John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This action of Qantas over the last few days reminds me very much of the shearers dispute back in 1982. Qantas had six planes grounded. You have lease payments to make on your machinery. You do not lease a Kenworth truck, sit it in a shed all week and expect to have money at the end of the month to pay your lease. Business is no different. They had six planes grounded that could not be serviced because the engineers would not work overtime. As a result of that flights were being postponed, flights were being cancelled and the public were being let down because they did not know whether planes could be relied upon as far as leaving on time and arriving on time goes. Here is a problem running the business. The message is clear: a business has a level of tolerance before they will take further action.

I will take you back to the shearers in 1982. 1982 was a terrible drought through South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and into Southern Queensland. I remember our ewes were due to start lambing in September. You have got to shear the ewes before they lamb. In August, the shearers went on strike for more money. We were not very happy about it. We just went on shearing away ourselves at home on the quiet, not making too much noise about it while others were on strike. In October 1982 they went on strike again. In the meantime graziers were suffering the worst drought in decades. In March 1983 the shearers went on strike again. The umpire said you could use wide combs and finally the graziers said, 'Enough is enough.' People were dismissed and since those days we have not had one dispute in the shearing industry in Australia. There is a clear message there.

Some of the union thugs have said, 'We will bake Qantas slowly.' If you want to destroy Qantas, you are going about it the right way—leaving their planes on the tarmac unserviced, parked away and unable to be used. A business like Qantas has to compete in the world market, where we have pilots from Thai Airways paid a lot less than Qantas pilots and we have Etihad and Emirates probably buying their fuel at one-tenth of the price Qantas has to pay for theirs. Mr Deputy President, as you know, I often say life is about fairness. I have been a shearer and a truck driver. I have also been a farmer and an employer. I have been on both sides of the fence. You must treat your workers properly, but the point is: when you start grounding airlines so they cannot earn any money and are cancelling flights and delaying flights, what can they do? Surely the government knew what was happening. Mr Alan Joyce from Qantas had made it quite clear in several meetings. But, no, the unions were going to bake Qantas slowly. What a terrible thing to say: we will bake an Australian icon, the flying kangaroo, slowly.

I have seen some of the wages. The pilots are on $350,000 to $500,000 a year. That is good money, but it should be good money because they have such an important job to do looking after the safety of hundreds on board. We know that Qantas have the best pilots and the best record of any airline in the world. But the bottom line is that they have been losing hundreds of millions of dollars on their international flights. What is going to happen? Will they sell that side off and become a domestic airline? Will Australia lose its international airline? We do not want that to happen. Once the Labor Party privatised Qantas and sold it off, it had to make a profit. If they continue to make a loss, the business fails and everyone loses their jobs.

The engineers get paid very well on the figures I have seen—some $145,000 a year. They have a vital job to see that those machines are serviced well so that they are reliable and safe. They do it well. But the bottom line is that, when the unions say, 'We are going to bake Qantas slowly,' that is when the management says, 'Enough is enough. We have got enough planes sitting idle that cannot be serviced. We are delaying enough flights. We are losing our reputation of being a reliable carrier.' That is when they had to act. The point is the government did nothing. They did not read the tea leaves. They did not know what was going on. They could have acted. They could have prevented it. The inconvenience caused to the tens of thousands of Australians and overseas visitors who were left in limbo, with nowhere to go and not knowing what to do, could have been prevented. Will the government ever take on the union movement? Never, because the union movement finances their campaigns.