Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the Coal Mining Industry (Long Service Leave) Legislation Amendment Bill. At the outset, I'd like to say that, while this bill is meaningful for me as a representative of an outer metropolitan seat in Forde, at first glance it may seem unusual that somebody from outside a coalmining town is passionate about this, but there's a few reasons—three reasons, in fact—why this is particularly important to me at both a personal and a political level.

First of all, I come from a mining town—Broken Hill in far western New South Wales—and, while it's not a coal mining town, it has all of the features that I know exist in coalmining towns. It's not about what's dug up; it's about the people who do the digging. These communities are tight. They stick together, they work hard, they play hard and they are the most decent people that you will ever come across. These are communities where everyone has a nickname, everyone loves a joke and everyone looks after each other.

The second reason is that legislation like this is at the very heart of why the Labor Party exists in the first place. Despite struggling on the shop floor to achieve fair pay and conditions, there are some things that you just cannot achieve at the workplace level and there are some things that you need control of the parliament to achieve, to see through, and fixing up coalminers' long service leave entitlements is one of those things.

The third reason is that coalmining is fundamentally important to the economy of Queensland as a whole and to Logan specifically. Logan would probably be the biggest coalmining-commuting community in south-east Queensland. In fact, when I was looking at some of the stats, there's a suburb in Forde called Wolfstein, which has something like five per cent of the workforce directly employed in coalmining. Across the whole electorate, that is somewhere around one to two per cent of people working directly in the coalmining industry, and that's before we even start talking about the royalties that the Queensland government relies on to pay for the services that we all need and enjoy, and all of the associated industries as well.

The first reason that I speak to this bill is because, coming from a mining town myself, I appreciate what it means to be in the mining industry. In fact, I worked for a short time as a contractor to a to a mining maintenance business—

See this speech in context