, these temporary visa holders from overseas. They get paid about $700 a week and they pay $150 for board and lodging, which consists of a bedroom that I can almost reach across and touch both walls in. It has three beds stacked one on top of the other on one side and three beds stacked one on top of the other on the other side. And they pay $150 for the privilege of having one of those beds and sharing the bathroom facilities with some 20 people. Increasingly, those are the job options in North Queensland.

We have a bloodthirsty battle in Queensland over the coal industry. We have only two industries in Queensland, really. Everything else pales into insignificance beside the sugar industry and the coal industry. Yes, we have hard rock mining but it's nothing like the size of the coal industry. It's negligible. We have an aluminium industry, which is significant, but it's nothing like the sugar industry or the coal industry. And we have a government in Queensland that wants to close down both industries. The ALP government in Queensland would close down both industries! I've never thought that they were particularly characterised by intellectual capacity, the leadership of the Labor Party in Queensland, but it takes a particular type of callous viciousness to destroy the jobs and the livelihoods of the coalminers of Queensland. My union, the CFMMEU, of which I am a proud member, has stood up to this. No-one else in Australia has stood up, but they've stood up and they've had to fight and take on people who they've worked with and been friends with all of their lives, their Labor colleagues. The split is now becoming venomous and bloodthirsty in Queensland, and it will worsen. Whilst the lily pad Left controls the Labor Party in Queensland, the hard Left are going to be left with nothing. There are no jobs in the sugar industry and there will be no jobs because there will be no sugar industry. That's because, 'Oh, the sugar industry is destroying the Barrier Reef.' The sugar industry has been there for 200 years; the Barrier Reef is still there.

They have brought in temporary visas. They were not brought in by the Liberal Party; they were brought in by the Labor Party. There is a strong strain of hypocrisy coming off this side of the House here. Fly-in mining was banned by the Court government in Western Australia and banned by the Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland. That ban was an enormous benefit to the people who worked in the mines. The minute the Labor Party came in along with their big corporate friends, they abolished the ban on FIFO mining in Western Australia. We know the corruption related to that decision; it is an ugly part of Australian history. In Queensland they abolished the ban on FIFO mining.

A town like Mount Isa—a proud town that was growing and prosperous and one of the richest towns in Australia, with 36,000 people—is now a town of 19,000 people, and half of them are the left-behinds. They're not the sort of people that can get jobs working in the mines. The poor workers have a very limited home life. They're only home one week out of two.

They're bringing in 640,000 people on temporary visas. Of those, 200,000 are migrants; 440,000 temporary visa workers are coming into Australia every year. So we have 640,000 people, almost all adults coming from overseas, almost all eligible for work, chasing 200,000 jobs. When I went to university, it was called supply and demand. Where you've got a massive oversupply of labour, the price for labour is going to go through the floor. Where we were getting 200,000 experienced miners, we're now getting 100,000 and soon we'll be getting 50,000. When you cut the throats of the only people that are fighting back—the CFMMEU, and I think there are not many other unions that are standing up proudly like they are and fighting the good fight. Yes, all right; they may not be perfect people. Let's face it, we as a union had to inherit the building labourers, and there was a famous comment when we complained that they're a bunch of criminals, that they'd kill people and we didn't want them. Bob Hawke said, 'No, you blokes are commos; you can handle them!' So we ended up having to inherit and trying to pull back into a gear a union that was completely out of control. We haven't done a bad job in pulling them back. It may not be perfect at this stage, and I'll be the first to admit that.

I think the government is genuine in what it's trying to do, but there's a very strong element of class struggle, which belongs in the early part of the last century, and there's a very strong element of politics like you're the good guys and this other mob, the unions, are the bad guys. That is not healthy for Australia. It's not the tradition of the Liberal Party, which was started off by Bob Menzies, the very proud grandson of one of the great union leader of this country.

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