Media Release

KAP Federal Leader and Member for Kennedy Bob Katter has condemned an attack in the Australian Parliament on our hard-fought award-wage and working conditions ahead of the KAP’s release of its industrial relations policy framework.

During debate in the final sitting of the 43rd Parliament, on an emergency motion co-sponsored by Mr Katter to prevent the offshoring of more Aussie jobs, the Federal Leader of the National Party commented that: ‘People are going from Australia to New Zealand because our minimum wage is $23 and theirs is $13 – in the US it is $8 – so it is not surprising that there are issues with competitiveness'.

“The deputy prime minister-in-waiting – straight after the loss in just a few weeks of thousands of jobs at Holden, Ford and SPC Ardmona – stood up in Parliament and blamed our hard-fought award wages for the situation in Australia,” said Mr Katter.

“But the ALP’s line is, by implication, the same. Because they have last year flown in 125,000 temporary 457 visa workers to undermine our pay and conditions – implementing the LNP policy brought in when they were in government and bringing an average of 38,000 temporary foreign workers a year.

“I’d like to see the Member for Wide Bay live on $350 a week. Or was the Honourable Member suggesting we could get America to lift its $8 minimum wage?
“No, of course he wasn’t – after 13 years under his ministerial watch, he knows full well it’s because of the free market polices of successive governments that our automotive workforce has shrunk one-third in a decade, down to 50,000 by February 2013. And our food production industries are selling up or going broke because they’re forced to compete domestically against a supermarket oligopoly, and globally on an unlevel playing field against slave labour wages.

“The Australian way has always been that our people should be paid a decent wage, and to do that, our industries have to have some protection – protection against imports from dirt poor wage level countries. The choice is protection or poverty for the working class – that Australians pay a bit more so we have jobs and decent pay and conditions in this country – and was always the social contract in Australia.

“But the KAP is the only party to stand up for workers against the relentless attempts to undermine our hard-fought wages and working conditions.”
Mr Katter said the policy underpinnings for the KAP’s strategic vision for workers was in line with the party’s Core Values and Principles (number 6) – that they are ‘able to bargain collectively to protect and promote their economic interests and that all, wherever practicable, have access to compulsory arbitration’.

“The party’s policy has always been promoting fair work negotiation through arbitration before industrial action (not the current ALP policy which forces strike before access to arbitration); curtailing the use of foreign fly-in workers at the expense of Australian jobs; and that people who work beyond the usual 40-hour week into family time are fairly compensated,” said Mr Katter.