Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

At 2 pm on Saturday afternoon the government were notified that Qantas intended to ground the airline. They had plenty of time to call Mr Joyce and say, 'We will intervene,' and then the grounding would never have occurred. After all, it was not until two days later that the lockout was due to occur. The government had plenty of time to intervene. A simple phone call to Alan Joyce or to a Qantas spokesman would have meant that none of this trouble occurred. None of it needed to occur.

The Prime Minister should have known that she had the capacity to intervene. After all, she was the minister who painstakingly put together the Fair Work Act. She is an ex union lawyer, so she ought to know a bit about the way in which the law works. She said that she could not act under section 431 because it had not been tested. It had not been tested, of course, because the Fair Work Act is only a couple of years old, and all of the other companies that have been put in a position where they have been blackmailed by their unions have just backed away—they have rolled over.

The government probably thought that Qantas had a bit of a reputation for rolling over and that it would do it again, so they just spurned the company and took no notice of all the warnings that had been given week after week and month after month that this dispute could lead to the grounding of the airline. If the government do not think that section 431 is of any value, why did they put it in the legislation in the first place? It was their bill; it was their legislation. If it will not work, what options does a company have if it needs to resolve an industrial action?

Bear in mind that the 48 hours of the dispute and its events were not the first time passengers had been inconvenienced by Qantas flights not being able to operate. The unions, in a tag team, had been week after week calling strikes, disruptions and work-to-rule campaigns—all sorts of attempts to disrupt confidence in the airline. Frequently they would tell everybody there was a strike on and, five minutes before it was due to happen, they would call it off, knowing full well that passengers had already made other arrangements and ensuring that there would be the maximum possible disadvantage to their employer while their own wages were not even affected.

This kind of disruption was going on week after week after week. There were many more passengers affected during those rolling actions of the unions than there were in the 48-hour grounding. It had been going on for month after month, yet the government did not take any notice of it. It is quite all right for the union to strangle a company day by day. It is all right, as far as the government are concerned, for the union to bake their employer over a long period. It is okay, from their perspective, to have the unions demand that people not fly on their own employer's airline. All that sort of thing did not provoke anything other than a couple of casual words from ministers.

The reality is that they could have intervened right back then. Qantas management were saying, 'We have taken just about all we can,' but the government kept silent. Qantas had reportedly already lost over $70 million before last Saturday and were bleeding $15 million a week. If that had kept going, inevitably Qantas was going to fail. The airline Australians love, the airline that carries our country's name around the world, would have failed because it was being put to death by a million cuts by unions who seemingly wanted more and more and who had no respect for the importance of their company's being profitable in order for it to be able to pay them better wages.

Let us not forget that Qantas is hardly some kind of wage and salary scrooge. Their employees are the highest paid in their profession. In many cases they are the highest paid in the world. Qantas had settled agreements with 10 other unions, so they were able to reach industrial agreements with unions. But there were three who were holding out, and these three unions had made it clear that it did not matter much what sort of offer was put on the table; they were not really interested.

They wanted guarantees that workers would continue to be employed in positions that did not even exist anymore—where the work was no longer there. They wanted long-term guarantees of employment. No company can do that. We do not expect a trucking company to employ people who make horse shoes just because they once used horses and carts; we expect a company to modernise. We expect the workforce to modernise and to take advantage of the new technology in modern aircraft. That means that the workforce is going to have to change, piece by piece, as time goes on.

The government knew all this was happening. Qantas had been around this building for week after week, talking to government members and opposition members. They knew it was happening, but they had no contingency plan in place, it seems. They must have assumed that Qantas were just going to allow themselves to bleed to death over a year and that there would be no need for the government to act. But even when they were warned—even when a decisive statement was made by Qantas that they would be doing something by five o'clock that day—the government did nothing.

The government could have acted—they could have saved the inconvenience to 48,000 Australians and they could have resolved this dispute immediately. What Fair Work Australia did 48 hours later could have been done by the government in one hour. It could have been done immediately. We could have got to a compulsory situation where the dispute was off and the parties' negotiations were continued. The government could have delivered that on Saturday afternoon, but they did not; they waited until the airline was grounded. Then, all of a sudden, the government could find a reason to go to Fair Work Australia and have it intervene. Why couldn't they have done it an hour earlier?

The suggestion that Qantas had not specifically asked the government to invoke section 431 is another one of the many misleading statements that the government is peddling. Does the fire brigade wait to be asked before it goes in and fights a fire? No, it knows that the curtains are on fire and need to be put out. This government did not see the house on fire; they essentially did nothing and delivered us 48 hours of chaos. All the Prime Minister had to do—or one of her ministers, if she was too busy over in CHOGM, meeting with all the important leaders from the Commonwealth countries around the world—was to call.

She could have put the foreign minister in the chair for a while to look after affairs. He is quite experienced in these things. He probably could have done it ably. But she did not do that. Neither did she lift up the phone and talk to Qantas like she does to all the sporting champions and other people who are in the news. She did not bother. If she was too busy, I am sure the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport could have done it. He has rung Mr Joyce many times; he said so himself. He could have rung up and said, 'We will fix the problem.' It did not have to be fixed by 5. It could have been just a promise to Qantas that the government would act. But the government did nothing.

The government is entirely to blame for the 48 hours of inconvenience to Australian travellers. It was in a position to do what it could do, but it did not act. It did not act, because its bosses are the trade unions. It did not act, because the people who pay the bills for the ALP are the very trade union officials who are running this dispute. The man who wants to be President of the ALP in a few weeks time—and I hope he does not succeed over some of the other excellent candidates who are seated in this room—is the one who is running the dispute, and this government did not have the courage to stand up to him. This government did not have the fortitude. It was not sufficiently decisive to solve a problem when it could have been solved, and it caused 100,000 people to suffer unnecessarily. (Time expired)

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