Page 2738 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 12 August 2015
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The Race Discrimination Commissioner and former speech writer for Labor New South Wales Premier Bob Carr tweeted his displeasure with the CFMEU. This is Tim Soutphommasane. He tweeted his displeasure with the CFMEU yesterday when he said:
It’s disappointing to see some NSW political adverts using inflammatory language about foreign investment
Then there is Mr Foley’s comment. “Let’s not license xenophobia,” he said. Mr Foley’s anti-privatisation campaign has been attacked by a former Labor senior figure who said it made him ashamed of his own party. It just goes on.
There has been lots of commentary about this. In the Australian Financial Review there was an opinion piece. Isn’t it interesting? A couple of years ago the Labor Party were talking about the Asian century. The Asian century apparently stopped in about 2013. It lasted a whole year. A century means a hundred years, members; a hundred years. The editorial in the Financial Review said:
… the party … now seeks to play the Asian peril card against a trade deal with a country with which we run a merchandise trade deficit topping $20 billion a year, which is our biggest customer and which supplies the bulk of our tourists and foreign students.
The CFMEU, through their disgraceful xenophobic campaign, put this at risk. It goes on to say:
But the campaign against the marginal easing of foreign worker provisions included in the China FTA is all about defending the labour supply monopoly that unions led by the CFMEU maintain and which ends up financing the Labor party.
Let us see whether we can put principles above your funding. Then there is an article in the Australian by Alan Oxley which I will grab a few quotes from. It says:
A leading left-wing union (the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union) then let loose on what’s wrong with the FTA. The party congress approves Shorten’s refugee policy. Then the CFMEU claims polling results show Labor will lose seats in South Australia because of the China FTA … Can it be a coincidence that a few months earlier the left-wing Australian Manufacturing Workers Union warned the government it would lose South Australian seats unless the new fleet of submarines was built there …
The article goes on to say:
Australia has never had a more beneficial trading partner than China. Japan runs close. Most Australians are unaware we are one of Japan’s primary sources of energy.
There were the benefits, for instance, when China was purchasing amounts of coal and iron ore. The article goes on:
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