WATERFRONT DISPUTE

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (15:46): I begin this contribution to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of the battle for the docks with the words of Paddy Crumlin, MUA National Secretary, who said:

In the middle of the night, with their guard dogs and balaclavas, they came. 2,000 wharfies had been illegally sacked nationally. Scab labour (mercenaries trained in Dubai) was brought in by buses with blacked out windows.

Fighting both Patricks and the Howard government, the MUA entered into the largest industrial dispute this country has ever seen. There was Peter Reith on national television, advising that you had been sacked.

But the trade union movement rallied and as a result of people sticking together and community support, the MUA won.

The words of solidarity became a national rally cry: 'The workers united shall never be defeated' and 'MUA here to stay'.

They were truly incredible times. Tens of thousands of Australian workers formed pickets in support of the more than 1,300 wharfies sacked at Easter 1998 from 17 Patrick Stevedore run wharves. Anyone who was there, along with the hundreds of thousands who watched this page of Australian history unfold on national television each night, will never forget the sight of the guards, some with snarling dogs, beside the fortified gates of Webb dock, where a non-union workforce, linked with the National Farmers Federation, secretly trained in Dubai under the directions of a former SAS operative, were supposed to take over the jobs of unionists. Patricks had created shell companies to employ the unionists so that it would be easier to sack them. In an article by Russell Robinson published in The Advertiser on 5 April the story unfolds:

Federal government involvement in the bizarre scheme was suspected.

Just before the 7 April dead-of-the-night sackings became public, the then workplace relations minister, Peter Reith, rose in parliament and declared: 'Our government promised it would fix up the waterfront, its rorts, its inefficiencies and its archaic work practices. And we meant it.'

With that, he welcomed the sackings and promised $250 million to fund the redundancy payments.

Nationally, seven weeks of mass protest followed, ending the following month in the Federal Court.

Julian Burnside acted for the MUA, and Patrick was ordered to reinstate the workers after which their enterprise agreement was renegotiated. Over 600 workers were made redundant and casualisation of the workforce followed. Pending legal actions were dropped. Patrick had spent $58 million in the fight, including $8 million in legal costs. Former MUA chief, John Coomb, became more than a national leader during the dispute. His fight with his then nemesis, Chris Corrigan, the company chief who had brought this struggle on, became a turning point in Australian industrial history. Ten years on, Mr Coomb said that he and Mr Corrigan patched things up and got back to a working relationship very quickly, simply because they had to.

Another key figure was the then assistant secretary of the ACTU, Greg Combet (now MHR for Charlton). I quote his vivid memories of the events:

I received a telephone call at about 11 pm, I think it was, with reports that balaclavad security guards with attack dogs had come onto the waterfront and that the employees had been locked out. So, it was pretty shocking news but we knew something was coming and I in fact went back to bed because I knew that I'd need all the strength that I could get for the next day and the weeks that ensued...This was a dispute that was created and instigated by the Howard government, and when you cut away a lot of the rhetoric about the dispute, what was at the core of it was John Howard's desire to break the Maritime Union of Australia.

The 10^th anniversary of this momentous dispute comes as the Maritime Union of Australia renews its call for documents withheld by the Howard government to be released so that the full story of the war on the waterfront can be told. Recently, Paddy Crumlin said:

While the defeat of the Howard government last year marked the end of the national attack on Australian workers, questions remain about the role elected representatives played in breaching federal laws. Australian taxpayers funded reports to the tune of $1.5 million, which could conclusively reveal the extent of the Howard government's involvement in the Patrick dispute.

That is the topic that remains clouded—just what was the role of the Howard government in this tumultuous event? Mr Coomb strongly believes that Mr Corrigan was lured into this course of events by the federal government's promise of financial incentives.

Whatever the deal, it remains a secret. No-one knows how much of what happened was Mr Corrigan's idea. In the legal battle to return order, documents came from a whistleblower and the contents of those documents were never disputed. Today, I support the call for the matter to be settled and for the release of the report commissioned for the Howard government by consultant Dr Stephen Webster in 1997. Seconded from Pratt Industries to work for John Sharp (the then federal transport minister) and Peter Reith, Dr Webster led a project team with the brief to provide advice on waterfront reform. Under the Labor governments of Hawke and Keating, and in the interests of boosting productivity, the MUA had already made major concessions—around 4,000 jobs had gone and $200 million in savings had been made.

Time expired.