Pod Insights ABC Rewind 02 | Conspiracy | Bosom Buddies About this episode When the Opposition Labor Party breaks the news in Parliament about a secret group of ‘industrial mercenaries’ training in Dubai to take over the wharfies' jobs some big questions are asked: who exactly is behind the training operation, and is the government involved?
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0:07 Speaker 01 A warning that this episode of Rewind contains strong language.
0:13 Speaker 02 It's December 3rd, 1997. The last sitting week of Parliament for the year. It's question time and the opposition leader, Kim Beazley, and the Shadow Minister for Transport, Labor's Limsey Tanner, are about to lob a grenade at the government.
0:29 Speaker 03 What knowledge do you have of this covert operation to recruit a force of industrial mercenaries from the ranks of the military? And when did you first become aware of it?
0:37 Speaker 04 I'm not aware of it at all.
0:38 Speaker 02 Limsey Tanner and Kim Beazley tag-team it, throwing question after question at Minister for Workplace Relations, Peter Reith, and Prime Minister John Howard.
0:49 Speaker 03 Thanks, Mr Speaker. My question is to the Minister for Workplace Relations and Small Business. Have you, or any member of your staff, or department, or any consultant advising the government on waterfront matters, had any discussions with Michael Wells, Peter Kielfoyle, or any representatives of Finn West Proprietary Limited, or International Port Services Training Group Proprietary Limited regarding the deployment of an alternative labour force on the Australian waterfront? If so, what was discussed and with whom?
1:17 Speaker 04 Mr Speaker, I must say I don't know any of those names of either the companies or the individuals that the member has asked me of, so the answer is no.
1:26 Speaker 02 Minister Reith, well, he starts to lose his patience.
1:30 Speaker 05 I'm not going to go back into my office and have a Spanish Inquisition with my secretaries, my staff, my this, my that.
1:35 Speaker 02 He ridicules the Labor Party for calling the Dubai trainees "industrial mercenaries".
1:40 Speaker 05 If you're a chef in the Defence Forces and get a job in a Canberra restaurant, does that make you a culinary mercenary?
1:48 Speaker 02 But like it or not, that phrase sticks. And when Prime Minister John Howard gets mobbed by the press after question time, he's all laughs. Would John Howard be prepared to use mercenaries to break union power on the
2:02 Speaker 04 An extraordinary question. But he didn't rule it out. I'm in favour of everything that's strictly in accordance with the laws of Australia.
2:12 Speaker 02 In this episode, we're following the road to Dubai, unpacking the complicated planning, manoeuvring and scheming that's led to this explosive revelation in Parliament. And we start asking some big questions about exactly how much the government knew about this controversial training exercise.
2:33 Speaker 06 Around 70 recruits are booked to fly to Dubai in the Middle East tonight for training, returning to Australia in the new year. The ACTU claims the Department of Foreign Affairs is involved, but the Howard government denies any knowledge of the scheme.
2:52 Speaker 02 I'm Jan Fran and this is Conspiracy: War on the Waterfront. Episode two, Bosom Buddies.
3:02 Speaker 02 Last time, a deep throat leaked confidential documents to union man Cole Davies at the Etamoga pub.
3:08 Speaker 07 He had that short, cropped hair, big head on him, square jaw, and he had the most pleasing eyes I've ever come across. They said, "Together, we can bring this government down."
3:19 Speaker 02 Military guy Mark signed up for a mysterious overseas training exercise and found himself with a brand-new passport heading for Dubai.
3:28 Speaker 06 I had an impression that the government was involved when that passport went through within two hours.
3:34 Speaker 02 And former Howard minister John Sharp told us the government did know about the Dubai plan.
3:41 Speaker 04 The NFF and Chris Corrigan. And they came forward with this plan to train an alternative workforce to do it in Dubai.
3:54 Speaker 02 Despite what we just heard, Peter Reeth always denied knowing anything about Dubai, right up until his death in 2022.
4:02 Speaker 04 No, we're not involved, and it was news to me until the Labor Party told us that question time. Look, quite frankly, I have no idea as to how these people may be placed into jobs in the region. I've got no idea.
4:16 Speaker 02 Ian Hankey was Reeth's press secretary when the news blew up in Parliament. We asked Ian just a few months ago what Reeth knew about the Dubai plan. He said the same thing.
4:27 Speaker 06 Mercenaries being trained in Dubai, and we didn't know the first thing about it. Peter didn't, nor did I, nor did anybody in the office, to my knowledge. So I actually went around to the Defence Minister's office and got a copy of the Army newsletter to try and find the ad, which I did, and then had to ring up Mike Wells to find out what the hell was going on, because we didn't know.
4:50 Speaker 07 Look, you've got to remember, Peter Reeth was a ducker and weaver. That's what he did.
4:57 Speaker 02 That's Bob McMullin, Peter Reeth's counterpart at the time, the Shadow Minister for Workplace Relations. Those documents the MUA's Cole Davies picks up at the Etamoga pub, well, the union hands them over to trusted comrades in the Labor Party, and that's what Labor uses to ambush the government in Parliament. But they don't quite get the answers they're hoping for.
5:20 Speaker 07 I mean, he used to weave stories that had a remote plausibility, even though you knew they weren't true, and he was quite good at it in his own way. So nobody was surprised that he was ducking and weaving. It was what he did.
5:38 Speaker 02 How much the Howard government knew about the plan to train a non-union workforce in Dubai to replace the union workforce on the waterfront remains one of the great unsolved questions of Australian politics. It's a question we're going to pick away at throughout this series. We've already heard one former Howard minister contradict another former Howard minister about how much they knew. What else might we discover about the government's involvement in this real-life spy thriller? I want you to just park that question in the back of your mind. Because right now, there's a slightly more pressing matter.
6:18 Speaker 07 Over the past month, advertisements have appeared in the official Army magazine, seeking service members for what the opposition claims is training as stevedores, not in Australia, but in faraway Dubai. Labour claims the ads have drawn around 70 recruits, 20 or 30 of whom were gathered at the airport travel lodge in Melbourne this afternoon to fly out to the Middle East this evening.
6:43 Speaker 05 Everyone was ringing around, trying to find out who it was that was behind this ad.
6:48 Speaker 02 Anne Davies is a former journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald and the co-author of the book Waterfront.
6:54 Speaker 05 There was only two big stevedores, so they were the obvious suspects. And Chris Corrigan was probably more suspect than PNO because he was under enormous financial pressure at the time. Chris Corrigan, the chairman of Patrick's stevedoring company, one of the two largest companies operating on Australia's waterfront, says he knows nothing of the Dubai operation or international port services training group.
7:23 Speaker 02 Hmm.
7:25 Speaker 02 I'm going to bring in our resident historian, Dr Geraldine Feller. You heard from her in episode one.
7:32 Speaker 02 Geraldine, at this point, the coalition government is saying that it doesn't know anything about the Dubai plan. The other person saying they have no idea about Dubai is Chris Corrigan. Now, is he telling the truth? No one believes Corrigan at this point. His blood is in the water, press is circling like sharks. Everyone thinks it's him. And Matt Peacock, who's the late ABC journalist, he's been on to this for months. And that's because he had a really weird conversation with someone from PNO, the other stevedoring company, so not from Chris Corrigan's company. And this guy is like high up in PNO, he's talking to Matt, and he's trying to drop some hints. He says, you know, to make these big changes on the wharves...
8:16 Speaker 02 You'd have to train an alternative workforce. And you'd have to do it overseas, maybe somewhere like Dubai. And Matt, being the eminent journalist that hears, his ears prick up. It's like, that is very specific. So he's sniffing around, trying to figure out who's doing what, what's going on, is Dubai involved. Suddenly it breaks in Parliament. And he goes straight to Chris Corrigan, calls him up and asks him what's going on.
8:43 Speaker 05 It would make sense to have people trained offshore, would it not? Well, if that was one's objective, I guess it would. But I think the government's ruled out troops. We certainly have never contemplated such a thing. And I have no knowledge of what you're talking about in this regard.
8:56 Speaker 02 Okay. Chris Corrigan does in fact have knowledge of what Matt Peacock is talking about. And that is because we now know that he was behind the Dubai plan. But I've got to tell you, I'm kind of impressed at the way that he ducks and weaves around Matt's next question.
9:12 Speaker 05 And do you think your company would ever get involved in something like this? Well, you keep saying something like this, I don't know what something like this is. Well, I suppose the idea of employing sort of ex-commandos, ex-army military types in order to break a strike is the essential allegation of the opposition. I, I just, it's just so hypothetical, a proposition I can't, I can't respond to. I mean, first I've heard of this circumstance, I'm not sure I understand what is being proposed.
9:43 Speaker 02 Dubai recruiter Peter Kilfoyle, well, he doesn't quite duck and weave as well as Corrigan when he's papped at the airport.
9:50 Speaker 05 We are recruiting for an overseas consortium to train people overseas for jobs that we have here in Australia.
10:00 Speaker 02 There was a bit of a cover story, but we got ambushed, simple as that. Journalist Anne Davies remembers the airport media scrum. The organisers were caught quite flat footed in the sense they couldn't really change the flight or anything. And so the men were seen leaving a hotel and arriving at Tullamarine Airport. And they were so obvious because they all had these short haircuts, they were all big, young, fit looking military types. And so it really sort of blew the story.
10:33 Speaker 05 Out into the open. When people saw it on their TVs, these guys leaving to go to Dubai, suddenly we knew this was a real thing.
10:47 Speaker 05 Confidential documents suggest the federal government may have been aware of plans for the Stephenore training scheme in Dubai as far back as September. I'm convinced that the government and Peter Reith knew about the Dubai plan. I think there's enough documents on the public record to make that case. Now, I know Peter Reith went into Parliament and said that he was not aware of the details of the plan. I think it's possible. He did not know the absolute details, like when, who, how. But they, in broad terms, knew there was a plan to replace the maritime union with a fully trained, non-union workforce.
11:32 Speaker 02 And over the next year, many more documents will come to light.
11:37 Speaker 05 It was pretty clear that the government had been briefed on an evolutionary plan for the waterfront and an interventionist plan for the waterfront. Now, the government definitely pressed the go button on an interventionist plan.
11:52 Speaker 02 Geraldine, what's the difference here between the evolutionary plan and the interventionist plan?
11:57 Speaker 01 So, in a nutshell, the evolutionary plan is more or less a status quo. Let things evolve and the Stephenores and Wharfies sort it out between themselves. The interventionist plan, well, it's in the name, really. It's a politically aggressive approach to waterfront reform. It looks like working with the Stephenore to give them the resources and the political support they need to dramatically reduce the power of the MUA on the waterfront. Really, really simply, and at the heart of this approach, is the dismissal of the union workforce and its replacement with a non-union workforce, working for diminished pay and conditions. Now, the various interested parties are trying to figure out a way to do this legally and quietly.
12:39 Speaker 02 Right, and the interested parties couldn't do it without government help, is that right?
12:45 Speaker 01 That's right, they couldn't do it without help. They couldn't do it without a commitment that the government was going to really back them. And this was also going to mean financially.
12:53 Speaker 02 Because there were huge redundancy entitlements that were owed to the existing workforce. So on April the 21st, 1997, they get commitment from the government that they're going to back the interventionist approach. A letter comes from Howard to John Sharp, where he says very clearly, "We are supporting the interventionist approach." And scribbled at the bottom of that, it says, in Howard's handwriting, "As discussed with Reith, we need to build the economic case." And what's he talking about when he says that? They need to make a case to the public about why they're going to go with this, you know, pretty politically aggressive route. So they're playing the PR war? That's right, yeah.
13:38 Speaker 02 Here's John Howard, speaking to the ABC in 2008.
13:41 Speaker 04 Part of building the case was to talk about some of the the rots that occurred on the waterfront, and that's all part of of building a case.
13:53 Speaker 02 And the government needs to build a case, because the general public is not too worried about the waterfront. So Reith's office starts putting out a daily press release. They call it the Wharfie Rorty Day. They're basically telling the public that the wharfies are lazy, that they're ripping us all off, that they're not hardworking, blue collar blokes at all. They're silver tails, overpaid, underworked, and adding to the price of imports with their cushy conditions and outlandish salaries. The government is building a narrative to get support for what's to come. Here's the man behind those Wharfie Rorty Day press releases, Peter Reith's press secretary, Ian Hankey.
14:33 Speaker 06 I think we demonstrated that there was a bit of rorting going on in the waterfront. The constant flow of media releases and information that we put out on a daily basis. Sooner or later, it starts to percolate through to the general public.
14:49 Speaker 02 With the help of the media.
14:52 Speaker 01 Water rats. It's war on our $87,000 wharfies.
14:56 Speaker 06 With overtime and penalties, some get more than $100,000 a year.
15:01 Speaker 04 Wharfies can earn up to $120,000 a year.
15:07 Speaker 02 In August 1997, Channel 9's current affairs programme, 60 Minutes, airs War on the Waterfront. The programme's been given access to the docks, where they secretly film some workers clocking off early after finishing their shift duties, a practice called the Nick. This man was rostered on the midnight shift, 10pm to 5.30am. And on the night we watched, he was the first to leave the job, at 1.13 in the morning. Now, that's not a bad early mark, especially when you're being paid double time. It's not easy for the Wharfies to see themselves cast as bludgers and rorders in the court of public opinion.
15:49 Speaker 02 Correg Kukugal and Arabumlamman, Thomas Mayo, is watching the telly, and he can't believe what he's seeing. And yes, that's the same Thomas Mayo who campaigned for an Indigenous voice to Parliament in 2023. Back in 1997, though, he was a young Wharfie on Darwin's docks.
16:09 Speaker 04 I remember, as a young man, just being bewildered by how there seemed to be constant reports in the media about Wharfies being lazy, or that we were somehow supporting criminal underground activities, and all these things that I just knew to be untrue. As a Wharfie, being there, seeing it for myself, you know, I knew that there were issues with old machinery, for example, and poor management from time to time, or waiting for cargoes that didn't turn up on time. But none of that meant that we were lazy. But the media made it seem like we were somehow treated differently to other workers, you know, and rorting the system. All of that media has an impact,
16:52 Speaker 04 and people, including my father, would joke around that we're lazy Wharfies and things like that.
16:58 Speaker 02 By September, the nation's caring about something it never knew it needed to care about: the Wharves. And the Prime Minister has given his unequivocal support to the interventionist approach, which involves the use of a non-union workforce for the Australian waterfront. But, wait a second. Isn't that the workforce Chris Corrigan is training in Dubai? That operation the government says it has no idea about?
17:25 Speaker 02 See, this is where things get a bit... hmm... muddy. Kilfoyle and Wells, the Dubai recruiters, say that they were introduced to Chris Corrigan by a man named Stephen Webster. Geraldine, talk us through Stephen Webster. Who is he? So Stephen Webster is a bit of a mysterious guy, but he presented himself as a kind of big business fixer. He'd worked for Dick Pratt, who's the kind of titan of industry, big in cardboard manufacturing. And then, at Reet's recommendation, he found his way into John Sharp's office, the Minister for Transport, and there he was working on waterfront reform. People that we spoke to had lots of different ideas about him,
18:09 Speaker 02 but one thing we heard over and over again was that he was a mystery man or a ghost. And we tried to find him and we couldn't. But how exactly, though, did this introduction of Corrigan's to Kilfoyle and Wells happen? So Dick Pratt, Stephen Webster's old boss, needed a new driver or bodyguard. And Stephen Webster thinks, "I know a guy, and that guy is Mike Wells." So he meets up with Mike Wells, who then gets in contact with Peter Kilfoyle, and they sort out a driver for Dick Pratt. And those two know each other through kind of old ex-SAS networks. Now, according to Mike Wells, Webster gets in touch again after that, and he says,
18:54 Speaker 02 "Look, mate, I've got another job for you. This stevedore, Chris Corrigan, he's looking to do a big job, recruiting an alternative workforce for training overseas. Would Wells and Kilfoyle be interested?" And it kind of flows naturally from there. Next minute, Wells and Kilfoyle are working for Corrigan. They've established the company, FinWest, and they're recruiting army and ex-army personnel to go to Dubai. Right, so we have a person working in the Minister for Transport's office putting Chris Corrigan in touch with the two men who were going to recruit and train a workforce in Dubai, and yet, the government is saying that it has no knowledge at all of this workforce being trained in Dubai. That's right, Jan.
19:39 Speaker 02 And in fact, they also say that Webster didn't put Kilfoyle and Wells in touch with Corrigan.
19:46 Speaker 02 Well, Kilfoyle begs to differ. We didn't pick Dubai. Of course, why would I pick Dubai?
19:52 Speaker 04 No, that was all done and set up for us. Webster and it was all plans for us, we just carried out. Webster told us that. Webster, that'd already been, see, to get to Dubai, you just don't go over to Dubai and say, we're going to do a bloody training package on your wall. No, it's all got to be sanctioned, it's all got to be checked out, insurance money's got to be paid, all that. That was well and thoroughly done. We didn't do that, we just got the training ground. Our job was to do the recruitment, right?
20:21 Speaker 02 But when the ABC put this to Peter Reith in 2008, he denied it all.
20:26 Speaker 04 Genuinely, it's news to me.
20:29 Speaker 04 But the idea that I had knowledge or, see, I don't really, I'm not sure if I even accept the proposition that Webster was the starting point for the hiring of people. I know Webster had some, to be honest, I'm just a bit hazy. Chris Corrigan said to us on Sunday. Yeah. Yeah, I did ask the guy, or the, I can't remember, he asked him or Webster offered to help with some recruiting. Quite frankly, I wish I'd never met him, is what Corrigan says, just so you know, that that's a confirmation from Corrigan. Yeah, well, Webster didn't tell me. Whatever happened, I didn't know through Webster, I can assure you of that. But I mean, look, I mean, the truth of the matter is, I did not know.
21:10 Speaker 04 I know everybody'd love to say that I did know, and if I did know, I'd tell you I knew, but I just didn't, it's just as simple as that.
21:16 Speaker 02 Hmm, it doesn't seem as simple as that, though. It seems as though someone in Canberra knew. Remember Mark, one of the Dubai recruits we spoke to? Remember how quickly he got his passport?
21:30 Speaker 06 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.
21:42 Speaker 04 I managed to get all these people out of Australia, current serving and ex-soldiers, what was it, 70 something of them? Right, on bloody visas and passport or on passports, and some guys didn't even have passports, and I had the passports done within 20
21:58 Speaker 02 We used to go into the people and say, "Hey, we're here to do this. We need a passport." Give all their stuff, they'd have them all checked out and have a passport in their hands within 24 hours to fly out. That's fact. So government obviously knew.
22:15 Speaker 02 We keep coming back to this question, don't we? Just how much did the government of the day know? Transport Minister John Sharp says he was told about Dubai at a meeting in Reitz's office. Reitz man Stephen Webster is introducing the Dubai recruiters to Chris Corrigan. Mark gets his passport in two hours. And yet... Did you have any sense of a list of potential offshore training sites through this time?
22:41 Speaker 04 No, absolutely not, no.
22:43 Speaker 02 Had you never discussed that with Chris Corrigan back then?
22:46 Speaker 04 I'd only had, I had, you know, for people who think that Chris Corrigan and I are like that, I can tell you, I mean, he's a great bloke. Highly respect him. I think he did a fantastic job for Australia on the waterfront. But, I mean, we were not close. I mean, we were not bosom buddies who were chatting about getting rid of the union every second day.
23:04 Speaker 02 Gosh, that's a real masterclass in not answering the question. Anywho, back to that offshore training site that no one seems to know anything about.
23:15 Speaker 07 We landed in Dubai, there was buses waiting for us. It was fantastic. The training in Dubai was very interesting. We were working on the port, Port of Dubai. At the time, I think it was the 14th largest port in the world. Lift containers was incredible, they were so fast lifting containers off. I was assigned to go up in a crane. So it was very, very interesting work. There was an assessor, an Australian assessor in Dubai who flew from Australia to assess our competence and he had to certify that competence of the work.
23:50 Speaker 02 Remember, at this stage, Chris Corrigan is still claiming Dubai has nothing to do with him. But who does that assessor work for? Well, surprise, surprise.
24:01 Speaker 07 He worked for Patrick. He was a senior man. I think he was heading towards retirement.
24:08 Speaker 07 I think around week two or three in Dubai, the media really got on to it in Australia. There was a lot of pressure on the Commonwealth. Everything was... We were kept in the dark, by the way. The only information we would receive was from our wives. The communication between Wells, Kielfoyle, to us, was not forthcoming. It... yeah, we lacked direction. We lacked the information at that time.
24:40 Speaker 02 Things in Dubai are not going great. It was a clusterfuck, the only way to say it. So I went over there. I booked into the Hilton Hotel, I think, for four days. I went and seen all the different groups. You have guys were pitting amongst each other and it was all on the piss and all sorts of things happening.
25:00 Speaker 02 Oh, and there's a mole. Remember friend number two from the Etamoga pub? Well, he's one of the trainees. And he's doing what he does best: leaking information about the recruits and their families to the Maritime Union of Australia.
25:15 Speaker 07 My wife was very concerned. Every time I spoke to the wives, she said to me, "Mark, the situation back here is pretty bad. You know what you're in for?" I said, "I think we know what we're in for now." So we figured that it wouldn't last. But we had no idea how long it would go for when we came back to Australia and the complexity of who's involved in this operation.
25:41 Speaker 02 Well, Mark was right about one thing. It didn't last. The MUAs got an ace up its sleeve. The MUA immediately started to bring pressure to bear on Dubai through their relationship with the international seamen and what have you, whatever it's called. They've got some international waterfront union. The MUA's National Secretary, John Coombs, jumps on a plane to London. Here's Greg Comby from the ACTU. There was a meeting there of all of the senior international waterfront union representatives involved in the transport.
26:17 Speaker 00 A port workers' federation, a resolution was passed about the expectations on the Dubai Port Authority not to train these workers.
26:27 Speaker 05 Good evening, Angela Peirman with ABC News. A victory tonight for the maritime union in the Dubai waterfront row. The United Arab Emirates has suspended the training of Australian soldiers, allegedly preparing to work as strikebreakers. The announcement came after international transport unions threatened to join their Australian colleagues in a blockade of Dubai's port.
26:54 Speaker 07 The Port Authority in Dubai basically said, you're not going to work. That's it. They were threatened by the MUA and other countries that they won't unload vessels coming from those countries. We did nothing, basically. We just went out, ate and so on, and arranged people to come back to Australia.
27:15 Speaker 00 And like about a nanosecond after the resolution was passed, all of the, I'm pretty sure the visas were cancelled for the 76 former SAS personnel and they were booted out.
27:28 Speaker 02 You know, once that happened, it was pretty clear that Dubai wasn't going to fight our battles. And so things unraveled in that context quite, quite quickly. That was, to me, that was a setback in our, in my planning and my execution. It's not just incredibly disappointing for Chris Corrigan, but also for the Dubai team recruiter, Peter Kilfoyle.
27:53 Speaker 04 As we, we had the unions pretty well, pretty well on the ropes in a lot of ways. Pretty well on the ropes. If you'd have gave me another 12 hours in Dubai, I would have had all my guys certified, signed off, would have come back here, closed Melbourne down, sacked everyone, rehired who we wanted to rehire, get reform on the waterfront.
28:13 Speaker 02 Didn't happen.
28:17 Speaker 02 Didn't happen. Mark and the rest of the men get on a plane back to Australia with no idea what's coming next.
28:28 Speaker 07 We boarded the plane coming back home and
28:34 Speaker 07 we knew it was going to be tense. We knew that the media would be waiting for us at the airport. As soon as we came on the tarmac into the airport, the media came on, it's like flies. Our instructions at that time were to sit tight, this will blow over and we'll be working in no time. This has been funded heavily and there was hints that the Commonwealth was behind this, so there shouldn't be a problem.
29:04 Speaker 07 We sat around waiting. People were getting edgy and in that time, we used to get together for barbecues in the park, couple of cans of beer, and that was paid for by Quills, just to keep us all together, keep the morale high and so on. I thought it was a joke at the time. I thought, wow, this is bullshit. This is way too deep. What the hell am I doing here? But it was too late.
29:33 Speaker 07 Did I feel betrayed? Yes.
29:37 Speaker 00 We were, you know, sorry for the 76, but pretty pleased that it had happened and they all trooped home. And that led to them being very disaffected. After that Dubai port training arrangement blew up, they were basically left hanging in the wind.
29:57 Speaker 02 Meanwhile, the MUA is still working the warbs. So what exactly are the Dubai guys waiting around for? And where are they going to train, let alone work? As 1997 comes to a close, Greg Comby meets with Chris Corrigan, who still hasn't come clean about Dubai. John Coombs and I met Chris Corrigan on Christmas Eve in 1997, after we'd blown up the Dubai operation.
30:27 Speaker 05 And no one knew who was behind it. So we thought, well, go and see Chris Corrigan and try and have this out. And he gave us chapter and verse about how terrible the work practices were, et cetera. And then he offered to sell us the company for a dollar and gave us a dollar. And he said, see how you go with it. And what he was signalling to us was that, yeah, it was me and I'm coming for you. John and I came downstairs out of that meeting, knowing that it was Chris who was behind the Dubai operation and that it was only round one.
31:10 Speaker 05 And there were another 14 heavyweight rounds to go.
31:14 Speaker 02 It is going to be an anxious Christmas for everyone. Next time on Conspiracy: War on the Waterfront. A new player enters the fray. It appears the powerful Patrick Corporation is helping the National Farmers' Federation set up its own non-unionised stevedoring outfit. The rocks or the stones or the bricks or whatever it is that's coming to, they start thudding on the outside of the bus and the windows and you hear windows smashing every now and then. It's not about waterfront productivity. It's about the destruction of organised labour. Give us the money and we'll fire the bullets.
31:59 Speaker 02 Conspiracy: War on the Waterfront is an ABC Rewind production. I'm Jan Fran. Catch you next time.
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