James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Quite right. The future of this country will always be linked to our ability to export. As a country of 25 million people, we're not going to get rich selling lattes to each other. We have to export. We have to produce things in this country—to produce more than we need for our population—and then sell that great value-added product around the world. That's something that I spent a long time doing, before coming to this House, in the wool industry.

The wool industry is one of the great industries in this country. It built this country. It has a great history of being disrupted by the union movement—particularly by the wide comb strike. We had to have primary producers delivering wool to port and loading it onto ships during the strikes that the union movement incited in the eighties and before.

These are the industries that create jobs and are fundamental to the prosperity of our country. If you were a party that represented the workers, you'd back export industries and you'd back access to overseas markets. But it's all changed for Labor. If it was ever different, it's certainly not the case now that they're interested in backing the Australian workforce and the workers of this country. It's all about the union leaders and what they want to do to extort things from Australian businesses and Australian export industries, at the expense of higher paying jobs.

If you want to grow productivity in this country, if you want to increase real wages, we have to export. And if you want to export, here's a tip: you've got to have a waterfront that is efficient and can take high quality Australian product from this country to overseas markets. The behaviour of the MUA, not just in the past few months but particularly in the past few months, has been an absolute and utter disgrace. They should be condemned, and I thoroughly support this motion.

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