Warren Entsch (Leichhardt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On December 7 last year, I am proud to say that I voted for the Work Choices legislation in this chamber. I voted to support the legislation because I very strongly agree with the government’s position that Australia cannot afford to take its economic prosperity for granted. Just as today’s prosperity is a product of yesterday’s reforms, tomorrow’s prosperity can only be a product of today’s reforms.

Despite the dire predictions by the union movement, there was no ‘green light for mass sackings’ and the sky did not fall in on workers. In fact, the figures tell a vastly different story. Since March 175,800 new jobs have been created—almost 85 per cent of those are full time; the unemployment rate in August was 4.9 per cent—near 30-year lows for the 4th consecutive measurement; participation rates spiked at a record 65.1 per cent; and real wages are up two per cent. The number of industrial disputes has fallen to 3.1 working days lost per 1,000 employees. That is the lowest rate since comparable statistics were first collected in 1970.

No matter how many times the unions get caught out telling their little porkies, as we saw with the Cowra and Spotlight examples, they persist with their dishonest scare campaign. Unfortunately, this activity is not confined to the national arena. In my own electorate of Leichhardt, the Electrical Trades Union has taken up the call to arms with some gusto, with its campaign apparently supported and subsidised—and this is where I have a serious concern—by its major employer, the state owned instrumentality Ergon Energy. So far, we have had the Leader of the Opposition, ACTU President Sharan Burrow, Senator Penny Wong and our local ALP hopefuls all turn out in my electorate to rally the troops.

I have been challenged to debate the new IR laws at times when it was known that I would not be in town. More recently, a so-called invitation demanding that I attend at a certain time and place turned up at my office without so much as a return contact number for RSVP purposes. Clearly, this is a political stunt, and I am certainly not going to dance to the unions’ tune. I remain unapologetic about refusing to be a part of it. I can understand the unions and the Labor Party wanting to push their own agendas, but the complicit approach taken by Ergon Energy, in my view, is a real concern. When I receive my bill from Ergon, it bothers me that my electricity account is going up by 3.3 per cent. How much of that increase is due to the current political activities of many of its employees? Ergon appears to have allowed itself to become involved.

Despite apologetic overtures and assurances of a full investigation by Ergon Energy’s manager of regional services for northern operations, Geoff Bowes, to date I have had no formal response to my complaints. My office received verbal advice from Mr Bowes suggesting that he could find no evidence to support claims of inappropriate use of Ergon assets in union activity, despite being forwarded a resolution from an ETU meeting that was sent to me by union steward Stuart Traill during work hours from his Ergon email account. My office has also provided Mr Bowes with photographic evidence of the activities of their employees which included a photograph of 42 Ergon Energy vehicles, many of which had political slogans stuck on them, parked along Mulgrave Road during an ETU protest rally outside my electorate office in August. He also has photographs of unauthorised signage and posters which mysteriously found their way to the top of electrical poles amongst the power lines and high in palm trees on public land across Cairns—in defiance of local council rules, I might point out. They were fixed onto these poles by very thick cable ties, commonly used by the electrical workers. I note that these signs have even made their way down here to Canberra, obviously through the ETU campaign. It is little wonder some of my colleagues have been asking me how much I am paying these guys to help raise my profile on a national basis. It is just another example of the Queensland government putting its political ideology ahead of the delivery of essential services.

As my colleagues would be aware, Queensland joined other state Labor governments earlier this year to fund a multimillion-dollar High Court challenge to the IR laws. Not content to wait for the outcome, Mr Beattie is now squandering more taxpayers’ dollars on a so-called inquiry into IR laws by the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission. The first regional sitting was in Cairns a fortnight ago. I understand that just one independent witness—and I use the term ‘independent’ very loosely—appeared before it. While I do not begrudge that witness the right to put a case, I do wonder whether the Office of Workplace Services would have been a more meaningful way of having the matter dealt with. To me, the inquiry is just another taxpayer funded political stunt—a travelling roadshow designed to give the union mouthpieces up and down the Queensland coast a quick headline.

I support workers and their right to be part of the trade union movement. As a former trade unionist—and I am very proud of it—I despair that never in the history of trade union leadership has it been so completely unrepresentative and contemptuous of its own membership. Just as the ACTU’s phoney advertising campaign has been exposed, I believe my constituents will see the ETU campaign as nothing more than a blatant, politically motivated exercise to win votes for the Labor Party.

So far, despite all the publicity and my repeated offers to hear the concerns of individuals adversely impacted by government legislation, the ETU has not come forward with a single case. In fact, the only calls I have received were to congratulate me for not kowtowing to the bullyboy tactics of the ETU. One electrical contractor called to report his own experience of being singled out and branded a ‘government sympathiser’ when he had the temerity to suggest to his fellow contractors that they might like to negotiate their own enterprise bargaining agreement without the union. He was subjected to personal attacks and victimisation by the ETU. When he complained to his employer and this was passed on to Ergon Energy, again Ergon could find no evidence of inappropriate behaviour by the union. The man had to be moved off the site by his employer, and life has certainly been made very difficult for him ever since. This is the type of behaviour that we have come to expect from the unions and I certainly have no intention of participating in their media stunts.

We have seen another classic example of bullyboy tactics, if you like, and dominance of the unions over the Labor Party in South Australia recently, where journalists who did not carry a union ticket were refused access to the opposition leader. That just shows you the extent to which the unions totally control the Labor Party. I think it is a damning example of that sort of control and it is something that I think the broader Australian community finds grossly inappropriate.

I have said quite openly to these union activists that my door is always open to any employee—or any employer, for that matter—who feels that they have been disadvantaged under the new legislation. To date I have received none. Absolutely none have come through my door to raise issues about it. I believe Australian workplaces deserve better than the lowest common denominator available under the old system of compulsory collective bargaining. Work Choices, in my view, gives employees and employers an opportunity to achieve just that.