Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

When the history of Australian governments is written the Greens-Labor government under Ms Gillard and Senator Bob Brown will go down as the worst ever. In the index, under the word 'crises', the entries will be lengthy: cabinet leaks, the cash splash, Fuelwatch, GROCERYchoice, the Fitzgibbon resignation, pink batts, Building the Education Revolution, solar panels, Green Loans, 'cash for clunkers', border protection, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, the no-carbon-tax promise, mandatory precommitment on poker machines, the superprofits tax, the live animal exports—and the list goes on and on.

And today we have of course the addition of the Qantas debacle. We have a Prime Minister who can ring a 14-year-old boy in a prison in Bali, who can ring Australian sporting superstars on their success and try to get publicity but who is unable to lift the phone to ring the CEO of Qantas in circumstances where the nation was ground to a halt as a result of industrial action. At the behest of the Greens, this is a Prime Minister who can stop the live cattle export industry overnight, but this is a Prime Minister that cannot stop industrial action within a few hours, although she has that power in legislation that she herself wrote, namely, section 431 of the Fair Work Act. Her reason for not using it was that it was untested, it was untried. Who put it in her legislation? She did. Why is section 431 in the legislation if it cannot be used because it has never been tried? What a wonderful endorsement of Ms Gillard's personal work that she says her own legislation does not work and will not work.

Today we have had proof positive of what we on this side have thought for so long: that if the government were not so beholden to the leadership of the Transport Workers Union—the leadership of which will undoubtedly become the leadership of the national Australian Labor Party at their national conference—they would have been able to act and stop the Qantas fleet from being grounded. Qantas have today confirmed that if the government would have taken decisive action and promised action under section 431 they would not have grounded the fleet.

We have on the other side of this parliament a smorgasbord of trade union officials like you would not believe—28 out of the 31 sitting over there are former trade union officials priding themselves on being able to read the industrial relations scene. Yet, allegedly, not one of them predicted what Qantas might do. When Qantas gave them hours and hours of notice of what they were intending to do, they said they were ambushed and they were flat-footed. They did not even ask Qantas, it would seem, for an extra hour or two to consider the government's position with a view to intervening in the dispute so that tens of thousands of Australians would not need to be inconvenienced by the grounding of the fleet. Why didn't the government do that? It has all these industrial relations experts on the other side, but dare we raise the issue of the strikes that were being threatened day by day by union leadership? Those opposite claim to be the champions of the workers, but take my tip: Thursday night, as the parliament rises, and Friday morning the Labor senators will all be there in the Qantas Chairman's Lounge whooping it up courtesy of Qantas. They will not tell the workers that they were there in the Qantas lounge whooping it up courtesy of Qantas. They will be saying, 'We were there fighting for the workers.'

We now have this bizarre proposition that somehow we on this side got advance notice from Qantas. It is news to me and it is news to my family. Why on earth I had to fly up here on Monday morning on a Virgin flight when I usually leave on a Sunday evening is beyond me. If I had all this notice and all my other colleagues had this notice, why did so many of the coalition frontbench—all of us, in fact—have to make alternative arrangements to get here for this week's sitting? The Labor Party, devoid of any excuse for their inaction in this, just make up this story that somehow Qantas had told us. What do you do? The Labor Party think that attack is the best form of defence. They make up a story, feed it to the media and hope it gets legs. I invite anybody from the Australian Labor Party to have a look at all the coalition frontbenchers who had to make changes to their flight schedules to get themselves here for the parliament. If we had had advance notice that would not have been necessary.

I am sure that Senator Cameron, having debunked that conspiracy theory, will in his fertile mind rustle up some other conspiracy theory to try to condemn the coalition. But the Australian people know this: it is Labor and the Greens who are in government and they are the ones that have to justify their incapacity to run this country. Their disputes between themselves are now becoming legion. We have Senator Kim Carr—they call him 'Rusty' these days because he leaks everywhere. We know that on border protection they have heated disputes within cabinet, because the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Mr Bowen, sided with the coalition policy on border protection—others did not. Ms Gillard won the day only because her pride got in the way of good sensible policy. We know as well, courtesy of leaks, that four or five cabinet ministers in a phone hook-up on the Qantas dispute were in dispute between themselves. It is quite clear that the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Mr Albanese, and the Assistant Treasurer, Mr Shorten, wanted the government to take the sort of action that somebody was suggesting a week earlier on Meet the Pressand that the Victorian Premier and the New South Wales Premier were suggesting. These were summarily dismissed by the great expert Ms Gillard herself.

But we know that action could have been taken and should have been taken. What is more, there are Labor ministers anxiously leaking to put on the record that they were on the coalition side on border protection and that they were on the coalition side with the Qantas dispute. Yet they still come out with these outrageous claims that somehow we knew about it before Labor did. As if that were the case—really! Do you expect the Australian people to accept that as an excuse for Labor's gross incompetence in this area? The Manager of Opposition Business, Senator Fifield, was absolutely right to put before the Senate a matter of public importance that states:

The Gillard government's incapacity to govern competently as it lurches from crisis to crisis.

Not only is this government incapable of making good decisions on border protection, workplace relations or the carbon tax but let us not forget that great deceit perpetrated on the Australian people 'There will be no carbon tax', and here they are all lemming-like running to the cliff to throw themselves over to vote for a carbon tax that they promised the Australian people they would not have. And here they are, all lemming-like, running to the cliff to throw themselves over to vote for a carbon tax that they promised the Australian people they would not have.

But the greatest indicium, the greatest indicator, of a government in crisis is when the cabinet leaks and when the cabinet leaks on a regular basis. Labor has it now leaking out no longer by the bucketful; it is coming out not drip by drip but by the swimming pool. The leaks are huge. The border protection leaks were absolutely devastating. Now we have got the workplace relations leaks in relation to Qantas. So there is no doubt that this is not only an incompetent government in relation to its management of its own affairs; it is also failing the nation. (Time expired)