Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister. I want Senator Sherry and Senator Arbib to listen to this statement from the ACTU-ACF report, which said:

Whether Australia continues to avoid the need for financial reconstruction is the elephant in the room.

It seems from this that the unions see the economy and its problems quite differently to the way the Rudd government sees them. The unions in fact are highly critical of Labor’s economic management. Such a split between political partners would arouse enormous interest and coverage if it occurred between coalition partners, the Nationals and the Liberals. But because it is the ACTU and Labor, their differences are not talked about. I would like to know why that is.

Union leaders care more for extreme green policy than for the jobs of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of their members put at risk by Rudd’s mining supertax. The CFMEU says the superprofits tax is a modest one and boasts that it has the support of Ross Garnaut. The tax is as far from modest as a scene from Scores nightclub, and Garnaut’s report canvassed replacing beef herds with kangaroo mobs to reduce carbon emissions. Blue-collar workers will not have much in common with that kind of thinking.

The only ones who win out of a superprofits tax are the extreme Greens because emissions will certainly go down as mining stops. In Queensland alone over $50 billion of mining projects have been put on hold. Union leaders have sold out their members’ jobs in these projects. It is astonishing to see the unions campaign so hard for a supertax that will reduce their membership by putting so many out of work. This comes after the unions cooperated fully with the Prime Minister’s plan to introduce an ETS that would have increased mining and industry costs around the country leading to thousands of job losses.

The ETS and the mining supertax are anticompetitive. Union members understand this. The AWU’s Paul Howes must be in cloud-cuckoo-land to claim as he did recently when he said:

We showed, during the debate over climate change, that we were not prepared to allow good Australian companies to go under at the altar of green utopianism.

But that is exactly what union leaders did on the ETS, and now they are helping those same companies go under with a superprofits tax. The ACTU joined with the ACF to plan the decarbonisation of Australia’s economy. They want to reduce emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 at the cost of an extra half a trillion dollars investment. That recipe would ruin Australian jobs and industry, and bankrupt us worse than Greece.

When history looks back at the actions of union leaders under the short-lived Rudd government, it will show enormous errors of judgment that led to a crisis of confidence in unions from their abused and neglected members. Not since communism threatened the unions has there been such an unholy alliance between union leaders and extremism. Throw in a secretary of the Treasury who suffers from a tax addiction and you have a recipe for economic mismanagement of the highest order. Workers are starting to realise this, especially as their electricity bills go up and up. Union leaders have not been straight with them. They have not told them that the side effect of decarbonising the economy is a huge cost that has to be paid for by the workers and their families in everyday living costs. If the government has its way on the ETS and the supermining tax, the cost will be jobs, jobs, jobs.

It is all right for union leaders who make it to the Senate or the other house. They can lounge round in their flash suits and reminisce about the days singing Solidarity Forever as though it really mattered. They come into this place and try to defend everything but put the jobs of the people who put them here on the line. No wonder you have got mining bosses at rallies while union chiefs and green mafia dons loiter in lobbies in their suits and ties. Unfortunately, these cosy deals at the top levels of power have serious ramifications down the chain where the real people live and try to make a living.

One small example, but a very serious one, is happening on the Wild Rivers in Cape York. As the Senate knows from its recent debate yesterday, the Queensland Labor government has cut a deal with extreme green groups to lock up entire river basins in the cape. This has local Indigenous people very upset because they will be restricted from doing anything much with their land as far as making a living goes. Labor forced this on them because Greens preferences are more valuable to them these days than the black vote.

I heard many a Labor senator get up and protest that it is not true: that Indigenous people can still get developments through in Wild Rivers areas. I ask them to look at the latest evidence submitted to the Senate committee just before their report was tabled. That evidence is proof that Labor senators are entirely mistaken. The Queensland government has made it clear that the Indigenous community cannot have so much as a vegetable garden because it would be in a high preservation area of a wild river where no clearing is allowed. That is a direct result of the alliance between Labor and the Greens. Indigenous communities cannot even grow their own greens.