Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I stand today in support of the wharfies at Hutchison Ports Australia. I stand in support of the wives, the husbands and the children who have got an uncertain future because of the actions of this multinational corporation. I stand here today to condemn the actions of Hutchison Ports Australia in terminating workers by fax, text message and email. This is a massive multinational company, the biggest port operator in the world, a company that should know better, a company that simply treated its workers with no respect and no dignity and certainly did not give them a fair go.

It is unusual that we have Senate resolutions passed on industrial relations disputes, but there were two Senate resolutions passed yesterday, one moved by me and Senator Rhiannon calling on the company to return to the pre-dispute situation, get everyone back on the job and sit round and talk about the issues that are between the workers, the MUA and the company. We also had a resolution from Senator Lazarus expressing the view that the actions of Hutchison Ports were not welcome or considered acceptable behaviour in Australia. This is generally seen in the community as an unacceptable, unprincipled way to deal with workers.

Hutchison Ports Australia sounds as if it is Australian but it is not. It is a subsidiary of a Hong Kong based company, Hutchison Port Holdings. This is a company that made A$11 billion profit in 2014. The company is owned by Li Ka-shing, the 17th richest man in the world, with an estimated personal net worth of $27 billion. HPH operates 319 berths in 50 ports in 26 countries. Forbes magazine listed Li Ka-shing as the 28th most powerful person in the world in 2014, ahead of Rupert Murdoch, IMF Director Christine Lagarde and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Hutchison Whampoa is one of the companies exposed as having a secret tax avoidance deal in Luxembourg. Hutchison Ports Australia, one of the subsidiaries of Hutchisons, is managed out of Hong Kong. It is not managed in Australia. The holding company is in the Netherlands, and the Netherlands is seen as one of the top global players for tax avoidance by the Tax Justice Network. So it has got its holding company in the same place that James Hardie went to to try and avoid its responsibilities in Australia. This is a massive multinational corporation treating its workers with absolute contempt.

One of the workers I spoke to today was Leyre Diaz of Maroubra. She is one of the Hutchison workers who were sacked last week. She said she first learned of her sacking on Friday morning. She had the phone on silent, so she did not get the text message to go and check her email. She had started work with this company a year and a half ago. She lived in a housing commission house. She moved out of the housing commission house because she felt she had a job with a reputable company, a job that would last for many years, and she went into private rental accommodation in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, costing $610 a week. She has got two kids. She is a single mum. She has lost her housing commission house. She has lost her job in the most reprehensible manner and she wonders what life holds for her. I say to Hutchison: think about your workers, think about what you have done and get back around the table with the MUA and their members and work this through. These Australian workers should not be treated this way by a multinational company.

It was concerning that we had Senator Eric Abetz, Leader of the Government in the Senate, defending the use of text messages to sack workers. We also had Senator Fierravanti-Wells yesterday saying that I was not listening to Senator Abetz when he was speaking yesterday. She said:

… Senator Abetz has … correctly indicated, the use of text messaging at this workplace is not unusual and is in fact one of the expressly agreed modes of communication under the enterprise agreement …

There is no agreement that workers should be sacked by text message; it is only the industrial relations mob in the coalition, the extremists, who think that that is a thing that should be done.

We all know the history of Senator Abetz on industrial relations. We all know the history of Senator Abetz and the coalition when it comes to the MUA. In fact, yesterday, when Senator Abetz refused to answer questions on this issue, he said:

… the MUA … has a disgraceful history of … sabotaging our World War II effort and compromising the safety and security of Australian soldiers overseas.

Then he spoke about a work by Dr Colebatch and said it was:

… an excellent piece of work …

That work has been analysed by many in the literary community, including Mike Carlton, who is an expert in war history in this country. He calls it:

… a right-wing rant against Australian trade unions, an ideological tract that includes errors, hearsay, exaggeration and in some cases, sheer fiction and fantasy. History it is not.

Yet, that is what this mob on the other side, the coalition, would rely on to try to attack the integrity of a union looking after its members. That is what this mob would do to try to denigrate Australian workers. They would rely on a fiction and they would rely on a lie. If you read Mike Carlton's article, you will see that none of what they argue against the MUA is true, yet we have Senator Abetz come in here and try to defend what is a fiction, what is a lie. But we know that this coalition are well acquainted with lies. You only have to look at what they do day in, day out, lying to the Australian public.

In closing, I want to go to the struggles that the workers in the industry have had. You only have to go to the history of 'The Hungry Mile' in Sydney, where workers were under what was called the 'bull system'. They were pitted against each other for a job and the bulls got the jobs—the biggest, strongest people got the jobs; the most compliant people got the jobs. That is what it was all about. That is what I think the coalition would like to see happen again on the wharves.

You only have to look at the history of the coalition and the conspiracy that they engaged in against the workers of Patrick and the MUA which came out in court—the real history in this country; the conspiracy that the former Howard government engaged in against Patrick workers, using Fynwest to train military personnel in Dubai to try to replace workers on the docks and engaging in attacks and character assassination of union officials and the unions. We cannot trust this government on industrial relations. They should stand up and say what this company is doing, what this Hong Kong based, multinational is doing to Australian workers. It is unacceptable. They should stand up for Australian workers. They should stop the ideological attack on the MUA. They should stop the lies. They should stand up for Australians and Australian jobs. They should behave like a government looking after Australians. They are a reprehensible mob, the same as the company that sacked the workers.