Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this emergency motion. Australia has an obvious, massive problem. We have a prime minister who will say absolutely anything to promote his own interests. He is shameless. He will leak private text messages of foreign leaders. He will disagree with what he, himself, has said. Just yesterday he misled the House during question time about his holiday in Hawaii. That holiday was taken during the Black Summer bushfires. He was forced to walk that back almost immediately. He will, point blank, deny saying things that he has said on national television. A case in point is his absurd statement that electric vehicles will 'end the weekend', a statement he now denies even making. How can any Australian trust what comes out of this bloke's mouth?

We have a government that is also absolutely squandering the job opportunities presented by the climate crisis. After eight years of infighting, after two Liberal prime ministers were rolled over climate policy, all this government has to show for it is a glossy brochure that Mr Morrison created so he could show it off at Glasgow. Why? Because the government is too busy virtue signalling. Mr Morrison and members of this government are spending their time on stunts, like bringing a lump of coal into parliament or smearing coaldust on their faces and putting on a hard hat for a photo-op. It's all virtue signalling, pure and simple.

Coal does have an ongoing role in the Australian economy for the foreseeable future. It has an important export and import role for jobs. But if Mr Morrison cared even the slightest about jobs in the coal industry, at some point in the last eight years he would have stopped the labour hire rort that is destroying that industry. Here are the facts of the coal industry. In the 1990s, 94 per cent of people working in Queensland coalmines were employees of the mine operator. Today, more than half work for labour hire or other external contractors. BHP is the largest coal producer in Australia. BHP told the job security inquiry that across its coalmines nationwide more than 70 per cent of people work for labour hire or external contractors; just 29 per cent of people working at BHP coalmines are actual BHP employees. Even the Minerals Council of Australia admits that labour hire casuals earn 24 per cent less than direct employees doing the exact same job.

The job security committee's inquiry heard from a coalminer in Central Queensland named Wayne Goulevitch. He is one of the fortunate few who still has a direct job with the miner, but he said he hasn't had a new permanent employee join his team for seven years. That's seven years of the company only hiring labour hire casuals; they're not hiring those same people as direct employees. This is disgraceful! Arthur Rorris, the secretary of the South Coast Labour Council, told us about the impact on miners in the Illawarra. He said:

You've got a series of body hire firms now that essentially trade on being able to constantly undercut wage rates. We have workers who are sacked one day and rehired at the next, doing exactly the same job, with less money and worse conditions.

Has Mr Morrison done anything to stop this? No, of course not. Instead, Mr Morrison spent half a million taxpayer dollars defending the labour hire rort in the High Court. Instead, Mr Morrison passed a bill earlier this year which stripped rights away from casual labour hire mine workers. The fact is that while Mr Morrison could bring a lump of coal into the parliament for a media stunt he approves of billionaire mine owners using labour hire to slash workers' wages.

Unlike Mr Morrison, Labor is fiercely opposed to this practice. That is why Anthony Albanese introduced the 'same job, same pay' bill in the House yesterday. Mr Morrison is opposed to that bill because he isn't on the side of mineworkers. (Time expired)