Joanna Gash (Gilmore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am personally grateful to have been given the opportunity to sit on the panel of the Joint Select Committee on Australia's Clean Energy Future Legislation because it revealed to me some unsavoury things that I suspected could happen. I do recognise the chair in the chamber, Ms Anna Burke, the member for Chisholm, and I have to say that she was extremely fair in that inquiry.

The most obvious was the farce that was the inquiry itself, where simply not enough time was given for responsible and diligent scrutiny of all the submissions. Just over 4½ thousand people took the time to send in a submission in the five days from opening to closing, and yet only a minority were chosen—mostly, of course, in favour. No visits were made to regional areas where it would have been applicable to do so.

One of the more interesting revelations that was made clear throughout the hearings was what seems to be the wide disconnect between the trade union executive and its grassroots membership. Since the spectre of having a carbon tax imposed on us without any prior consultation, and in a clear breach of a pre-election commitment not to do so, the risk to jobs has been sharply drawn into focus. What has prompted me to comment was an exchange during the committee hearing between myself and Mr Timothy McCauley, the national project officer of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.

The actual exchange is recorded in the Hansard, but what struck me was the disparity between Mr McCauley's reality and that of the trade union grassroots at Port Kembla. The announcement that 800 direct jobs had just been cut from the workforce at BlueScope Steel with another several hundred indirect jobs to follow did not seem to resonate with Mr McCauley. I must clarify this by saying that it is not Mr McCauley per se that I am speaking about, but who he represents: the union executive.

He said his membership had not raised any issues of concern as to the impact of this tax on jobs. Let me quote from an Illawarra Mercury report on 18 April this year, which predates the inquiry exchange by some five months or more:

Illawarra union boss Andy Gillespie has backed a call by Australian Workers Union chief Paul Howes for the steel industry to be exempted from the carbon tax.

Mr Gillespie, who is the AWU's Port Kembla branch secretary, agreed the steel sector was "under stress".

… … …

"We haven't changed our stance … I think the AWU has come out quite clear on this issue and that's that we're not prepared to back a tax that costs jobs," he said.

… … …

Mr Howes' plea came a week after he was jeered by steelworkers during a visit to Port Kembla with federal Climate Change Minister Greg Combet.

Mr Howes was more reserved in his comments at that visit, telling workers a carbon price was "inevitable" but his union would not support it if it cost even a single job.

So how can it be that Mr McCauley can say, and I quote his exact words:

Members from the Illawarra have not complained to me and that is the only information I can provide to you today.

The exchange between Mr McCauley and my colleague, the member for Casey, is even more revealing:

Mr TONY SMITH: I know we are short of time. One last question. You mention that you are out there talking to members all the time. Could you just, for the benefit of the committee, each tell us the last time you were at a manufacturing plant.

Mr McCauley: Personally?

Mr TONY SMITH: Yes.

Mr McCauley: I am a lawyer; I am not an organiser. We are an organising union. I am not the organiser for the union.

So while the concerns of Paul Howes and Andy Gillespie are all over the national news, the trade union hierarchy is apparently oblivious to anything happening outside its office. Either they are genuinely ignorant of the concerns of the members they purport to represent—in which case there is no point in their existence—or they do know and simply do not care for the welfare of their members, in which case they can only be there under false pretences.

But the disconnect is not limited to the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union. Tony Maher of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union told the inquiry, 'Mining and construction workers support a carbon tax because they aren't fools and recognise it won't hurt the industry'. It beggars the question: do the likes of Tony Maher and Timothy McCauley speak to Paul Howes? In fact, does anyone in the union movement speak to each other about matters of such grave importance?

It is becoming apparent that the trade union executive has a primary agenda, and the preservation of jobs is not it. It has more to do with power play and preserving the power of the union elite. How else can these disparities of fact be explained? In April Paul Howes said he was going to back the tax, which involved some verbal contortions on his part to rationalise his earlier statement that he would not back any tax that cost one job. Of course, the loss of 800 jobs in a major steel town in September challenged the spin that the unions were advocating. So, in a way, we should be grateful to the Prime Minister for introducing a tax that has inadvertently revealed the sham of the trade unions.

In closing, I just want to say that I hope that those in the firing line of this tax will have the courage to open their minds to the evidence laid out before them—which today, of course, did not happen. But in condemning this inquiry I hasten to say thank you to the secretariat, who under these circumstances did a most professional job. I certainly want to pick out Stephen Boyd and his team and to say thank you to them for the work that they did do.