Seven Years On: The Battle for Miners’ Entitlements

Seven years. That’s how long we’ve been fighting Australia’s largest wage theft case for thousands of underpaid casual coal miners.

Some workers are owed up to $211,000. Others have been stripped of more than $40,000 a year.

When we first exposed the broken governance and dodgy practices surrounding Coal Long Service Leave (Coal LSL), they told us we were wrong. Now? We stand completely vindicated.

A new bill is moving through parliament and we have serious concerns. It actually gives delinquent employers a 20% discount on entitlements they should have paid in full.

The system has been a mess for so long that miners simply want certainty now rather than letting this drag on in court for years.

Our 3 core goals since 2019 have been to:

🡪 Get Central Queensland and Hunter Valley miners every dollar of their just, moral, and legal entitlements.

🡪 Stop the use of unlawfully processed enterprise agreements once and for all.

🡪 Deliver justice against the employers, union bosses, and agencies who colluded to rip off these hard-working Australians.

I’m not backing down. We’ve been chasing this for seven years, and we will keep chasing it until our miners get the justice they deserve.

Transcript

One Nation has a second reading amendment to the Coal Mining Industry (Long Service Leave) Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. I move: 

At the end of the motion, add “, but the Senate calls on the Government to immediately pursue backpay for workers who were underpaid as a result of the use of casual labour hire contracts in the coal mining industry”. 

The ‘workers’ are the casual coalmine workers. 

There are thousands of casual miners who have been underpaid in Australia’s largest wage theft case. I’ve been chasing this up on their behalf for seven years. We are chasing this and we will continue to chase it. They have been underpaid for many years. Some are owed up to $211,000. Others are owed more than $40,000 a year. 

We have some concerns with this bill but it’s going through as a noncontroversial bill—I’ll explain why in a minute—because we have listened to the miners. Long service leave in the coalmining industry has exhibited poor governance and broken government contracts. This has now been exposed. We exposed it. We were told, ‘No, you’re wrong.’ Then they found out that we were correct. We were vindicated. 

This bill is rewarding delinquent employers by giving them a discount when they pay. They get a discount for being delinquent and underpaying their levy. There has been such a mess made in coal long service leave for so long, and such shoddy governance, but we’re informed that the miners would rather have some certainty on this being resolved hence giving the company the 20 per cent discount on entitlements that they must pay in order to have this resolved—otherwise it could drag on for years. We are listening to miners. 

We’ve had three aims for our work on this since 2019: (1) to get Central Queensland and Hunter Valley miners their just, moral and legal entitlements; (2) to stop the practice of using unlawfully processed enterprise agreements—we’re pursuing that; (3) to bring justice for the miners against those employers, union bosses and agencies that have been colluding against and ripping off these miners.