Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Quite obviously we still want Qantas to call Australia home and we want the airline to remain an Australian entity, and it will. But we cannot take the position where we start telling organisations how they must operate overseas. If Woolworths go overseas and open up a shop in Ho Chi Minh city, we cannot start insisting that the people at the checkout get paid Australian wages, otherwise it is not going to stay in business for very long. The reality is that we want Qantas to succeed, and to succeed it has to operate under the terms and conditions that keep the dignity of what it is to be Australian but deal with the commercial realities of exactly where they are. If you impose all these conditions on Qantas the result will be to put it out of business, not keep it in business.

Obviously issues will come to light—I think Senator Xenophon may have mentioned this before—and there are issues aplenty in aviation. I think the next one will be Etihad's involvement in trying to grab hold of Virgin and shell it out and turn it into basically an overseas airline. These questions are afoot all the time and we are going to have to try to work out how we deal with them. You cannot manipulate by legislation the actions of a company that is dealing in an extremely tough commercial environment.

It was great listening to Senator Sterle—he seems to have left the chamber now. In the rambling diatribe that we will call a speech, he did go to one interesting area: job security.