Mr ALLAN MORRIS (7:07 PM) —Speaking after the member for Bradfield (Dr Nelson), who is the ex-president of the country's strongest, most rigid and most vicious union, the AMA, and remembering their strike in 1983-84 over Medicare, I find his comments absolutely fascinating. There is hypocrisy embodied in those remarks, particularly the concluding ones. The rigidity shown by the current Minister for Workplace Relations and Small Business (Mr Reith) is matched only by the rigidity shown by the AMA. Perhaps that is why the mutual praise society and back scratching is going on; perhaps they have something in common.

This debate to date has been marked by its absolute deceptiveness. This whole issue is one in which the Australian public are being misled, the parliament is being misled, people are being demonised, families are being torn apart and enormous damage is being done to this country. It is very difficult to bring a context to all of this because so much has occurred since the government set out, after its election in 1996, on a path to destroy not just one union but two: the MUA and the CFMEU—the waterfront and seaman's union and the mining union. That was a stated objective, to take them on. In any language that means going to war.

I have been warning the Newcastle community for eight or nine months now that we would probably end up being the victims of this vendetta. And we are, right now. Ours is a community that has worked incredibly hard at industrial relations reform and has done enormously well at restructuring workplaces and awards, removing demarcation and completely changing the relationship between workers and their management. Yet we are now seen as being a bad port. We are not a bad port and we were not a bad port, but we are now being demonised as one by this government and by their co-conspirators, Patrick's.

Some weeks back I called on Patrick's to leave Newcastle; either get back to work or get out. What is interesting here is that, in this drive for efficiency, Mr Corrigan and his company now want to milk a contract. They want to introduce an extra layer of profit taking. They want to keep the contract for themselves and then sublet it to somebody else to do the work. In other words, it is an extra layer of profit. That is disgraceful. For a government that is supposed to be about efficiency to be supporting a company which is intruding an additional layer of profit into the cost of stevedoring is disgraceful. Patrick's are trying every trick in the book to, firstly, defy the court order to restore the contracts as they were at 6 April and, secondly, to pretend that somehow Newcastle has been a problem.

At this stage I want to particularly pay tribute to the workers in Newcastle and perhaps even more so to the people who are not in the MUA but who have taken part in the peaceful demonstrations. I have been over to the wharves in Newcastle on a number of occasions in recent weeks and on one of those occasions there was a ship being berthed. Let me assure you that, among the number of people there, the MUA were by far the minority. The majority of people there were people who were generally concerned about what this government is doing to the relationship between workers and their management, between labour and capital.

It is more than ironic that the day after a budget in which the government has vastly underestimated the implications of the Asian problems, against which we have been told for nine months that we are fireproofed, they are now conceding that perhaps we are not fully fireproofed. If we ever needed unity of labour and capital, if we ever needed commonality of purpose and a total, single, unified national effort between our workers and their management, this is the time right now. This next six months we are facing are, from my observation, perhaps the most critical since the crisis of 1982. In my view, we are facing a major crisis.

In areas which are absolutely critical to our economic future—export of mining product, particularly coal, from the biggest port in the country, Newcastle—the government and Rio Tinto are trying to rip apart the system by trying to force down wages and destroy relationships. The relationship between Rio Tinto and its workers is disgraceful and will not lead to increased productivity or improved performance. At the same time, anybody looking at using the port of Newcastle and listening to what Patrick's and Mr Corrigan are saying about Newcastle would have second thoughts. More importantly, our competition—the people who export against us—whether they are from South America or from other parts of Asia or from South Africa, must be absolutely delighted that at a time when unity is so critical the government is leading the charge to war. We have not had an industrial war in this country for quite some time. The last major one, which from recollection was in 1981, was concluded by the wedding of the Prince of Wales. The then Prime Minister, Mr Malcolm Fraser, left the country to go to the wedding and settled the dispute before he left.

What we have now is a government leading the charge to war. Of course, the victim of that war will end up not being the MUA but the Australian economy because this economy is incredibly exposed. The forecast last night of three per cent growth in the next year, to my mind, is fanciful at best and dangerous at worst because it will lead to a sense of complacency. I think that is now of major concern. As I said, I have no doubt that our competition in world trade are rubbing their hands in glee that a government could be so stupid as to embark on such an escapade, such an adventure, such a foolhardy exercise at this point in the international economic cycle when we, of all countries, are probably the most exposed country in the world in view of what is happening to our north.

For what purpose? What kind of gain are we talking about? One can hear and read all the comments made earlier. We have heard figures quoted to us over and over. We have heard the National Farmers Federation talk about how much it is going to cost them. I read with some interest a letter in the Sydney Morning Herald on 17 April by Captain Harry Mansson from Clareville. He makes it clear at the start that he, as a full-time professional on the waterfront for 44 years, was in the management side. He makes it clear that he has no particular sympathies. He does have some quite strong remarks to make about the wharf experiences he had at the time. He then goes into working out the actual effect of the so-called reform that the government is seeking. He suggests, in a fairly detailed analysis, that we are talking about $4.85 per container.

He then goes further and looks at the cost with respect to beef and wool. He ends up with a saving of $55 per container of wool—equivalent to .028 per cent of the price of wool; and the saving is .149 per cent of the price of beef. He quite carefully puts on that the maximum values of the savings the government is claiming they hope to achieve. He then goes on to point out that the price of wool might change by 0.5 per cent per day. In fact, the drop in the currency in the past 24 hours, particularly since the budget—which again is insightful—has done vastly more to change the price and the cost effectiveness of our competition in wool, wheat and any other product than any of the changes even remotely put forward by the government in these proposals. So the idea that somehow this waterfront reform is going to save us a lot of money and make us much more competitive is, and always has been, nonsensical.

In fact, the letter from Captain Mansson was responded to by some other individuals and Captain Mansson bought back into the issue on 29 April. Again, he made the point that a one cent change in the exchange rate would have a $330 million a year impact on our trade. As I said, we have had half of that much effect in the last 24 hours; certainly in the last few days we have had much more than that. So while the government on one hand is out there slugging it out at war with its own community in a most partisan display of ignorance and victim bashing, the currency is falling through the floor, our competition are laughing all the way to their sales and to the north the Asian crisis is worsening. What kind of government is it that, when the major issue facing the country is in fact the Asian crisis, is throwing petrol on the flames and adding fuel to the fire? As I said, last night's budget does not take into account what is occurring to our north to anything like a serious or sufficient degree.

In looking at this issue, I want to quote from some research notes from the Parliamentary Library because I think that we all accept, trust and respect the Parliamentary Library as a bipartisan and certainly totally neutral commentator on national matters. I want to read a couple of quotes from their Research Note No. 43, 1997-98, which goes to the question of how you compare countries, port to port. It states:

One factor is that in Australian circumstances in which ships are more likely to offload at a multiple of ports these indicators are dependent on the efficiency of the way ships are stowed. If containers are well arranged the loading and unloading task will be simplified and hence more efficient.

Another is that these measures may be dependent on the percentage of the entire ship's cargo that is handled at any particular port. In this context note that it is in general more efficient to exchange the entire container cargo of a ship than it is to exchange only a proportion of it.

Yet another is that the measured values are dependent on the characteristics of the ships being loaded and unloaded and of the ports. More modern and better equipped ships and ports will in general lead to easier load and unloading.

If one looks at the ports of Singapore or Hong Kong—as I have, and I am sure many other members have over time—one would see ships come in, the whole cargo being unloaded and a whole new cargo loaded—a complete transfer. Those ports are very efficient and they do it very quickly. If you go and look at Sydney or at the main five ports in Australia which deal with containers—sometimes Newcastle, but Newcastle is not primarily a container port; it is very much a secondary role there—you will see the exchange rate might be 30 or 40 per cent. Thirty or 40 per cent of the containers will be taken off and 30 or 40 per cent of the containers will be put back on. That 30 or 40 per cent are not sitting by themselves; there is not a hole left for them to be loaded into. Ships have to be loaded with the heaviest containers at the bottom, so it can mean rearranging two-thirds of the containers on the ship to absorb 30 or 40 per cent. It will vary enormously from ship to ship and from port to port. How many cranes they have operational over a ship is also relevant as to whether or not they can actually activate more than one loading crane at a time.

That is why the Drury report states that, when you compare the nature of Australian container loads and ports, the rate of 19.3 or so is about world's best practice. We are not far behind that. To suggest that 25 containers an hour is in fact a benchmark would probably be unwise. One can recall one day this week the minister went on one of his usual demonising exercises, which as a rule here has become so outrageous and so grotesque. He is almost a caricature of himself, which is almost impossible to imagine. It is almost impossible to imagine the minister caricaturing himself, but he actually does these days. He actually cited the number of containers loaded in the last two hours. What he was really talking about was: a ship which came in, unloaded part of its load, rearranged its containers and then loaded up its final load. So he took the last two hours, which of course were straight loading and nothing else with a prepared ship, which would be at the maximum rate.

The figures on that would be entirely different from the rate across the total time the ship was at the dock. The minister understands that. This is not news to him, the Minister for Transport and Regional Development (Mr Vaile) or to the Prime Minister (Mr Howard). We all know it. We have access to the country's best information systems, as I indicated before when I talked about the reports that are available within the Parliamentary Library. This is not news to us, but it is news to a lot of the public when they hear about container load rates—14, 18 or 25 containers an hour—and think, `Isn't that dreadful?' The member for Bradfield talked about us being last, but he did not say that the ports he was comparing us with predominantly load and unload total ships. You do not see Rotterdam, Singapore or Hong Kong loading and unloading 30 per cent of the cargo. We know that and so does he.

This attempt to deliberately deceive and mislead the parliament and the public is reprehensible. And one asks: why? I think people have worked out for themselves that this is not about the MUA, it is not about containers, it is not about port efficiency and it is not about competition in trade. If it were, we would not be doing it right now, particularly with an international crisis on our hands. The worst thing we can do for trade right now is to have this kind of war. It is not about any of those things. It is about breaking the back of organised labour. This Prime Minister wants to be the Margaret Thatcher of Australia. He wants to be the one who broke organised labour in Australia. That is what this is about. There is no other logical explanation. Look at the rhetoric, the deceit, the deception, the lies, the distortions, the demonising—and look at the cost. What has it cost us so far? Articles in today's papers talk about half a billion dollars to date, and to achieve what? A possible saving of a maximum of $100 million a year in trade.

This does not make sense. We have lost half a billion dollars. We have now become an unstable supplier, an unreliable port and an unreliable shipper. God knows how much that is going to cost in future competition and future credibility—credibility we spent years building up. The workers of this country, including the workers of Newcastle, have worked incredibly hard to build a reputation for reliability. In a matter of months, this government has succeeded in destroying that. For that, it is accountable.

We keep hearing about voluntary unionism, but what they are really saying is, `There is nothing wrong with people organising as a group and negotiating their conditions and awards, but why should Joe Blow help pay the cost of that?' They are really saying that people in a work force should be freeloaders on the rest of them—in other words, union members should pay the cost of negotiation, arbitration, health and safety, occupational changes and award restructuring. They are saying that the costs should be borne only by those who choose to. The people who benefit from the improvements in conditions and circumstances should not have to pay any part of that cost. The government is suggesting that people should be freeloaders on their workmates, and even if they don't want to be they are being forced to be.

This whole issue has been concocted in malice, it is being conducted with malevolence and the eventual and real victims will not be the unions or Corrigan—although he has been destroyed already, and the minister has no future—but the Australian economy and the Australian people. This minister is throwing fuel on the firestorm of Asia. The bushfire that we are likely to have will become a maelstrom and the Prime Minister and the Minister for Workplace Relations and Small Business will be responsible and accountable. (Time expired)