Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Cities and Regional Development (Senate)) Share this | Hansard source

no, seriously—there would be a coalition member on the back of a ute, addressing workers? He knows this is not a union stoush. This is destroying a community, and 1,600 jobs so they can outsource them to contractors or say, 'You can take a 50 per cent wage cut and then you can come back in our gates, and, by the way, we're not even going to talk to you; we don't even want to know you people, even though you worked for us for years.'

So I wrote a letter to Alcoa, and I want to share this letter. It's on the web, so it's out there. I've got the 'nice Glenn Sterle' hat on, but, I've got to tell you, if I'd been on the picket line for 34 days, it wouldn't be the nice Glenn Sterle! In it I've virtually asked Alcoa: 'Please, you're making a good deal of money—and that's fine; that's great—you've been in the community, you've been in our state, extracting our resources with Australian workers. All we ask is that, while you're making money, just give the workers the decency of putting in writing, in an agreement that offers no pay rises for three years: "We won't march you off the job under the pretence of a redundancy and employ contractors and labour hire." Is that fair?'

Well, this should come as no shock. I wrote the letter and sent it off on 3 September. Today is only the 10th, and I know that that is only a week, but all these sites are shut down. The mines are shut down; the refineries are shut down. It's not as though they're flat-out busy, unless they're planning to bring in foreign workers or contractors or whatever it is. You'd think someone in Alcoa would've thought, 'We'd had better respond and just say, "Look, you're on the wrong train, mate," or, "Yes, we want to talk to our employees; you go away; we'd rather deal with them."' No—radio silence from Alcoa.

I don't even know anyone at Alcoa, except the workers. I've never met the management of Alcoa, and I've got no desire to meet the management from Alcoa, unless they come in here and apologise for shafting the living daylights out of Australian workers. That's the only reason I'd want to. In fact, I want to share this with you, Mr Acting Deputy President. This is not the case, but if Glenn Sterle was the Prime Minister, it'd be sorted very quickly, because the phone call would go through to the management under this feller, Mr Michael Parker, who I've never had the chance of meeting, who is the chairman and managing director, and I'd say: 'Mr Parker, it's the Prime Minister here, Glenn Sterle. I want you to come and have a meeting with me. Jump on the first plane to Canberra—or, even better, if you're too busy I'll come to you,' and, when I got there or he got here, the advisers and the bureaucrats would be out of the room, and his hangers-on taking their notes would all be out of the room, and we would have a man-to-man conversation about the way things happen in Australia. And I can guarantee you one thing: it wouldn't be pleasant, because how the hell can a mongrel—jeez, I could get so wound up here! How can a foreign company come in here, extract our resources—ours; they belong to the Australian people, but I'd normally have no problem with this—have 30 years of continued growth in our state of Western Australia from digging up our bauxite and exporting it around the world, and, by the same token, be frogmarching Australians seafarers off the MV Portland? I said last year and the year before that this was just the thin end of the wedge: 'Here they come to replace them with foreign workers.' And they love this model. Mr Parker, you want to cross your fingers that I never decide to go to the other side and end up as the Prime Minister, because I can tell you I would be around a lot longer than you, Mr Parker from Alcoa.

I make no apologies for this. This is disgraceful, disgusting behaviour by a foreign raider. How the hell can they go through our communities in the south-west of Western Australia, Senator Dean Smith, and say, 'Aren't we good people because we might build a set of shades over a playground or something'? I'm told that Alcoa had been a responsible member of the community, but they'd had a shift in management. The previous managers, in my eyes and the workers' eyes, were decent, working human beings who all had the same objectives at the end of the day. There was a family there to consider, trying to pay off a mortgage and put the kids through school and give them the best opportunity and hoping the grandkids would get an even better opportunity.

Well, Mr Parker, if this is the way you run your business—in fact, I would like to meet Mr Parker. Oh, I would relish the opportunity, because this man has a lot to answer for. Mr Parker, you should at least have the intestinal fortitude to pick up the phone, call your workers, call your staff, call the ones who have contributed to your company's wealth and to your pay packet. You and all your mates around you are hiding there in Melville in the three-storey building where I attended the other day. They are hiding behind the laws of this land that can take enterprise agreements away from workers and shaft them by 50 per cent to put more money into the grubby pockets of Mr Michael Parker and every one of the other mongrels on the board of Alcoa. What a disgrace.