Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to inform the House of two events which illustrate the dark truth behind the Australian Labor Party. These cases show that the Australian Labor Party will do anything, including condoning employers breaking the law, to look after their union bosses.

In 1990, under a state Labor government, an employer dismissed a female worker for refusing to join a union. This was clearly an unfair dismissal and against the law. When an officer of the Department of Productivity and Labour Relations made the only recommendations thinkable, the then minister admonished her for submitting a recommendation to prosecute and the officer was instructed by the minister to find legal advice to support a recommendation not to prosecute. It was a minister of the Crown desperately seeking a reason to avoid upholding the law because it was not in favour of her union puppeteers.

Not only was this a disgrace; it also exposed Labor’s spurious claims to protect workers and women. An irony is that both the Premier of the day and the minister concerned were females. The sisterhood had betrayed a woman. The ultimate irony is that this former minister is now WA’s Commissioner for Equal Opportunity. What a sick joke! I call upon the Premier, Mr Carpenter, to ensure that she is removed as soon as possible as her credibility is irretrievably compromised.

The second case involves the current WA Labor government. A constituent of mine had been the CEO of the Broome Port Authority. He and the board had taken the port from an underutilised loss-making facility with old equipment to an excellent port with modern equipment and a great reputation with all who used it. However, as soon as the Labor government was elected, a Maritime Union official told my constituent he would lose his job unless he did what he was told. You can guess what happened next. The CEO suffered false allegations, there was a highly questionable selection process and suddenly he was no longer CEO. Minister Alannah McTiernan stands condemned for this scandal.

These two cases show that the Labor Party will stoop to any depth to do the bidding of their union bosses and that they do not care about the workers whose lives they wreck in the process.