Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Unfortunately, I have to bring to the attention of this House a report on The 7.30 Report on 11 June this year which was basically bogus. It related to signatures from more than 200 people on a mine site at Newman in Western Australia on a petition suggesting that they had been victimised because they had signed on to an AWA. After receiving information from a number of my constituents who are fly in, fly out workers and other people involved in this industry, I sought to have this record corrected. I wrote to Mr Mark Scott, the Managing Director of the ABC, and asked that he investigate the fact that some of the 200 signatures on the petition complaining about an atmosphere of intimidation, victimisation, safety incidents et cetera due to AWAs were bogus. It was found that, of all the signatures on the petition, at least 80 were illegible, many were from people who were not even working at Mount Whaleback and some were names of people who did not even exist, so the credibility of these claims had to be tested.

I wrote to Mr Mark Scott that I have over 29,000 workers—in other words, one in three people—on AWAs in my electorate, which is the second-highest figure in Australia, and that he might want to correct the record due to this bogus report. I wrote that the report was obviously generated by the union involved and the ABC had fallen into line to support it, so Mr O’Brien and Mr Peacock should address that inaccurate and unprofessional report. By the way, there are 14½ thousand registered AWAs in Swan.

Mr Scott wrote back to me a month later, on 2 August, saying that he had received my letter, that they had looked into this matter, that they had believed it was a relevant story at the time et cetera. I will table all this information because of the time constraints so that it can be looked at properly. He said that the office of workplace safety had gone to the mine site, including BHP, to see whether the mine site was operating unsafely and with a culture of fear and intimidation, and that was found to be incorrect. Mr Scott said to me that he would wait for the state government mine inspectors to do an inspection of this mine site to see if they agreed with the petitioners. I have not heard from Mr Scott since then. He says: ‘Thank you for your concerns. The 7.30 Report will wait for the final report of this investigation and will do a follow-up story depending on the report.’

Well, Mr Scott, you are a bit slow, because I have the mine inspector’s report, by Peter Capon, the district inspector of mines. Mr Capon—without going through all of his report; and I will table this—said that largely the issues raised were not valid. There are at the margins some communication issues, but it says, for example:

DOCEP acknowledges the effort of the site management team and employees on the improvement in the record of safety performance at Mount Whaleback mine, which has earned the CEO’s OTC award from BHP Billiton for being the most improved site. There is a higher standard of safety comparable with the higher standards found in other major companies in the region. Of the 43 employees contacted during the investigation, the overwhelming percentage of the employees interviewed stated that they were not afraid to raise safety issues via direct action et cetera. Allegations that employees were too afraid to raise safety issues were not supported by greater than 90 per cent of the people questioned.

This whole report puts into place the fact that this matter was inspired by the unions and then peddled by the ABC—by one of their great friends in the ABC, Kerry O’Brien. We know he has returned to type. He was a former staffer for Gough Whitlam and we know that, as a former staffer for Gough Whitlam, he was a Labor Party employee. He sneeringly attacks members of the government when they go on his program and he gives an easy ride to the opposition. Mr O’Brien, if you really want to be a player in politics—and you live in Warringah—why don’t you do as other ABC operatives like Maxine McKew, Alan Carpenter in Western Australia and others in the Northern Territory have done? The ABC is an incubator for Labor Party candidates. Kerry O’Brien, you should do the right thing and run for the Labor Party. (Time expired)

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