Mr McMULLAN (6:14 PM) —I rise to support the remarks made by the shadow minister for transport and my other colleagues with regard to the Stevedoring Levy (Collection) Amendment Bill 1999 —including those remarks made so well by you, Mr Acting Deputy Speaker Hollis. I support the case that, before the parliament finishes dealing with this legislation, it will need an effective scrutiny and the only way that scrutiny is going to occur is by a Senate committee examining the matter. I will speak broadly to why I support that case in a moment or two.

What I want to say also in relation to this matter—and it is very closely related to the history that leads to this bill and the circumstances that surround it—is that, when a government acts or fails to act, when it acts in one area and does not act in another, it is a clear indication of the priorities of a government. It is an indication of what it thinks is important. It has a number of matters before it. It chooses to bring one on for action and not act on another. It chooses to proceed in one and be dilatory in another.

We have seen this government being embarrassing in its haste with regard to these matters. On the night of the mass sackings of waterside workers, within minutes it was in here with a bill saying, `This is how we are going to fund sacking all these people. The sum of $250 million is enough to do that and, if $250 is not enough, we will come back with some more.' But we find workers all around Australia losing their jobs and tens of millions of dollars of their entitlements. We saw reported only yesterday in the Sydney Morning Herald that a group of miners at Oakdale Colliery, west of Camden, were not sacked because they had done anything wrong, not even sacked because they were in conflict with the government's industrial relations objectives and therefore part of some government corporate conspiracy, but sacked because the company found the mine was no longer viable. On that front, it is not even the company's fault. But what did the miners find? They found that their entitlements of $6.3 million are not being funded. These people have a right—there is a legal obligation by the company to these people—and the company has spent their money somewhere else. In my view, it is crystal clear that this company has stolen those people's money and spent it for some other purpose. It had a legal obligation to provide and it has not.

This is not unique. I do not know the individuals associated with this company. In most of the instances that I have been associated with in regard to this matter—not all but most—the companies thought they were doing the right thing, because they thought if they spent the money they could keep the company going. They have no right to do that. They are borrowing these workers' money without consulting them and they are spending it in the company. So I do not particularly single out the directors and management of this company for criticism. I would need to know more before I said that they had been singular in their misbehaviour, as I think, for example, Patrick was in the way in which it went about depriving people of their legal rights—it is an issue I would like to refer to in a moment—and as I think, for example, Ashanti was, because everybody knew that it had simply entered into a corporate device to avoid paying the legal entitlements. It had the money; it simply entered into a corporate structure to avoid it. And there have been other examples of that. That is not the case here. It was not the case in the disturbing circumstances at the mine in Goulburn.

Nevertheless, this is an issue we have been raising with the government since long before the sacking of the waterside workers. We raised it before the Cobar issue arose. The member for Prospect, to her great credit, was the first to raise it. In the last term of the parliament, as shadow minister for industrial relations I joined with her—she introduced one private member's bill; I introduced another—to address two different aspects of this matter. And in this parliament the member for Prospect and the new shadow minister for industrial relations, the member for Brisbane, have introduced private members' bills to deal with this matter. And what has the government done? Nothing.

This involves thousands of workers, but most of the circumstances where this occurs do not get any publicity. The example that was first raised with me by the member for Prospect was never in the newspapers. These people just suffered quietly, but they nonetheless lost and the lives of many people were destroyed. The government knows. It may not have known before then, although it should have, but it knows now. It has known for much longer than it has been dealing with this matter that this is an issue that needs to be dealt with and it knows there are proven ways of dealing with it. It is not as if Australia is the only country in the world where this issue rises. Other countries have grappled with it and resolved it in different ways. And we can learn from their experience. States in the United States have dealt with it, not by a federal scheme but by individual states, in ways that we could emulate. And the government has done nothing.

It is a very interesting indication of priority. The sum of $100 million can be found by levies on this industry to achieve a political purpose for the government; not one cent can be found to assist all the workers who are losing their legal entitlements. Nobody alleges that any of these people—take these workers at Oakdale—have done anything wrong or that they were on strike or that they have been working inefficiently or that they have been derelict in their duty. They simply came up from mining one night and were told, `Sorry, it's all over.'

Overnight one man lost $98,000. This is the entire retirement nest egg of one of these workers. For many people, this is the end of their expectations. They felt, first of all, that they had a secure job, but everybody knows that, as society changes, secure jobs may be harder to find. They thought that if their job was not secure their rights and entitlements were. As one of the workers, a 44-year-old worker with three children, was quoted as saying in the Sydney Morning Herald:

What am I supposed to do? With my entitlement money I could have paid off the mortgage, maybe bought a truck, got into business on my own.

Without it, as another man on the night shift said, `We are history.'

These people have been robbed. It is happening time and again. It has gone on for too long, but now nobody can any longer pretend we do not know it is happening. It has been raised significantly in the parliament, very effectively by the Cobar workers, very effectively by meatworkers at Grafton and persistently and effectively by the member for Prospect, with the support of the entire parliamentary Labor Party and in particular the member for Brisbane. We have said to the government, `We have proposed two solutions to different parts of this problem. They will work, but we do not pretend they are the only solutions.' If the government got back and said, `No, we don't agree with your solution, let's solve it this way,' that would be terrific. We might argue about the best way to do it, but it would be terrific. We would be pleased to facilitate the passage of any step to assist in this matter, but we have got nothing.

Yet we have this bill where nobody says why we need this extra $100 million. It says it is for unforeseen extra costs for redundancies, but everybody associated with the industry says that, as far as they know, the $250 million will fund the redundancies. We will find out in the Senate committee, and I will be very interested to hear why all the people who should know disagree with the government. But I cannot say unequivocally that it is wrong; we will wait to see the evidence. Nothing has been put forward that reassures people who work in the industry—nor, to the extent I have been able to get information about it, management and companies engaged in the industry—that this money is needed for any of the ordinary purposes which were originally outlined in the purposes of the bill.

So we are apprehensive. We are apprehensive that the history of this matter gives nobody comfort or encouragement to believe that you should trust this minister and this government with the right to rip more money out of companies operating in this industry, including some who may not wish to take advantage of the scheme and may not wish to enter into redundancies. That was the worst thing about the original scheme. It was saying to companies who had worked effectively and efficiently in cooperation with their work force, `Here is a tax you have to pay to fund the activities of people who cannot work effectively and efficiently with their work force.' It said to Sealand—and to others, but they were the biggest example—that, notwithstanding that they had achieved significant reforms cooperatively, that they wished to continue to achieve those reforms cooperatively and that they felt no need of access to the redundancy package, to this sort of assistance, they had to pay a levy because Patricks could not achieve or did not seek to achieve the same reform in the same process. I think it is a combination of `could not' and `did not seek to'.

It was, firstly, the product of appallingly incompetent management by Mr Corrigan, appallingly incompetent incapacity to work with his work force to achieve change, as other people in the industry had been able to do. He thought he was still running a merchant bank and he suddenly found he was dealing with an organised and strong work force who stood up for their rights. He found that difficult and uncomfortable and he was unable to cope with it. As a consequence, he was ripe for the conspiracy that the government sought and into which it entered, which has been outlined so effectively by my colleagues. I have not been able to listen to all, but I heard particularly the member for Melbourne and you, Mr Deputy Speaker Hollis. I know that others spoke on it as well, outlining those circumstances. I therefore will not take the time of the House just reiterating things that have been said, but it is those circumstances that mean that nobody has confidence in this minister and in his word on this or, as indicated correctly by Senator Harradine, on anything else.

This is not an industry rescue package. If someone said, `Here is an emergency piece of legislation. We need to bring in a levy to raise $100 million to save the futures of these workers'—for example, those people who work at Oakdale Colliery in Camden—and said, `We will come to the rescue of these people, this is an emergency,' everyone would be prepared to look for ways in which they could facilitate this. People would say, `That is a purpose we all know has to be done. It might not be the perfect measure. It might only be an interim measure, and we can't just go on making these interim measures, so let's look for a long-term solution.' Everybody would want to facilitate it because that is an objective that you would think everybody knows is desirable, although it does not seem to have sunk in with the government yet. It will not move one inch to deal with that matter. But what the government is doing here is saying, `Let's provide to collect more of a levy on every container and vehicle that is loaded or unloaded in Australia, and let's disburse that money to help companies which are trying to sack other people.'

Why do we need an extra $100 million? The minister's second reading speech said it is to meet the greater than anticipated cost of redundancies. Amazing. Nobody seems to believe that is true. During a response to the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Legislation Committee in relation to the estimates only last week, the committee was told in answer to a question from Senator O'Brien that the total redundancy costs will be in the order of $195 million. We do not have any reason to doubt that those officers were telling the truth when they gave Senator O'Brien that advice and that information. So why is it that here we have an enthusiastic burst of levying of charges, raising $100 million to solve an undefined problem, while we get studied inactivity about a crisis in the lives of working people arising all too frequently in workplaces around Australia? It happens particularly in the mining industry and the meat industry but not only there. The first case that the member for Prospect raised was in fact in the manufacturing sector.

We have a circumstance here where everybody's understanding is that there is more than enough in the kitty to pay for the existing redundancies. People in the industry say they have no idea what the extra $100 million might be for, and some of the company representatives are saying they are also puzzled. We hope it does not wind up being used to fund the government's defence in the FOI Federal Court case. We particularly want to make sure that does not happen. We would also be interested to know when the Department of Finance and Administration is going to put in its statement of risk, the contingency with regard to some of the court cases that are being pursued in this matter. I endorse the remarks of my colleagues and express our profound and deep reservations about the direction in which the government is going on this and what it says about its priorities, but support the decision to allow the passage of the bill through this House so that it can be properly scrutinised in the Senate committee.