Ross Lightfoot (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I listened to Senator Bishop and I thought he was speaking about the coalition policy. Senator Bishop is someone closely associated with the Trades and Labor Council of Western Australia, which, incidentally, enjoys the dubious honour of being the most strikebound state of all the states and territories of Australia.

Senator Bishop is a product of the Trades and Labor Council. His was a strange speech when one considers, say, that the trade union movement in Western Australia is the most militant and the most dictatorial. It almost seems as if the Western Australian Trades and Labor Council was schooled by the old Arthur Scargill school of left-wing socialism; it is so steeped in the tradition of the old English system of ‘them and us’. I can think of two prominent trade union leaders in Western Australia: the porcine Kevin Reynolds from the CFMEU and his partner, Joe McDonald, who is not quite the same rotund shape as Mr Reynolds but who has also been in a jolly good paddock with a big deep trough.

This is the sort of thing you have in Western Australia. This is the background and the training that Mr Bishop came from: it does not matter what you tell them; tell them anything as long as they all believe it. Some will believe anything you say, Senator Bishop, but they will not believe the garbage about you being good for Australia. What is good for Australia is the Howard coalition government and the new changes that have been made—those necessary changes that have been made to the economy. You could not argue, for instance, that the economy is not better off; the economy is better off. It is one of the best performing in the OECD. You could not argue that under these workplace reforms no-one is going to lose their job without some sort of reason. That has gone on from time immemorial. It has gone on for the last 100 years under trade union movements in Australia. It is going to go on for the next hundred years.

But let me go back to the Western Australian trade union movement and the CFMEU there. They are wreaking havoc upon the Labor government. They are biting the hand that feeds them in Western Australia. I do not know how Mr Alan Carpenter, the new Premier, whom I have known for some years—in fact, I worked with him in the Western Australian parliament as well—can handle the job he has. I suppose he will; he is quite clever. He is not a bad profile for a Labor Party person these days. But he has 400 workers who are doing crucial work on the new railway there—working on the tunnel that is going through the CBD in the fair city of Perth—who are subject only to the orders of the shop steward. When it gets a little hot the shop steward says, ‘Go home.’ It is not the foreman or the contractors on the job but the shop steward who says to go home. And then they go off for two weeks. How can an economy survive things like that?

How can the opposition survive in this place, coming from the trade union movement as it does and steeped in the history of ‘them and us’, which does not exist today? This government was elected because the battlers voted for the Prime Minister’s team. You have lost the backing of your people. Not many kids today want to be associated with Labor. Some aspire to be tradesmen. Previously, they supported your movement. Some aspire even to be professionals. But you say, ‘No, we are going to stick with the old, traditional Labor.’ You are always going to lose. There may be a time when you come onto these Treasury benches again, but you are going to eventually lose them because you are political Luddites in every sense of the word. You do not want change. You fear change. What this brave government has done is give Australia change that is going to be good for the future. Every person in Australia today on average is worth $300,000, right across the board. That is a heck of a lot better than the biggest socialist country in the world, China, where their wages are $5,000 a year. Is that what you want? Is that what Australia wants to go back to? Do we want to go back to a system that is retrograde? Do we want to go back to a system that puts your people in penury for the rest of their lives? This is the system. It works very well. And under the new system it is going to work much better than it has in the past.