The Pilbara union movement used to fit in a minibus

Today, about one hundred people are going to try to switch off the Australian economy.

Not metaphorically. Actually.

At Port Hedland, roughly a hundred Electrical Trades Union members and a similar number from the Manufacturing Workers’ Union will walk off the job.

Through that single harbour passes more than a third of everything this nation ships to the world. Pilbara ports handle 81 per cent of our national iron ore trade and 43 per cent of the entire global trade.

There is no second harbour or alternative route and certainly no backup plan quietly idling offshore in case a disagreement about penalty rates gets out of hand.

BHP puts the cost at more than $120 million a day in lost revenue and $6.85 million a day in royalties that would otherwise reach the WA taxpayer. Mining royalties fund roughly a fifth of everything Western Australia raises for itself that pays for hospital beds, classrooms and roads.

But this power is a recent phenomenon. Three years ago, the ETU had fewer than 20 members across the entire Pilbara iron ore operations. You could have fit the entire Pilbara union movement into a minibus and still had room for the esky.

What changed?

Not the work. Not the conditions. Not the pay.

The law changed.

Canberra rewrote the rules, loosened right of entry until it barely means anything, and handed a dormant movement the keys to the most valuable infrastructure in the country.

A union that could not fill a minibus three years ago can now shut the world’s biggest bulk export port.

Make no mistake, for the Albanese Government this is not a crisis, rather an outcome they engineered.

WHAT THEY ARE ASKING FOR.

Base salaries of $249,000 by 2028, plus $20,000 a year for nightshift and an additional $7,000 for hot weather, because apparently nobody mentioned the Pilbara gets warm. Plus another of $6,240 towards private health insurance and a further plus 200 per cent penalty rates for overtime and 300 per cent for public holidays.

The Chamber of Minerals and Energy estimates the package lands somewhere near $400,000 a year, roughly what we pay the Premier of Western Australia. The Premier, I note, does not receive a hot weather allowance.

Mining wages already sit 57 per cent above the national average making them among the best paid workers in the country, and their pay has climbed steadily for twenty five years without a union in the room.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY AT STAKE.

This is where it stops being funny.

Twenty-five years of industrial peace built the Pilbara delivered more than $100 billion in royalties to Western Australia. It grew the iron ore workforce sevenfold, from fewer than 9,000 workers to more than 65,000. It made the Pilbara the most productive corner of the national economy and it brought tens of thousands of families along with it, not to mention the entire Australian economy.

The damage however, does not stop at the wharf.

Ships sit in port at $60,000 to $90,000 a day in demurrage. Rail and haulage contractors tear up their business plans. The towns that service the region wear it. Businesses through the supply chain will begin to build “disruption premiums” of 1-2 per cent into their margins, taking costs higher.

We have seen this film. The strikes of the 1970s and 80s trashed our reputation as a reliable trading partner and sent billions in investment to Brazil, who remain our fiercest competitor to this day. We spent a generation earning that reputation back.

A hundred people now propose to put a torch to it.

AND THE MINISTER?

Asked about the prospect of the world’s biggest iron ore port being shut down, the Resources Minister, Madeleine King, said she was “not opposed to workers downing tools”, and wondered aloud what was wrong with unions working in the Pilbara.

Nothing is wrong with unions in the Pilbara. Workers may organise, they may bargain, and within reason they may withdraw their labour. That was settled long ago.

What is wrong is the minister charged with the stewardship of this nation’s export capacity treating the shutdown of our single most critical trade node as a bit of weather. She is not a bystander, she holds the portfolio and now she has chosen a side.

Watch what happens today, and watch what happens after. Port Hedland is not the end of this; it is the opening bid.

Twenty-five years of peace built the Pilbara. A hundred workers, and a minister who cannot bring herself to object, should not be allowed to burn it down.