Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on a threat to the union movement’s ability to look after the jobs of its members. Once that threat was communism; today it comes from an extreme greens agenda. Union leaders are joining forces with extreme greens policy. We saw it on the ETS and now we are seeing it on the mining tax. Union leaders, perhaps with an eye to Labor preselections in the future, are putting extreme greens policy first and their members’ jobs last. For example, union members’ dues are funding extreme policy reports that would undermine members’ jobs. The ACTU and the Australian Conservation Foundation, ACF, produced a report in May that calls for a 50 per cent cut in emissions by 2030 at a cost to the economy of nearly half a trillion dollars in extra investment.

Senator Sherry, you would be alarmed, as deputy person in charge of the purse strings, that the ACTU and the ACF have put out a paper calling for half a trillion dollars in expenditure to reduce emissions by 50 per cent. Do union members know that their hard-earned money is going towards this extreme greens agenda? How much union money went towards paying for this report? Why aren’t union leaders standing up for their members instead of selling them out for greens’ fantasies? Earlier this year I listened to Senator Milne debating the renewable energy amendment bill. She said, ‘We should be aiming to have 100 per cent renewable energy as fast as we can.’ That is a totally irresponsible call. If implemented, it would send household and business power bills through the roof, whether covered with solar panels or not.

Complementary policies for greenhouse gas emission abatement and their national and regional employment consequences is a report for the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Australian Council of Trade Unions prepared by the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research. The ACTU and ACF report recommends wonderful proven policies such as incentives for ceiling insulation. We know how that ended up—in tears. In order to pay the half trillion investment cost, the report says that:

Investment can only be resourced from savings, which can only be increased by consuming less.

That means:

… immediately-pleasing expenditures must be foregone: in the business case, profit distributions; in the government case, current services for the people; in the household case, current spending on consumption goods and services.

I am quoting from the report that, Senator Sherry, your union fees would have helped pay for.

In the report, the ACTU advocates that:

… an incomes policy is agreed between the major stakeholder groups in the Australian economy via tax/wage, tax/superannuation or wage pause agreements to limit the inflationary consequences of the aggressive CO2 reduction strategy …

Do union members know that the ACTU wants to freeze their wages to fund emissions reduction? Have they held meetings with their members to discuss this? How did the plan go down? I bet no-one on the factory floor or in the mills or the mines knows anything about this deal on wage freezes to fund emissions reductions. Union leaders are treating their worker-members like mushrooms. I bet there were no items on the shop stewards’ agenda to discuss with workers which government services should be cut or how every member will be forced to cut down their consumption of goods and services. No, the shop stewards would not even know themselves. The sell-out of their members’ jobs has been done at the highest level by union leaders.

The ACTU-ACF report concludes that:

… the ratio of household debt to gross disposable income will stabilise at around 200 per cent—a very high ratio by historic standards.

The union leadership of Australia have seriously promoted such a state of affairs. Why have they not been held accountable and asked to defend such an unsustainable position? The ACTU report says that:

An important potential means of reducing emissions would be to switch production from the current mix of goods and services towards education and health services, both of which are low-emission.

Effectively they are saying, ‘Out with mining, out with manufacturing.’ Union leaders have sold out their workers in those industries. Perhaps that is why they have fallen for the 40 per cent mining supertax, because, for them, mining was on the way out anyway.

Then they want to increase public spending on top of all that. The report says:

To maintain the targeted GDP growth rate, public sector spending will have to increase. That is, the public sector will have to go into sustained deficit—

I am quoting from the report, Senator Sherry. I know it is embarrassing, and I know you would like to leave. I know this is tremendously embarrassing to you.

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Boswell, I would like you to address your remarks through the chair, if you would be so kind.

Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am quoting the report. It says:

… the public sector will have to go into sustained deficit to offset the negative effects on the economy from a rise in the household savings ratio.

This report is highly critical of Australia’s economic performance, saying:

If it does not come to an end from household debt saturation, the Australian boom from 1993 to date could easily end in a crisis in financing the balance of payments deficit.

It seems that the ACTU and Senator Barnaby Joyce have something in common. He is always pointing out the debt. The report goes on:

This would rebound on the household sector by raising prices (through increased costs of imported consumers’ goods due to devaluation) and by raising interest rates as well. The resulting fall in household incomes would reduce demand and generate unemployment.

Senator Arbib is here—and I hope he listens to this because he has some influence in the union movement. Here we have the industrial arm of the Rudd government saying that Australia faces rising prices, rising interest rates, lower incomes and higher unemployment—hardly a ringing endorsement of Rudd’s economic management. Yet no-one has held the ACTU to account.

The Acting Deputy President:

Senator Boswell, I think you are aware that you are supposed to refer to the Prime Minister by his correct title.

Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister. I want Senator Sherry and Senator Arbib to listen to this statement from the ACTU-ACF report, which said:

Whether Australia continues to avoid the need for financial reconstruction is the elephant in the room.

It seems from this that the unions see the economy and its problems quite differently to the way the Rudd government sees them. The unions in fact are highly critical of Labor’s economic management. Such a split between political partners would arouse enormous interest and coverage if it occurred between coalition partners, the Nationals and the Liberals. But because it is the ACTU and Labor, their differences are not talked about. I would like to know why that is.

Union leaders care more for extreme green policy than for the jobs of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of their members put at risk by Rudd’s mining supertax. The CFMEU says the superprofits tax is a modest one and boasts that it has the support of Ross Garnaut. The tax is as far from modest as a scene from Scores nightclub, and Garnaut’s report canvassed replacing beef herds with kangaroo mobs to reduce carbon emissions. Blue-collar workers will not have much in common with that kind of thinking.

The only ones who win out of a superprofits tax are the extreme Greens because emissions will certainly go down as mining stops. In Queensland alone over $50 billion of mining projects have been put on hold. Union leaders have sold out their members’ jobs in these projects. It is astonishing to see the unions campaign so hard for a supertax that will reduce their membership by putting so many out of work. This comes after the unions cooperated fully with the Prime Minister’s plan to introduce an ETS that would have increased mining and industry costs around the country leading to thousands of job losses.

The ETS and the mining supertax are anticompetitive. Union members understand this. The AWU’s Paul Howes must be in cloud-cuckoo-land to claim as he did recently when he said:

We showed, during the debate over climate change, that we were not prepared to allow good Australian companies to go under at the altar of green utopianism.

But that is exactly what union leaders did on the ETS, and now they are helping those same companies go under with a superprofits tax. The ACTU joined with the ACF to plan the decarbonisation of Australia’s economy. They want to reduce emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 at the cost of an extra half a trillion dollars investment. That recipe would ruin Australian jobs and industry, and bankrupt us worse than Greece.

When history looks back at the actions of union leaders under the short-lived Rudd government, it will show enormous errors of judgment that led to a crisis of confidence in unions from their abused and neglected members. Not since communism threatened the unions has there been such an unholy alliance between union leaders and extremism. Throw in a secretary of the Treasury who suffers from a tax addiction and you have a recipe for economic mismanagement of the highest order. Workers are starting to realise this, especially as their electricity bills go up and up. Union leaders have not been straight with them. They have not told them that the side effect of decarbonising the economy is a huge cost that has to be paid for by the workers and their families in everyday living costs. If the government has its way on the ETS and the supermining tax, the cost will be jobs, jobs, jobs.

It is all right for union leaders who make it to the Senate or the other house. They can lounge round in their flash suits and reminisce about the days singing Solidarity Forever as though it really mattered. They come into this place and try to defend everything but put the jobs of the people who put them here on the line. No wonder you have got mining bosses at rallies while union chiefs and green mafia dons loiter in lobbies in their suits and ties. Unfortunately, these cosy deals at the top levels of power have serious ramifications down the chain where the real people live and try to make a living.

One small example, but a very serious one, is happening on the Wild Rivers in Cape York. As the Senate knows from its recent debate yesterday, the Queensland Labor government has cut a deal with extreme green groups to lock up entire river basins in the cape. This has local Indigenous people very upset because they will be restricted from doing anything much with their land as far as making a living goes. Labor forced this on them because Greens preferences are more valuable to them these days than the black vote.

I heard many a Labor senator get up and protest that it is not true: that Indigenous people can still get developments through in Wild Rivers areas. I ask them to look at the latest evidence submitted to the Senate committee just before their report was tabled. That evidence is proof that Labor senators are entirely mistaken. The Queensland government has made it clear that the Indigenous community cannot have so much as a vegetable garden because it would be in a high preservation area of a wild river where no clearing is allowed. That is a direct result of the alliance between Labor and the Greens. Indigenous communities cannot even grow their own greens.