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

I take a personal and upfront interest in Qantas. My granddaddy was amongst the early investors in Qantas, and we lost a lot of money. When they refloated the company we put a lot of money in again, and again my family lost a lot of money. There was a lot of criticism of granddad losing all that money. He told me when I was a little boy that he was not upset about losing the money—he didn't care what the family said about him—but he had put the money in because we needed aeroplanes. We needed air services in Australia, particularly in regional and remote areas. Amongst his many achievements, the great Ben Chifley introduced Trans Australian Airlines. He wanted competition in the marketplace and he wanted a benchmark for pricing, so people like Ansett could not charge what they liked. He also wanted to provide services so people, no matter where they lived in Australia, would not be far away from an air service. That was his dream, and it was my granddad's dream as well.

They founded the great company which today we call Qantas. It has been taken over by a grubby little group of slithering snakes from Sydney. If my language is a bit self-indulgent, I think I am entitled to a little self-indulgence on this issue, because what they have done is the complete opposite to what great people like the Fysh family, my grandfather and many others who put in their money to establish this airline. My grandfather, Alexander Kennedy, was one of the early investors and a famous pioneer for the area. The current board is flogging off the airline and cutting services to make themselves rich. They are sacrificing the services to the Australian people to make themselves richer—the complete opposite to what the Fysh's, the Kennedys, the Browns and the Katter's did. They sacrificed themselves to help their country. This mob is sacrificing the interests of their country to help themselves. If you put the entire airline onto the international market—it will no longer be an Australian company—you will get a lot more for your shares. There will be a lot more people buying the shares or available to buy the shares, so the share price will go up. If you offload the marginal routes, then you will make bigger profits. If you offload the marginal routes, your rate of return will increase dramatically. Let's cut the services; let's do this.

A certain prominent person, whom I will not name, knew of my family's relationship with the company. My father opened the first flight into New York; it was Qantas's way of thanking him. This person of great prominence in Qantas said to me: 'If your minister'—who was the leader of the party I belonged to then, the National Party—'is determined to move to a fair dinkum open skies policy, we will be left with no alternative but to remove the 5,000 maintenance jobs to Singapore. So you understand, Bobby, that if you allow your leader to fully privatise and introduce a free skies policy then it will be bye-bye to 5,000 jobs—and you know the implications of that.' He did not have to spell it out to me. If you have nobody here who knows how to take an aeroplane to pieces and put it together again, you are in a bit of trouble. If you have a ping in the motor, what are you going to do? Are you going to send the Boeing 747 from Melbourne to Singapore? Not likely. You are going to keep flying it.

I do not know what everyone else's experience has been but, of the last four flights I have taken, on one I was delayed three hours getting out of Brisbane and then delayed an hour getting back to Brisbane; on the second, I was delayed for 40 minutes; and, on the last one, I was delayed for an hour—which was good because I was going to miss it had it not been delayed. That is three out of four flights delayed and an average of two hours wait time. I will tell you why that is occurring when it has never occurred before: it is because there is no-one around to keep the maintenance going. It is not being done.

In the Dustin Hoffman movie, Rain ManI think he is autistic or something—he says, 'Yes, there is an airline which has never had a crash; it's Qantas.' That is true apart from its initial period and its days of pioneering. If you take those 15 years out then, yes, Qantas has never had an accident. But now we are getting these down periods all the time. There is something wrong. Nobody knows what is wrong. Maintenance is not being done. If a car does not have maintenance carried out on it, the car will break down. There are unfortunate consequences when aeroplanes break down.

I belong to a political party and one of the founding principles of that political party is that we will not sell this country off. I made a bet with two prominent journalists this morning. I said, 'I will put $300 on the table and, if I cannot find in the national media, every three days, the removal of hundreds of jobs to someplace overseas through an industry closing or the sell-off of some major asset of the country, I will give you the $300.' I will make that bet with anybody. People are sick and tired of watching, on television every night, the transfer overseas of jobs and the transfer overseas of all the great resources and wealth of this nation. They are a little bit sick of it, the people of Australia—watching this place sell us off and sell us out. It is going to stop. If you are a politician and you think it is not, you are making a big mistake. You will pay for it in September, I can tell you.

We are saying that our access to overseas ports is through government agreement. Some will argue that that is not the case. But, in very lengthy talks with the pilots association, the unions representing flight attendants and all of the other representative groups—particularly the maintenance people—they have assured me that this is the case. There is a little bit of grey area here. But we are saying, in this piece of legislation, that the airline, if it is enjoying the benefits of Australian airline access to these ports, will be Australian. All of the flight staff will be domiciled here in Australia and they will be Australian citizens. It will be 51 per cent owned by Australians and 81 per cent of the maintenance work will be done here. That is what this bill says.

What it really says is that Qantas will remain an Australian company—it will be based here and those maintenance engineers and technical staff will be based here so that if a plane gets into trouble it can get fixed here. It will not keep flying until something terrible happens. I present as proof the number of stoppages and delays which are occurring now with Qantas. We want our airline pilots to be decently paid— (Time expired)

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In accordance with standing order 41(c), the second reading will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.