Pod Insights ABC Rewind 01 | Conspiracy | If it quacks like a duck About this episode When Patrick Stevedores locks out and fires 1400 wharfies overnight on April 8, 1998, it divides the country. But behind all this is a story of high drama and political intrigue, a complex web of double dealing and high-stakes leaks. It's no secret that the Howard government wants waterfront reform but what role is it playing in Patrick owner Chris Corrigan's "revolution"?
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0:07 Speaker 01 A warning that this episode of Rewind contains strong language.
0:16 Speaker 02 It's 6am on the 8th of April 1998. 21-year-old Michelle Emmett is on her way to work at Melbourne's East Swanson Dock. She doesn't love the early starts, but she does love her job. I was an electrician for Patrick Stevedore's and I was a fourth-year apprentice just coming out of my time. She's this close to finishing her apprenticeship. I was the first female apprentice at Patrick's. I've always been a little bit out of the box.
0:48 Speaker 02 I'll never forget my first day walking into a really big mess room of blokes. And there was lots of pictures on the wall of females. They weren't expecting me. It was quite funny looking back. They quickly closed the door and said, "You can come back in half an hour."
1:05 Speaker 02 I was driving to work down Footscray Road and I was listening to the radio, as you do. It was 6.30am in the morning. And on the radio, they had said something about a lockout on the docks. And I thought, "What? Turn the radio up."
1:21 Speaker 03 Patrick Stevedore's has announced the sacking of its entire workforce around the country.
1:26 Speaker 02 And turned around the corner and nearly fell over.
1:35 Speaker 04 The announcement last night of the dismissal, the sacking of 1,400 workers, was made by none other than the Minister Peter Rees.
1:47 Speaker 02 There was just cars everywhere, people everywhere. And I thought, "This is, this is real." And I tried to drive up through the boom gate and they said, "No, no, you can't come in here." And I just, I was in shock.
2:00 Speaker 04 1,400 workers with their wives and children were the sacrificial lamb. You will not be forgotten.
2:07 Speaker 02 Afraid? Anxious?
2:11 Speaker 02 This wasn't just gossip. This is actually happening.
2:20 Speaker 02 But my boss,
2:23 Speaker 02 I actually called him because I was so worried. And he said, "Sorry, I can't help you. You won't be coming in to work."
2:36 Speaker 02 Michelle's just months away from finishing her apprenticeship. This lockout, it's jeopardised everything she's worked so hard for. Who's going to sign my papers off? How am I going to get through all of this? It was, um, yeah, very hard, very hard times.
2:58 Speaker 02 Late the night before, after months of speculation, security guards in balaclavas with Alsatians locked down Patrick Warbs in every major port in Australia.
3:11 Speaker 05 And the men who had just been on the shift, I don't forget, they were standing around absolutely bewildered at what had just taken place. At 11pm, right across Australia, I call them goons, with their dogs, stormed all the wharves and drove people out of the wharf, out of messrooms, out of machines, out of straddles. Oh, it was terrible stuff, terrible stuff.
3:39 Speaker 02 This is a six-part series about the story you might think you know. The story that divided not just workplaces, but families, communities, the country. You might remember the picket lines on docks around Australia. The main characters: Chris Corrigan, Peter Reith, Greg Comby, John Coombs. But behind all this is a story of high drama and political intrigue, a complex web of double dealings and high-stakes leaks.
4:09 Speaker 06 It's a part of Australia's political history that is just so bizarre. When you sit back in hindsight and watch it all play out again, it's like, how on earth did that happen?
4:21 Speaker 02 It's a story that takes us from Queensland's Etamoga pub to the ports of Dubai, from low-rent motel rooms to the highest court in the country, and all the way to the Prime Minister.
4:37 Speaker 02 What was afoot here was an unlawful conspiracy involved... The government and Chris Corrigan and others to terminate the workforce on the grounds that they were union members. For the first time, we reveal secret documents that show the Howard government had a greater hand than it's ever admitted in the largest industrial dispute in living memory. We peek inside Peter Reed's diaries, the unpublished bits, and uncover official correspondence that suggests the Howard government wasn't just a supporter of a plan to reform the waterfront, but a driver of it.
5:15 Speaker 04 You might say, oh, that amounts to a conspiracy, Mr Reed. Shock, horror. But no, I did a lot of talking, no question about that.
5:22 Speaker 02 I'm Jan Fran and this is Conspiracy: War on the Waterfront. Episode One: If It Quacks Like a Duck.
5:32 Speaker 03 Skates is coming out of the shit house, you lying bludges. You lying bludges, hundreds of black out of work, Eddie is full. Eddie is full, you dirty lying bludges. Angry waterside workers being evicted from Patrick's terminals as the company carries out mass sackings around the country overnight.
5:48 Speaker 04 So people woke up to their toast and coffee on the 8th of April 1998, opened their newspapers, turned on the telly, and all splashed over the front page, all over, you know, the morning news were images of dogs and security guards of Bella Clavers invading the waterfront across Australia.
6:08 Speaker 02 This is Macquarie University historian Dr Geraldine Feller. She is the youngest person I know with the most knowledge of the 1998 waterfront dispute.
6:19 Speaker 04 And they wrote to the news that the entire unionised workforce of Patrick Stevedores had been sacked and pretty much chased out of their workplaces.
6:28 Speaker 02 And why was this such a big story? What were the sort of implications that it would have had for the ordinary Australian?
6:34 Speaker 04 I think a lot of people would have woken up, seen that and thought, could this happen to me? Is this how bosses treat their workers these days? Is this normal now, you know, that I could go to work and find myself locked out or even chased out?
6:49 Speaker 02 You mentioned April 1998. How old were you in April 1998?
6:54 Speaker 04 I was...
6:56 Speaker 02 Actually, I was four. Oh my god, that makes me feel really old because I was 13 in April 1998. And yet, we're both here hugely interested in this story. But you've done your entire university research on this. What was it about this story that happened when you were a four-year-old that has kept you so engaged? I think it's not just about the waterfront. It's really a story about power and politics. It's about corporate power. It's about people power and what happens when those two things meet. And it's, you know, it's a really important story as well in terms of our workplaces today and how we work and how we live today.
7:37 Speaker 03 Security guards moved on to dock sites in several cities, locking out Patrick's 1,400 workers.
7:42 Speaker 04 Get you one day, you [bleep] scary little [bleep]. How's your family and keeps going? Eh, [bleep]? How's your family and keeps going?
7:52 Speaker 03 The confrontation at Melbourne's East Swanson Dock in the dead of night, where workers battle to stop private security guards. A scene repeated throughout the night at Patrick's terminals across the country. The Maritime Union had a very clear reputation for violence. Mr. Corrigan says the company's decision is final and no amount of threats or intimidation will change the outcome. Cargo has to move. We've got the strikes every other day. We've got to bring this thing to an end.
8:20 Speaker 02 What would come to be known as the lockout was a coordinated shutdown of wharves right across the country and the locking out of members of the Maritime Union of Australia, the MUA. This blow up hasn't just come out of nowhere. It's been brewing for years. Both sides of government have wanted waterfront reform. The stevedoring companies too. This lockout, though? Well, no one ever thought it would go down like this. The dogs on the wharves and the balaclavas. This is new. This is not what we ordinarily do in Australia. This raises the stakes for everyone. The wharfies working on the docks, the MUA that represents them,
9:06 Speaker 02 for Patrick Stevedores, whose share price is tanking, and for the Howard government, that's made no secret it wants waterfront reform.
9:15 Speaker 04 We were concerned, and the evidence was abundant, that the waterfront had to be at our sights because it was notoriously inefficient. I mean, if you were interested in industrial relations, you knew that the Australian waterfront was notorious.
9:32 Speaker 02 John Howard was Prime Minister at the time.
9:34 Speaker 04 It was so notorious that it had even entered the popular culture. There's a story about a lady in Cairns who was told by the local police that she had to get out of her house because there was a cyclone coming.
9:50 Speaker 04 And her reply was, "Don't worry, Sergeant, the wharfies won't land it."
9:58 Speaker 02 Geraldine, were Australian wharves inefficient? Look, the thing is, Jan, were Australia's wharves the most efficient in the world? No, they weren't. But I think what we often forget in discussions of efficiency is that sometimes what is the most "efficient" practice are detrimental to the wellbeing of workers. So, for example, the government at the time of the dispute held up Singapore as a kind of paragon of efficiency. Well, in Singapore at the time, crane drivers actually had their lunch sent up to them in helmets. So, in other words, they didn't have a lunch break. They spent hours and hours at a time sitting in a container crane.
10:42 Speaker 02 What a lot of people don't know is that you have to sit at a really awkward angle in a container crane, actually looking down through your legs. So you can imagine the impact that that can have on crane drivers' bodies. I think the other point to make about the debate around efficiency, which is really important, is to look at how blame was apportioned in that debate or discussion. Wharves are a huge ecosystem. Transport is a huge chain of logistics. And the idea that all of the problems on Australia's waterfront were down to Wharfies or the MUA just doesn't really stack up. There were lots of other issues there in terms of the age of equipment,
11:25 Speaker 02 maintenance and those kinds of things that weren't really taken into consideration. Geraldine, can you talk us through the lead up to this a little bit? Because this didn't just come out of nowhere, did it? No, not at all. There's long, long animosity between the MUA and the coalition. And John Howard in particular really took issue with the MUA. And there was a fundamental ideological element to this. The MUA is a militant union, so by that I mean a very active union, a union willing and able to take industrial action. It's a very left wing union that has involved itself in all kinds of social causes, from land rights to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. And it had strong links to the Communist Party.
12:10 Speaker 02 It didn't, and to an extent, it still doesn't, play by the industrial rules. And the 1980s and 1990s, it's important to note, was a time of huge workplace change and industrial relations change. And a lot of that had actually happened under the Hawke and Keating Labour governments. The MUA by the late 90s, in a lot of ways, represented the kind of last holdout in a form of militant trade unionism that was really under siege. So there was huge political investment from the Howard government in taking them on. So that's the background to this story. But this is where it really kicks off.
12:50 Speaker 04 We have been elected with a mandate, a very powerful mandate.
12:55 Speaker 02 After 13 years in the political wilderness, the Howard government's elected to power on the 2nd of March 1996. It wants widespread workplace reform. And it really, really wants waterfront reform.
13:11 Speaker 02 And that means dealing with the powerful MUA, the Maritime Union of Australia.
13:20 Speaker 06 We're an island continent.
13:22 Speaker 02 That's Greg Comby. At the time, he's with the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the ACTU.
13:28 Speaker 06 We need transport by ships to export commodities and to import commodities. It's the lifeblood of our economy.
13:36 Speaker 02 And the MUA knew it. If waterside workers didn't like something, they'd strike, and imports and exports would come to a halt. And so...
13:46 Speaker 06 John Howard had a real beef with the Waterside Workers' Federation and saw it as communist-controlled and all the rest of it, and it needed to be tidied up. They'd made no secret of their desire to smash up the waterfront labour arrangements. It was all very public, lot of bravado.
14:04 Speaker 02 The Maritime Union of Australia is 125 years old, and its membership of 10,000 has a stranglehold on every port in the country. The Prime Minister has always wanted to change that.
14:16 Speaker 03 The nation should not be held to ransom by a small number of people controlling the waterfront.
14:20 Speaker 02 But it's been the worst year on record for Chris Corrigan's company, Patrick Stevedores. Its share price has halved, and Corrigan's blaming the wharfies.
14:30 Speaker 03 Items didn't arrive on time because of this incredible inefficiency on the waterfront. Exports of rural products would become wasted on the docks, you know, frozen containers wouldn't be plugged in, these sorts of things. So there was tremendous loss of product, and everyone, you and I, were paying for this incredible inefficiency. And that's why change was required. And I knew that. The unions knew that, too. They just didn't want to cooperate.
15:02 Speaker 02 But the government did.
15:06 Speaker 04 That you had to enlist the assistance of an employer who was willing to go the distance and we found that with Patrick's.
15:16 Speaker 06 They found a very good friend in Chris Corrigan who had his own commercial objectives that aligned with the political objectives of the government at the time.
15:26 Speaker 04 What I said to him, and I remember it very clearly, was, Chris, I admire your determination and the government will work with you because we know what your goal is and it's very similar to ours, but what you do is a matter for your free and commercial judgement. All I ask of you is that anything you do is within the law.
15:47 Speaker 02 Ah, a partnership for the ages, the Bert and Ernie of waterfront reform, if Bert and Ernie were a little more committed to the free market. And so begins a marriage of convenience. But with this marriage, there's no time for the honeymoon.
16:02 Speaker 03 It became clear to me at that time that this required a revolution. This wasn't going to happen in a sensible, measured way, that you needed to have a complete revolution in order to get change to occur.
16:20 Speaker 02 Yes, this revolution kicks off the way all good revolutions do, with meetings. There are meetings between the unions and the government, meetings between the unions and the stevedores, and, and this is important, many secret meetings between the government and the stevedores.
16:44 Speaker 06 Leaks of what the government was up to. Everyone was sort of positioning for this big thing that was going to erupt at some point in time. I lost count of how many secret meetings we had.
16:57 Speaker 03 John Howard was ringing regularly to find out what was going on. He was vitally interested in this. He saw the reform of the waterfront as a totemic issue.
17:07 Speaker 02 John Sharp's the Minister for Transport and he's in charge of waterfront reform.
17:11 Speaker 03 Howard would ring you every day or every second day, saying, what are you up to? What have you done? Who have you spoken to? What do they say? What do you think? This is what I think. He was not leading from behind, he was leading from in front.
17:25 Speaker 04 I remember saying at the time, I'm like a dog at a bone.
17:29 Speaker 02 By September 97, the unions know something
17:33 Speaker 02 Big is coming. Greg Comby and the National Secretary of the MUA, the late John Coombs, meet with Prime Minister John Howard.
17:42 Speaker 06 We wanted to have a genuine conversation with him and also to make clear that we would fight. We don't want to fight. We didn't want to dispute and that we could negotiate our way through things. But, you know, John Howard and Peter Reith and team, they didn't want any negotiation. They were set on a path.
18:00 Speaker 05 Howard was quite certain and sure of himself and gave us absolutely no satisfaction whatsoever that we were going to be able to have a relationship with the government. At the end of the day, Greg said to me, "Well, we can forget about thinking we're going to work with them, Johnny." He set us on. We didn't know what was on, but we knew that we were in for some trouble with the government. It was abundantly clear. They were very cocky, very sure of themselves, very sure of themselves.
18:25 Speaker 05 The first inkling that we here in Brisbane had that there was something amiss was when we started EBA negotiations in mid-1997. It was palpable that something was up.
18:39 Speaker 02 This is Cole Davies. And back then, he's the MUA's Joint Branch Secretary in Brisbane. He's in the thick of nutting out employment contracts with Patrick's.
18:49 Speaker 05 Patrick's wanted nothing but complete capitulation. There was open hostility towards the committee negotiating the EBA that I've never seen before. And we'd come out of those meetings thinking, "What is going on?"
19:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, what is going on?
19:12 Speaker 04 Well, this document, he came to my attention. One of the guys came in, wanted certain documents witnessed. I said, "Burado, let's go into the barracks."
19:24 Speaker 02 This is Mark. And in 1997, he's working for the Army. This isn't his real name or voice. Because as this story unfolds, Mark and others like him become enemy number one. He still worries about payback. Mark's a JP. And one day, an Army colleague asks him to witness a document.
19:44 Speaker 04 I said to him, "What's this all about?" He said, "Well, look, I really can't..." I said, you had to tell me. He said, no, I've signed a confidentiality clause.
19:51 Speaker 02 The guy hands Mark a clipping from the army newspaper and says.
19:56 Speaker 04 If you need to know something, easy ad from the paper, give this guy a call.
20:00 Speaker 02 An ad in the paper? What could this be about?
20:04 Speaker 06 Civilian career opportunity, trade specialists required. We are seeking applicants for a number of permanent positions in the surplus Trans-Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane.
20:14 Speaker 02 Sounds relatively innocuous, right?
20:16 Speaker 06 Service members who have or are about to complete their 20 years. Initial inquiries can be made in confidence to Mike Wells.
20:24 Speaker 04 So I said, righto, right there and then, I phoned up Mike Wells.
20:29 Speaker 02 Mike interviews Mark just a few days later and the details of the job are, hmm, let's say vague.
20:37 Speaker 04 We were told it was going to be funded by Asians. They didn't divulge too much. They threw the dollar sign in front of us. They said you'll be paid handsomely. The working conditions would be good. You'll get all these qualifications and it was very, very secretive.
20:56 Speaker 02 But Mark's intrigued. He's been thinking about moving on from the army for a while now and here's his chance to walk straight into a new lucrative job.
21:05 Speaker 04 And because I'd completed 20 years, post 20 years, you get a pension and that's when you can leave the service. And that's why this advertisement was so attractive. It would have been definitely a second career and that attracted me.
21:20 Speaker 02 So Mark applies for long service leave and his colonel approves it. But it's curious, right? The ad only appeared in the army newspaper. Why are they, whoever they are, only targeting defence personnel?
21:38 Speaker 02 Mark's told to get his affairs in order, that he'll be leaving the country in early December, just a few weeks away.
21:45 Speaker 04 Everything happened so fast. My passport had run out. I was given a name and I can't remember if it was ****. I went into the passport office, dropped this name, gave the passport and within two hours I had a new passport ready for me. And that name was from Canberra. The speed of everything that was happening was. Laughable, to be honest with you. It was, it was like a James Bond movie. Everything was secretive. Phone calls, money was not an issue, airfares and so on. Um, I had an impression that the government was involved when that passport went through within two hours.
22:29 Speaker 04 I thought, wow, whoever gets issued a passport within two hours? Someone within the Commonwealth had to give that authority for a passport to be issued. And that's when my suspicions started.
22:45 Speaker 02 At this stage, Mark has no idea who's really behind the plan. But it's all being organised by the man whose name is in the ad. Mike Wells, a highly decorated former commando, and his business partner, Peter Kilfoyle, also ex-military.
23:02 Speaker 06 My name is Peter Kilfoyle. I did, along with Mike Wells, the, the Worf dispute. I was the one that took them all over to Dubai and brought them all back.
23:13 Speaker 02 Wait, what? Dubai? What does Dubai have to do with anything?
23:18 Speaker 06 Yeah, they briefed us. They were looking to do an alternate workforce to take over the waterfront and de-unionise the waterfront.
23:26 Speaker 02 Okay. So according to Kilfoyle, he and his partner, Mike Wells, were asked to recruit and train a workforce overseas to take over the jobs of the Union Worfis. Right. And by the way, they're both ex-SAS. So where's the first place they look for recruits? The army.
23:48 Speaker 06 If you want the job done, you want WOES sergeants, people like that, that are used to training, giving orders and making happen. So they're the calibre of the sort of guys we wanted. And we got a lot of them. I think they just wanted to hold the Union to ransom and use that as a way to get what they wanted. Then we got the brief, how it was going to happen and what was going to happen. It was all done. Look, both sides of government knew the Worf had to be fixed. The Worfis knew it. Everyone knew it had to be fixed, otherwise it was going to come to this. The strong militants? No. If you're not going to get... With the times and change your bloody tactics to go with the times. You're going to get taken over.
24:35 Speaker 02 But what Kilfoil and Wells don't know is that they have a mole. Someone on the inside is leaking details of the Dubai plan to the MUA's John Coombs.
24:49 Speaker 06 One afternoon when I'd got home from work and the phone rang and he identified himself as a senior bureaucrat in Canberra in the Parliament House. And he outlined to me what was being proposed with great detail, which I have to say, turned out to be 100% accurate. And I still don't know who that person was, but I could recognise his voice tomorrow if he spoke to me. I'll never forget it, a very well modulated voice. And when I asked him, who's behind all of this? He said, well, how high do you want to go? I said, right at the top. He said, John Howard. Just like that. John Howard.
25:27 Speaker 02 Just like that, huh? This bureaucrat becomes known as friend number one. But then Coombs gets another call from another friend, and this time Greg Comby's with him.
25:41 Speaker 06 John came in kind of looking rather ashen-faced from taking this phone call and told me that he'd had a call warning him that something big was going to happen and that this person would be able to provide us some information.
25:58 Speaker 02 This guy is friend number two, and he drops a bomb. Coombs gets straight on the phone to the MUA Joint Branch Secretary in Brisbane, Cole Davies.
26:10 Speaker 05 He told me, first of all, have you got a digital phone? We're being tapped. Okay, John. He said that he's just received a call from friend number two, who was offering pure gold, documents he claims could bring down the Howard government. He then said, Cole, you know where Etamoga Hotel is? I want you to get up there and wear something that will identify you as an MUA member and be up there by two o'clock.
26:41 Speaker 02 If you don't know what the Etamoga Pub is, let me tell you. Because it is, oh, chef's kiss. It was built on the Sunshine Coast in the 1980s as part of the, get this, Aussie World Theme Park. Yeah, so it looked like something out of a cartoon, and that's because it was. Anyhow, back to Cole.
27:04 Speaker 05 And make sure you're back in Brisbane around five. We've got a courier waiting to pick up the documents that you'll be picking up. And Cole, don't stuff it up. I said, okay, comrade. I whipped into the car and I drove up the Bruce Highway. By about 15 minutes, I got another phone call. Cole, no heroics. These blokes are trained killers. Thanks, comrade. Started to get a bit concerned then. Two things I was worried about. I was going to meet a would-be scab and I had to keep my mouth shut.
27:44 Speaker 05 But I can tell you when I drove into that car park, my heart rate was definitely up, I can tell you that. I went to the hotel, into the bar. Anyway, my phone rang after a few minutes and I was instructed to go into the TAB section, buy a beer and find a seat out the front of the hotel, which I did. And a few minutes later, a bloke come up. He's pretty casual, big lump of a bloke. He said, you Cole? He said, I've got something for you. I said, but I, we need to go inside and have a chat. When he come up to me, I looked at him. I said, oh, this bloke would be a bit of trouble in a blue.
28:27 Speaker 05 He had that short cropped hair, big head on him, square jaw, and he had the most piercing eyes I've ever come across. And he knew it too, and he sort of stare at you. And he says, go and park there, put your left-hand window down and just wait. A few minutes later, car come past, envelope in the window, and he was off, and so was I.
28:57 Speaker 02 The info in that envelope that friend number two throws into Cole's car, well, it blows everything up. There is so much information, including details of the alternative workforce recruits, or as the union calls them, the scabs.
29:13 Speaker 05 The scabs, their names, the phone numbers of the apartments they were to stay at in Dubai, the credit cards they were to use there. And there was a lot of background to who was involved in this conspiracy. A heck of a lot of detail. I mean, there was so much detail, they said, "Together, we could bring this government down." Yeah, I'll never forget those words.
29:42 Speaker 05 After I got those documents, I flew off down the highway. And I've always told the joke that it was a bit like Get Smart. And I said, "I'll fry it up in the envelope in case I disappear up in the air orifice."
29:57 Speaker 02 And when Greg Combe sees what's in that envelope, oh, he cannot believe his eyes.
30:04 Speaker 06 They were the contracts that the former SAS personnel were signing in order to go to Dubai for training and become the replacement workforce. Yeah, we were pretty shocked. And we learnt in this information too, you know, their flight number, that they were staying in the travel lodge right at Melbourne Airport. So we were able to tip off the media. Yeah, it was a pretty extraordinary event.
30:36 Speaker 06 We arrived at the airport and that suspicion of the job we were going to be doing only grew when we were on the plane. And the penny dropped, I think I knew as we were on the plane, heading towards Dubai, what the government and Patrick's were up to. But I made the decision to go ahead with it right there and then.
31:05 Speaker 02 For 27 years, the Howard government's consistently denied knowing anything about the Dubai training programme.
31:11 Speaker 03 He never told me, I can assure you, about going to Dubai. That is news to me. Did you have any sense of a list of potential offshore training sites through this time? No, absolutely not, no.
31:23 Speaker 02 Absolutely not, says former Howard minister Peter Reith. Except, that's not what we were told.
31:32 Speaker 03 Late 1997, so you can remember a meeting in Peter Reith's office in Melbourne that I attended with the NFF and Chris Corrigan. And they came forward with this plan, to train an alternative workforce, to do it in Dubai, and to then have them available to step in in the instance of a dispute where they could take over the running of the operation.
32:04 Speaker 02 This is John Sharp. He's saying that ministers in the Howard government knew about the plan to train an overseas workforce in Dubai. How did he know? He was one of those ministers, the Minister for Transport, to be precise.
32:23 Speaker 03 I can assure you, I never spelt it out in John Sharp's presence.
32:27 Speaker 02 Well, someone's not telling the truth. Next time on Conspiracy, one of Australia's most significant industrial showdowns is about to blow wide open. The whole thing from the go-get was just dirty. It was undercutting what Australians believed in, and it was a conspiracy to smash the Maritime Union of Australia. All very dramatic and all great fun, but I can tell you, it wasn't a conspiracy. I'm not going to bullshit, personally.
33:06 Speaker 02 Was the federal government in bed with big business? I am convinced that the government knew everything about this. How deep was the Howard government's involvement? I don't know that I knew what that plan was. I didn't. And how much did it really know about the plan to smash the Maritime Union? Do you think they didn't know about Dubai?
33:35 Speaker 02 They should have known. Of course I knew. Of course I knew. The quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck, it's a duck. Right? Come on.
33:46 Speaker 02 Conspiracy: War on the Waterfront is an ABC Rewind production. It was made on the lands of the Gadigal, Bungala, Wurundjeri, Woiwarrong and Darug peoples. And it was produced by Kirsty Melville, Geraldine Feller, Claudia Taranto and Michelle Rayner in association with Macquarie University. Russell Stapleton is our outrageously talented composer, sound designer and engineer. I'm Jan Fran. Catch you next time.
34:28 Speaker 02 Housing in Australia is broken. Sold, sir. Congratulations. Our hometown is just too expensive and we're being pushed further and further away. But for investors, business is booming. We've massaged that portfolio now. At one point it was over 40. So why is the supply and demand so out of whack? Join me, Sam Hawley, to find out how Aussies became housing hostages. Our five-part series on ABC News Daily starts Monday, March 3.
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