Industrial Relations Minister Tony Burke is meeting with DP World representatives today -- over the ongoing dispute causing serious delays at port terminals across the country.
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TVTranscript
00:00 This dispute is mainly over pay. So the Maritime Union of Australia is asking for a pay rise
00:07 for 1500 of its workers. The company though says if you take in account back pay, that
00:15 pay rise they're asking for is actually 27% over two years, which is too high. So the
00:21 Maritime Union of Australia members have been taking protected industrial action. They've
00:26 reduced that action to two hour stoppages now. But as you can imagine, this is affecting
00:32 a lot of the containers coming into ports into Australia. And this is having, you know,
00:37 a big impact on businesses across the country. It's impacting both importers and exporters
00:42 of all sorts of goods, but including fresh produce. So you can imagine if you're importing,
00:48 you know, fresh fruit and vegetables that you're selling to events, say, such as Chinese
00:54 New Year, they might not get to them in time now. It also means they perish and the business
01:01 has to wear that cost. It's also affecting a lot of exporters who are exporting products
01:05 such as wine, which is, you know, obviously a time of year when they're exporting this
01:10 product in addition to meat. So it's really having a major impact and they are calling,
01:16 they're among a number of voices that are calling on Federal Minister Tony Burke to
01:21 intervene. I've talked about the, you know, importers being affected. Now that could potentially
01:26 see if this drags on, that could potentially see the prices that consumers pay at the shops
01:31 increase. And that obviously has a big inflation impact. And this is a time where we really
01:36 want the Reserve Bank's been working very hard to try and keep inflation under control.
01:41 So it's really risky if this does push up inflation, because rather than seeing rate
01:46 cuts this year, what you might then see is more rate rises.
01:50 [BLANK_AUDIO]