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

by leave—I don't want to be difficult. I was speaking on this. I was informed that the debate was interrupted and I would be allowed to complete my speech, so I'm just getting up to complete my speech.

I said at the start of the speech that I was a member of another union, and we had a very dangerous situation at the Mount Isa Mines. I had to stand on a flue and swing a sledgehammer at a piece of machinery called a shaker. It was frozen, and we had to unfreeze it, so I had to hit it and jump off because the heat was such that my boots would catch on fire if I was there for any more than a minute or two. Once the shaker began to move, it would come at me at 60 kilometres an hour. On the other side of the flue was another bloke with a sledgehammer, so he'd hit it and then I'd jump up and hit it. We were hoping to get it moving. Anyway, it was extremely dangerous. I couldn't speak to any of the representatives of my union, because they were all staff. They hadn't quite been appointed, but they were temporarily on staff. You can't complain to a staff member about shortcomings of staff!

So I went down to see the organiser. As I said before, he turned up at my place of work. Like here, there was glass up there, and my boss was behind the glass. He was pointing me out to my boss—obviously, me as a troublemaker. Did he address the issue of the extremely dangerous shaker? No. I asked my boss in the control room, 'Did he take up your shaker?' 'No. Why would he do that? There's nothing wrong with the shaker.' 'Well, you go down and wield the sledgehammer, mate, if you think there's nothing wrong with it!' So I left that union, joined the CFMEU and remained a proud member of that union until this very day. You could say we're excessive at times. Yes. I wouldn't deny that for a moment. Put your hand up here, any member of parliament who is perfect in their conduct as a member of parliament. I'll track you down and I'll soon prove whether you're a good member of parliament or not. Yes, we've most certainly had our shortcomings. We're a very aggressive union and we make no apologies to anyone for that. Australia is averaging about a dozen deaths on construction sites each year. We're trying desperately to eliminate those deaths on construction sites. And, if we're a bit aggressive to people who will not take out a ticket—we do the work, and they bludge off us. I don't think that's very fair. We should do the work to get decent pay and conditions.

There is a union called the coalminers union. I'm really interested in the coalminers union, because it was led by a very good friend of mine, who put the biggest union in Australia together. At his valete speech, Bob Hawke and Neville Wran gave speeches. It was a very high-flying evening. He is a very great man, John Maitland. The head of the coal division, who was double-degreed from a university, stabbed him in the back and put him in jail, when he was totally innocent—and of course the appeals court found him totally innocent, and he was released. But, in the meantime, this fellow had taken over the miners union. As far as I'm concerned, he's never been near a mine in his life. He came out of university with two degrees, stabbed John Maitland in the back, took over the union and then took the coalminers out of the CFMEU because we didn't make him federal secretary. Well, I'd spit on him before I'd make him federal secretary of our union.

I came out of the Bjelke-Petersen government, the only government in Australia that stood up to union thuggery. I made no apologies to the ETU. You turned off the lights and you wouldn't switch them back on until you got the absolutely outrageous outcome that you wanted. So you switched the lights off. The only way we had to switch the lights back on was to bring in contractors. I pleaded with you. The Leader of the Liberal Party was an ex-ETU official who had become a doctor. He pleaded with them to go back to work. Johnny Maitland, the head of the coalminers union of Queensland, pleaded with them to go back to work, because they were playing into the hands of Bjelke-Petersen, who was just looking for an excuse to bash them up—and they gave him the excuse. I won't hesitate to say that our behaviour was excessive, as a government. I'm not proud to admit that, but the truth is that it was.

This issue has arisen because Setka has a different attitude towards women in the workplace. I'm not going to deny that for a moment. But a woman, in all of human history, has lifted 737 kilos. A man has lifted 2,422 kilos. It might come as a surprise to people in this place, but they're different, and Setka is one of those blokes who is conscious of the difference. If you want to go onto a construction site, you want to be able to swing by one hand 20 stories above the ground and not feel scared when you're doing it, and you want to be able to take weights that most people wouldn't be able to lift and do that 20 foot up on a steel beam. So please excuse me for saying some words in defence of Setka. This bloke was in the authority that was appointed to bash up and destroy our union, so please excuse me for saying that Setka might be a bit upset about that. And then he gets put in one of the most lucrative and most looked-up-to positions in this country, with the AFL. Well, please excuse me for complaining about it.

Let me go back to the coalminers union. We are now not in the CFMEU. We are in the coalminers union. Wages in Queensland have been driven down from $185,000 a year to $135,000 a year, for those of us who can get jobs—because we're supporting an ALP that wants the coal industry closed down. They've said it again and again and again. Well, I'll tell you something: it was the CFMEU that sacked Jackie Trad for screaming against the coalminers. It was the head of the CFMEU—not the coal division but the construction division. The coal division never said anything against her at all. She was just allowed to keep screaming that we wanted to close the coal industry down, and she was the deputy leader of the party in Queensland. Well, please excuse me for getting a little bit upset as a CFMEU member. At one time, we had the coalminers and we were going to fight for the coalminers. Since they left, our wages had gone down from $185,000 a year to $135,000 a year. So be it. You're going your own way? I wish you well, son. And the leadership of your coalminers union are a bunch of greenies.

Let me move on. The Liberals say, 'You get money from them.' Yes, in our first election we got money from them and from the ETU in Victoria. In the last nearly 20 years, we haven't got a cent off of them. Not only that, three of them handed out how-to-vote cards against me in my major booth in Mareeba. They had CFMEU shirts on. Alright, these people are entitled to their viewpoint, and the CFMEU actually works against our party, so I'll put that on record. If you think we're getting any money for what we're doing—no, it's what we believe is the right thing to do. So that's not why we're doing it. We're not getting any support from them whatsoever, to my knowledge.

The last speaker said, 'It is damaging us internationally—the tremendously high demands upon our industry.' Well, hold on, you're talking about the construction industry. Then he started talking about food processing, but the CFMEU has no coverage on food processing. You chose to pick the construction industry. The biggest and most important economic go-forward in Australia is construction on the Gold Coast, and you can go to any site, and the CFMEU flags are flying high. The most forward and aggressive economic go-forward in Australia is construction on the Gold Coast, and we're in charge of all those sites. So I'll say to the previous speaker: before you shoot your mouth off in this place, you better hope that the mob on the other side is stupid because someone might just hear what you're saying and answer it.

I didn't say that the CFMEU was in charge of construction on the Gold Coast. I didn't say that. The Liberal Party said that we're destroying industry in Australia. The only industry we've got going forward in this country is construction on the Gold Coast. I defy any member in this place to point out to me, apart from little, tiny things, anything that's going forward in this country. Everyone knows everything's going backwards; we're all aware of that. Unfortunately for him, he picked food processing. He said it's going forward wonderfully well, in spite of these people. Firstly, they've got nothing to do with the industry. The levels of fruit and vegetables imports are not going up; they're going down. Forty-five per cent of our fruit and vegetables now come from overseas. It's quite extraordinary for the most agriculturally well-suited country on earth that we get 45 per cent of our fruit and vegetables from overseas.

A few years ago, we were actually importing more fruit and vegetables than we were exporting. It goes backwards and forwards. I'm quite sure that, in the next few years, we'll be importing more fruit and vegetables than we export. Our country can't feed itself—that's a lovely state of affairs, isn't it? That's not the fault of the CFMEU. We are in construction. The one industry in Australia that is going like a house on fire is construction, and it's construction on a big scale where all the sites are CFMEU. So don't tell me we're restricting, because we're the only industry that's going forward. We're not restricting it. I can't say we're facilitating it, but we're most certainly the people doing the work on the site.

I'm very proud to say that our party has four members of parliament—and please, God, after selection we might have seven or eight to balance the power in Queensland. But every one of our members of parliament has dirt under his fingernails, and my honourable colleague on my left here has dirt under his fingernails. He's one of the last of the Mohicans! Who has in the Labor Party? They've never been near a job where they use their hands in their lives! But we've still got one left, and God bless him for being here.

When we have a candidate, we really want to have a look at him. We're very strong on Christian values. We believe—and you don't have to believe in the good Lord to be in our party, but we sure like to look at whether you agree with the teachings of a bloke called Jesus Christ: you're supposed to love your fellow man, look after him and make the world a better place. That's a very simple message. And we like to make sure, when we interview people, that they have that same viewpoint and are comfortable with that viewpoint.

I refer to Paul Keating—and, you know, it's rather ironic that the agricultural industry was destroyed by the National Party, not by the Labor Party or the Liberal Party; every industry was deregulated by the National Party—and to bananas. Behind the National Party leader's back, he'd already given the import licence for bananas to come in from a country where they paid $5 a day in wages when we paid $28.50 an hour in Australia. I remember it vividly. I had the ABC on—once upon a time I used to listen to the ABC—at six o'clock in the morning, as I got out of bed, and Keating announced that this would be the freest country on earth: 'We are abolishing all tariffs, all subsidies—all gone.' Well, that was a good idea, Paul! The average support level on earth was 42 per cent. So farmers in other countries were getting 42 per cent of their income from their government. Thanks to Keating, we reduced it to four per cent. So we were running a 100 metre race and giving our competitors a 42 metre start. My reaction to his statement was to pick up my boot and throw it at the wall and use some language that my mother told me she'd kill me if she ever heard me saying. And I said: 'What does this bloke mean? Are we going to go down to slave-labour wage levels, or are we going to close down every industry in Australia?'

Well, we closed down the motor vehicle industry. We closed down the fuel industry. Ninety-seven per cent of Australia's fuel was being produced here in Australia. Last year we imported $48,000 million worth of fuel; our total exports were $500 billion; but one 10th of our entire exports was going overseas to buy fuel. That has been the outcome of the free-market policies of the ALP and the LNP. (Time expired)

See this speech in context