Last week in Canberra I was unable to give this speech in the Senate so I recorded so you could hear. The government is proposing changes to the the Industrial Relations system and I wanted to put my views on the record and say to the government that the IR system is broken and needs fixing. And simplifying.
Transcript
I serve the people of Queensland & Australia and want to discuss our shared need for:
Improving industrial relations to protect honest workers and employers
the bigger picture and a vision for a secure future.
And I will shine a light on the Industrial Relations Club, known as the IR Club. The root cause of most IR conflict.
We have listened to workers – casual and permanent – across Queensland and Australia. From Thursday Island to the Hunter to Tasmania, from Brisbane to Perth. We have listened to union bosses and union bodies. We have listened to small and medium sized businesses. We have listened to employer and industry groups.
We have listened to the government and to the opposition. I’ve worked underground at the coalface in five regions across our country, managed mines and negotiated and introduced IR changes improving safety, productivity and security. As a mining executive I introduced the Australian coal industry’s first radically new enterprise award, one proudly based on matching employees needs and employers’ needs.
Our people set records that stood for decades with extremely high worker retention and Australia’s best safety performance for large underground coal mines. Listening reveals that across our country, people are hurting, feeling vulnerable. Afraid for their jobs, afraid of the future.
Add to that Australians are hurting from the economic fallout from COVID with restrictions and lock-downs keeping us away from our jobs, businesses and loved ones. People feel confused, often despairing, even hopeless. Many feel powerless to improve their situation or their business, frustrated that this government didn’t listen and just listens to the IR Club.
And people like HV miner Simon Turner crippled, exploited and discarded due to abuses proving the complete failure of current Industrial Relations laws. People are angry. The “Industrial Relations Club, the IR Club” is alive and well. It keeps its members fat, well paid and secure – lawyers, courts, employer peak bodies like the BCA, major UB’s.
Driven to perpetuate conflict so they have something to “fix,” a reason for staying in existence. Using complexity to conjure issues that need lawyers and UB’s to sort. The primary workplace relationship between employee and employer has been shoved aside. The IR system is broken. And that’s destroying Australian industry and exporting jobs to China.
The IR Club perpetuates artificial restrictions that needlessly destroy productivity and job security and suppress wages. Restrictions hurting workers and employers. The Building & Construction General On-Site Award is almost 150 pages long with 80 separate allowances on top of the prescribed wage schedule.
Australia’s cabotage is another IR Club casualty – and guts national security, sovereignty and tax revenue. The IR Club’s other victims are small and medium sized business. Our economy’s engine room. The IR Club insists on a one size fits all from large multinationals with huge teams of lawyers through to small businesses. Queensland’s 445,000 small businesses are now under even greater pressure as a result of the govt’s COVID response.
And, as a result of the IR Club, small businesses are left with complex, unworkable IR rules that are not fit for purpose. The IR Club is one reason why small businesses and honest big businesses are angry. We need honest, competent leadership making decisions based on solid data and facts with strength of character and a willingness to serve our country’s people, Australians. A Prime Minister who tries to do good, not just look good.
One Nation protects workers’ rights and knows that only employers, entrepreneurs, small businesses and workers create jobs. The govt’s COVID restrictions have done enormous damage. Yet the govt-induced collapse is not an excuse to cut pay or job security. Instead, let’s reform IR together properly.
[Malcolm] Good morning, Marcus. I’m disgusted with that rort I’m bloody annoyed because look, what’s really going on here, mate is it’s not just that he’s got a job that’s being protected. What we’re doing is Mathias Cormann in the Senate, who often answered questions by saying we are fulfilling our global responsibilities.
To hell with the global responsibilities. We have to look after Australian sovereignty. I don’t need him in the OECD bringing back OECD stuff to steal wealth from Australians. I need as Australian parliamentarian to look after Australians.
[Marcus] Yeah, I thought that might have you fired up. And I’m glad I asked the question. You said it much better than what I did. I mean, you, you’ve dealt with this man, and it’s not a personal attack. It’s just the way the system’s set up. And you know, we’ve been talking at length this morning about the disparity, if you like, in opportunities and pay for men and women in our workforce. But I mean, this is just beyond the pail.
It really is and you know, 4,000 odd dollars. Now that’s before staff mind you, up to eight staff, the Prime Minister is apparently providing this former Senator, former Finance Minister with, to try and get him around the world to lobby people. So he gets his prime gig with the OECD, mind you at the same time, he’s going to receive a pretty decent politician salary upon the fact that he’s decided to pull the pin. He’s retired etc. He’s still of working age. I mean, the whole thing is just, it’s a joke.
[Malcolm] Well, it’s actually worse than a joke. It’s theft because the costs that you have just outlined are huge, but Marcus, they are tiny compared to the cost to the Australian people of pushing this globalist agenda. Morrison has appeared to be against the international globalist. But the fact is his behaviours show that he is a globalist.
He said on the 3rd of October, 2019, after we were pushing the fact that the message about the globalist taking over, he came out trying to steal our thunder by saying he is against the unelected, unaccountable, internationalist bureaucrats. He pretended to be against them. He didn’t say the UN, but since then, he’s said that we need to give the World Health Organisation, a UN body increased powers, powers of weapons inspectors, to just go into countries.
He’s just collected an award from Boris Johnson as for fulfilling his global agenda. And Morrison is just pushing policies. I’m tired of the liberal and labour and national parties, pushing policies that are destroying our water in accordance with UN, destroying our energy sector in accordance with the UN Kyoto Protocol, destroying property rights and farmers’ rights to use their own land in accordance with the UN Kyoto Protocol.
Both of these major parties have done that for 30, 40 years. Look at our tariffs look at it that have been smashed and left our companies vulnerable. Look at the taxes that we have paid to the foreigners and multinational companies in this country and 90% of the large companies in this country are owned by foreign owned multinationals, and they paid little or no tax.
[Marcus] That’s right.
[Malcolm] That’s fact. And then we’ve also got people being destroyed in the family law court system, which is a slaughter house of the nation, that’s fact. And that came from the UN as well. We’ve got to start running this country for Australians and let the Australians do the job. Instead of these bustards from overseas, it really fires me up.
[Marcus] Ah, well, I can tell all it’s missing next to the Australian flag behind the Prime Minister is a sign saying, “The Great Reset.”
[Malcolm] Correct. That is what is going on. And it’s just a return to feudalism. We will be surfed, serving the barons and the international barons. We have got one of the wealthiest countries on earth. We are the biggest exporters of energy in that gas and coal in the world, even greater than Middle East countries.
And yet we’re sitting at the crumbs, we’re taking the crumbs off the table now because the wealthy corporations are just taking it. They don’t pay taxes for taking our natural resources. This is ridiculous. They’re stealing it. And we end up poor and we’re taking the crumbs off a rich man’s table when we should be sitting at the bloody table.
[Marcus] All right, the Defence Inquiry has wrapped up the Brereton Report, there’s a whole range of issues. Here, Malcolm, you’d be happy to know that we are speaking to ex-Commando ‘H’ on our programme regularly. He’s outlining things from… And he’s not one of the people who’s been accused of any of the alleged war crimes, but he’s providing us updates on welfare of fellow serving Australians.
And they wanna start a petition to try and get their citations kept rather than taken off them. And also the other issue of course, is the fact that bloody War Memorial now wants to, before anything’s gone through courts before anyone’s been found guilty of anything. The War Memorial is already talking about setting aside a section of that sacred place in IsaLean, Canberra dedicated to the so-called atrocities of war in Afghanistan.
I mean, it’s almost as if these people have been found guilty. Don’t we have a presumption of innocence here, at first?
[Malcolm] Well, of course we do Marcus, and this is really, a really very difficult situation to walk through. You know, our country has a value that you don’t murder people in cold blood. That’s a value that we have to stand up for, whether it’s here or overseas. But we have to be compassionate and understanding that these people were sent overseas, if first of all, they must have a trial and they must have the resources.
Secondly, their generals above them are culpable because there’s no way, if this is true, there’s no way the general did not know this was going on. It’s their responsibility.
And I take it a step further, Marcus, John Howard came back from America, according to Alexander Downer, and when Downer retired, he said that John Howard came back from America after 9/11, and walked into the cabinet and said, “We’re off to Iraq,” no executive council meeting, no cabinet meeting, we’re just doing it on one mans say-so.
And apparently, I don’t know this for a fact, because I’m not educated on this. I haven’t been briefed on it yet, but apparently Afghanistan, we did not declare war. So there were no true terms of engagement. And so what we had, we had women and boys with land mines, with explosive tied to them.
And we also had Afghanis in an American training base and an Australian training base shoot Australians and Americans within. And so this is a war that’s not really a war.
And yet it’s diabolic, a very deceptive. And we went in there, based upon one man and that man later admitted, or his government later admitted, there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, look at what we’re doing with our boys in this country.
So if we can’t uphold murder, but at the same time, you have to be compassionate because we sent these people there, to do our job, and we should have done a better job in looking after them.
[Marcus] Well, well said a lot of people we’ve spoken to, including Commando “H” said that, you know, the situation over there is best described by people who’ve been there rather than armchair critics. And even to be honest, generals who sit in their plush leather chairs in Canberra and direct these men.
Look, the issue obviously is that in relation to the enemy, it’s not an international war as such. It was more a civil war, so war within a country. So whenever they did manage to capture some of these people, Taliban and otherwise, they had to eventually, within a day or two release them, only to be shot at again by the same people that just captured.
I mean, the whole thing really needs a good looking at, and we need to bear in mind that it’s very correct what you say, Malcolm, we don’t condone outright cold-blooded killings, but at the same time, we also need to understand what went on over there, why we were there in the first place.
And the other issue, of course now, comes down to mental health and we know, and we’ve been told by our sources and Commando “H” that, you know, so many men and young women who’ve served overseas and are suffering mental health issues as a result of not only their service, but this inquiry as well.
[Malcolm] Yes, well, very well said. There’s an a Roman general who said that no one who’s been to war can understand what goes on and people who go to war do not come back with the same mental approach. They have enormous burdens mentally and emotionally. So let’s recognise that for start.
So we send them, we bend them, but we don’t mend them very well in this country, but it is good to see that the people have set up a hotline for these servicemen, but, you know, stripping medals from people who have earned that medal through an Act of Valour, it’s just wrong.
These people earned it through an Act of Valour, who knows as a result of the torturous and tough regime of cycling in and out of Afghanistan so quickly and so often, if these people weren’t under enormous pressure and they did something, they shouldn’t have done. That’s if they were guilty, let’s assume some of them were guilty.
Why should we strip the medals of these people when they earned it, earned the medals for doing something to protect other Australians or protect their country, or protect even Afghanistan people? So, and then let us strip them because they’ve cracked under pressure, that’s wrong.
[Marcus] I think so.
[Malcolm] They were given a medal and they deserve to keep it.
[Marcus] All right, let’s talk IR reform, we know March 21 is the date when JobKeeper ends, there are some very big concerns amongst some sectors of our community that as of next, well, March, April, you know, there needs to be an extension of some sort, for JobKeeper what do you make of it all?
[Malcolm] What I make of it is that the Morrison Government would yet, again, fiddle around the edges and not do a good job and make it worse. The Morrison Government is about building facades and not getting on with the job properly. Getting back to basics. We need to rebuild our country. There are several lessons from this COVID–
[Marcus] Pandemic.
[Malcolm] Virus that hit our country. And the primary lesson is that we have destroyed our productive capacity and manufacturing. Even our agricultural sector is being destroyed by unelected international bureaucrats that our governments, labour and liberal had put in place.
That’s the first thing we need to restore manufacturing. Marcus we cannot restore manufacturing and our economic sovereignty, our economic security, unless we address electricity prices. Electricity is the biggest cost, component of manufacturing today, greater than labour.
So we need to do a good job in reforming industrial relations. And I can talk about that in a minute, but we must do it with regard to energy prices, taxation, overregulation from the UN. We must do it with regard to where water and other resources and infrastructure. Without that we’re just playing with this stuff. Now, you know, that I’ve done a lot of work in protecting some miners in the Hunter Valley–
[Marcus] Yes absolutely.
[Malcolm] From exploitation with under the hand of BHP and Chandler MacLeod, but also the CFMEU was involved there because they agreed with the exploitation of workers and enabled it. And I’ve done nothing to protect those workers, which raises an interesting point, could these workers sue the CFMEU because they paid dues to be protected and the CFMEU actually in the Hunter Valley I must add actually did not fulfil their responsibilities?
But look at the corruption of some of the union bosses, the Health Services Union, the AWU, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ union. This shows that our system is wrong. And the Hunter Valley has just brought it home to me just how corrupt our system is, we need to get back to basics because people at work feeling frustrated, hurt, literally crippled, painful, afraid of losing their job.
We are right now got people confused. If someone’s working on the job and wants something clarified, they’ve got to go to a bloody lawyer. It’s actually, that’s some of the advice that the Fair Work Ombudsman has given people. I mean who can afford to go to court our system is completely smashed, I’ve said it before.
People want to know that their job is safe. People want to know that they can be safe at work. People want to know that they’re protected, they’ve got protection for their rights. They want to be supported and be in compliance. They want fairness, they want choice. They want simplicity, understanding.
We’ve got to really rejig the whole of our industrial relations system because it’s not serving the people. It’s serving a few union bosses and a few company bosses, and that’s wrong and it’s serving a hell of a lot of lawyers. We’ve got to completely clean that out and do a good job. Get back to basics, to protect workers and honest employers.
[Marcus] Just finally, Malcolm, you’ve been on fire this morning. Are you gonna get that jab?
[Malcolm] That jab mate, I will get a jab when Alan Joyce takes the jab and I’ll watch him do it.
Look–
[Marcus] He probably will.
[Malcolm] He probably – ridiculous. How do we know the impact–
[Marcus] Well, hang on, just back to that, that comments you’ve just made. You’ll get the job when Alan Joyce does. Well, I believe that Alan Joyce probably will get the jab because of he wants to fly overseas, which you probably will for business on his aircraft. And that’s what he calls them, on my airline.
[Malcolm] Well, he’s become a national test guinea pig by the sound of it then, but maybe that’s his new job. But this is disgraceful because even the International Air Transport Association, IATA has distance itself from Qantas’ compulsory vaccination stance, the Prime Minister has done that too.
It’s certainly how do we know the impact of these viruses, which have been tested in minimal circumstances at the moment, very short term? How do we know the impact on these sort of these vaccines with other drugs, with complimentary medicines? How do we know the long-term impact? This is ridiculous. I’m not gonna take the jab, not until it’s proven.
[Marcus] All right, Malcolm. Great to have you on this morning. You been on fire and I love it. I love the passion and thanks as always. Mate, look after yourself, we’ll chat again soon and all that if you catch up with Mathias, make sure we get the window seat, okay.
[Malcolm] Mate. Yeah, we’ll try and make sure that we stop him bringing his OECD policies into this country. Well, I want Australia to be Australian.
http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/RD1oE4UXxco/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2020-11-30 14:42:392020-11-30 14:42:48Matthias Cormann given millions to jet around Europe – 2SM with Marcus Paul
