Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Brandis, I will take that interjection. He has informed the chamber that he does not think anybody thinks that, and he is probably right. But we do hold out hope that maybe one day the 20-something million people around this country can see this Labor government make a sensible, practical decision with a correct outcome—something that is not a stuff-up. But no, here we have another one. We have had this debacle of an issue with the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport being told of the announcement by Qantas that there would be a lockout of the workforce and a grounding of the fleet. That is pretty clear. I think even this minister could understand what he was being told at that point about what was impending and what was going to happen. But what did the government do? What did the minister do? What did the Prime Minister do? Absolutely nothing. It is simply beyond them; they are incapable of properly running the country. They are simply incapable of doing it. On the weekend we saw yet again exactly the same issue happening with yet another stuff-up.

There was no contingency plan. The government did not seek any advice until late in the piece. The senator speaking before me was railing about how it all went off to Fair Work Australia. He did not point out the fact that that happened way down the track. It was the wrong course of action to take. I will tell my colleagues why it was the wrong course of action to take: just in the last 20 minutes or so Qantas has confirmed that it:

… would not have grounded its fleet if the federal government had used the Fair Work Act to invoke ministerial powers …

This is exactly what the shadow minister, Senator Abetz, the New South Wales minister and the Victorian minister had all been asking for. We now have it confirmed that Qantas would not have grounded the fleet if the government had indeed taken the action that the coalition was asking them to take all along. I quote:

Asked if the fleet would have been grounded if the government had used section 431 of the act, a Qantas spokesman said: 'No. If a declaration had been made under section 431 of the Fair Work Act, Qantas would have been prevented from issuing a lockout notice to these employees covered by the three unions' …

What we have here is 48 hours of mayhem and 80,000 people whose travel was disrupted and who were put to great pains because of the inaction of this government. This could all have been avoided, every single bit of it. For this government to say today that it has acted appropriately is absolute rubbish. This is a government that has a complete inability to govern. We only have to look at things like pink batts, the BER debacle, the cash-for-clunkers scheme, GroceryWatch, Fuelwatch, the citizens' assembly that never happened, the inability of the government to protect the borders and the absolute stupidity of this government's bringing in a carbon tax. Why should we be the slightest bit surprised that when the issue arose with Qantas it would again stuff it up? No surprises there—it is simply unable to govern.

It is interesting that the Prime Minister, who said during this whole issue that the last thing she was going to do was pick sides and that she was not going to involve herself in making statements about either side of the dispute, labelled Qantas's actions as extreme but did not admonish the unions for their debilitating campaign. This government does not have a clue. It is like having the country run by a bunch of kindergarteners—and that is not being very kind to kindergarteners, whom I actually hold in very high regard. This absolute disaster of a situation could have been avoided and the government knows it.

Question agreed to.