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

Tonight I want to draw to the Senate's attention the state of the aviation industry, an industry that has been decimated by the global health pandemic only to be kicked in the guts by the absolute failure of the government to provide a national aviation plan. The grounding of flights was the right call, but it was not a market failure; it was a government decision. When they made that decision, they appear to have made one other: to abandon the industry.

Virgin, a full-service airline, was forced to practically bleed out while the government refused to take an equity stake—a financially viable and sensible decision that would have given certainty to thousands of Australian workers and would have provided a return to the taxpayer—only for the government to turn around and play favourites with the Deputy Prime Minister's mates at the majority foreign-owned Rex airlines, a company, disproportionately pumped up with untied government grants and relief money, turning around and buying Virgin planes on the cheap. All the while, the missing minister, Michael McCormack, has been using the excuse that Virgin is majority foreign-owned to deny it funding support.

Then there is the story of the 6,000 workers at dnata, a company that the government retrospectively excluded from the JobKeeper support program. Workers—many of whom worked for Qantas—who never chose who ultimately owned their company and who have paid a lifetime of tax, were cruelly abandoned by a government that could have supported them with the stroke of a pen.

And now there's Qantas. Alan Joyce has taken Scott Morrison and the Australian taxpayers for fools. The whole point of the government's taxpayer funded JobKeeper program was to preserve links between employers and employees. The community's expectation is clear: the funding from JobKeeper should be used to keep jobs; to preserve, as far as possible, the status quo. Letting Qantas take millions, and hundreds of millions, of dollars in taxpayers' money without any obligation to its workforce, or to the country, is an act of sabotage of the national interest. Today's announcement—the pending outsourcing, sacking and replacement of 2,400 ground, baggage and cleaning jobs—is an evil act of corporate bastardry.

I heard today the words of Jim Metropolis, a leading hand on the international ramp at Sydney Airport. He has worked for Qantas for 34 years and amongst his family they have 100 years of service. He said: 'We are gobsmacked. My phone has not stopped ringing since about 12 o'clock. People are ringing—worries about mortgages, kids, bills. I put in 34 years and now it's gone. It's like a piece has gone from all of us.'

Alan Joyce and the board are using COVID as an excuse, not just to sack these workers but to replace them with outsourcing companies like Swissport. Swissport is a company that treats its staff so poorly they were discovered to be sleeping under baggage carousels because they could not afford the fuel for a round trip home between shifts. Is this the future the shareholders and taxpayers of Australia want for the workers and families of Qantas? Well, it is not one that I want. I join the Transport Workers' Union today in calling for Alan Joyce to resign as CEO. And if that fails then the board should be replaced, because, let's be clear, today's decision is not getting Qantas through the crisis. The work still has to be done. It's just going to be done by companies who pay starvation wages and structure their rosters in a way that forces aviation workers to sleep in terminals and in their cars. The government shut down the skies. It has the responsibility to work with all the shareholders and all the stakeholders in aviation to build a national plan for all Australians, not just a privileged few.