Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment Participation, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

One month on from the Fair Work Australia laws coming into effect, one thing is very clear: there is nothing fair about the so-called Fair Work Australia laws—nothing. Events in my home state of Western Australia clearly demonstrate that. What we have got this week—with an indecisive government, with those laws not being properly applied—is a return to the laws of the jungle. We have got the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, like Tarzan and Jane swinging from tree to tree thinking: ‘Everything is fine down there. We’re not going to get involved.’ All the while we have got this dog-eat-dog type arrangement where the government is quite happy for a union to put a gun to the head of a business that, at the end of the day, under the threat of further industrial action, has got no choice but to buckle.

We have got an agreement here where people who are currently on about $130,000 per year—semiskilled and unskilled workers—have just been awarded a $50,000 a year increase. I urge people across Australia who might be listening to this to take this in and consider it very carefully. There has been an increase in wages and allowances from $130,000 per annum to $180,000 per annum—$50,000 in additional wages for those particular workers. It is quite extraordinary, it is staggering, and all of that with no productivity offsets. We have got the Prime Minister out here over the last couple of days talking up the need to improve productivity. He is all talk. Do not believe a word he is saying because he does not mean it and here is just another example.

Deputy Prime Minister Gillard was requested to intervene, as she is empowered to do, and she refused to do so. The Deputy Prime Minister then went out and said, ‘If I had intervened it would have resulted in arbitration.’ That is of course a very misleading statement for her to make because the reason she did not intervene is that arbitration would have led to a much lower outcome than could be forced by union action, as Fair Work Australia would have been required to take into account matters such as productivity offsets. This is not an isolated incident. We have had strikes going on for the last couple of months at the Woodside Pluto project, which is a $12 billion project in my home state of Western Australia. It is a project that will make a significant contribution to the economic prosperity of this nation and it is also a project that will enable this government to benefit from increased tax revenues in the future to pay off the reckless level of spending and debt.

I have another example here where strikes have gone on for months. The Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, under section 431 of the Fair Work Act 2009, had the power to intervene and stop the industrial action and she refused. But guess what? The voice of industrial reason came out the other day. Senator Cameron, who is a former union ‘heavy’ and now the voice of industrial reason, was calling on the workers at Woodside to go back to work. He and Colin Barnett, the Premier of Western Australia, are out there arm in arm saying, ‘Go back to work; do not do this,’ yet we have got the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, being too weak and too indecisive to even use the opportunities in her own Fair Work Australia laws. Here we have got Senator Cameron reported in Canberra today as saying, ‘I think those workers should go back to work.’

What is emerging now is a very serious concern because we have got a combination of legislation with a weak and indecisive government that is not prepared to ensure that there is an appropriate balance between the interests of the economy and the interests of workers. If this continues and if this is allowed to spread across various sectors of the economy, the unions and workers across Australia will be looking at this and thinking, ‘Gee, a $50,000 increase in salaries for those workers at Total Marine Services; why not for us? If it is good for them, why would it not be good for us?’ You watch: over the next six to 12 months there will be other unions across Australia who will be looking at putting a gun to businesses’ heads and it will be against our national interest.