BILLS – Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Administration) Bill 2024 – Second Reading

I want to start my remarks by putting on record my support for trade unions in this country and the work that they do. I mentioned in my first speech to this chamber that trade unions play an important role in our nation and they’ve done great things for workers, over many years, in Australia. I’ve been happy to work with many trade unions on various issues—most recently with the Transport Workers Union. There are some very good people, like Michael Kaine, in that union. I worked closely with the Australian Workers Union on manufacturing issues and with Mr Daniel Walton, when he led it up. I worked very closely with the MEU of the CFMEU, the mining division, when I was resources minister, and over the years I’ve been happy to campaign alongside mining union members for things like the New Hope coalmine. I recognise that the mining union have largely separated themselves from the rest of the CFMEU because of the issues that are needing to be tackled within the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Administration) Bill 2024.
It’s very regrettable that we are at this stage and are having to fix something long after the issues have been widely known across the country. It is somewhat a mess of this government’s making. They came to government and abolished the Australian Building and Construction Commission, a commission that was clearly needed because the construction arm of the CFMEU was openly flouting the law, time and time again. This was well before any of their more salacious issues and the recent reports around criminal gangs and mafia-like connections to the CFMEU. But for years the construction division of the CFMEU has been openly flouting court orders, refusing to rein in their law-breaking tactics on workplaces and effectively seeing the millions of dollars of fines that have been imposed on them because of those criminal breaches as some sort of cost of doing business. That was very clear. It’s been clear, and it was not like the Australian Building and Construction Commission had nothing to do; they were constantly trying to fight back against this organisation that seemingly had no interest in abiding by the law. This was all known. Everybody knew this, and that’s why people like the mining union have desperately sought to separate themselves from the construction arm. The forestry division is, I think, trying to do the same. People wanted to run a million miles from the construction arm of the CFMEU, even within the trade union movement. Yet then we had Anthony Albanese elected Prime Minister, and, quite the opposite from what these other trade unions were doing, he rushed to embrace these law-breaking elements of the trade union movement. The Labor Party has taken $6.2 million in donations from the CFMEU since Anthony Albanese became leader. How do they explain that? We all knew this. We all knew they were breaking the law, yet the Labor Party were happy to be funded by people that were openly breaking the law. Most of our issues with this bill—we support the overall intent of doing something here; something has to be done, clearly—are with the simple fact that it’s hard to trust a government that has been so closely tied to and financed by an organisation that it now tells us it’ll rein in. They can be trusted, apparently, to re-impose a level of law and order on this element of the trade union movement. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for those of us outside the Labor Party to just be a little bit cynical about that and to say, ‘Look, can we really trust a workplace relations minister who’s just been appointed and who for years was the attack dog for the CFMEU in Senate estimates and in going after people like Senator Cash who are trying to hold this law-breaking organisation to account?’ That’s what Senator Watt did time and time again over the last decade, and now he gets up and has the temerity to say: ‘Now you can trust me. Give me almost omnipotent authority to re-establish law and order.’ I don’t believe that for a second. I think what we really need here is proper accountability for this and ongoing accountability—not just in this sitting fortnight, not just while the glare of the media spotlight is shining brightly on these issues. We need
accountability over many years to re-establish some level of law and order in this element of the trade union movement. This bill doesn’t do that, because, as I was alluding to, this bill gives the minister enormous authority to do whatever he chooses to do, with almost zero parliamentary accountability. I’ll go to some of the specifics later, but the general point here can be highlighted by the fact that, for some inexplicable reason, this bill exempts a variety of ministerial decisions made under the bill from disallowance. I’ll explain to the average person what that means. Normally, the default provision is that, when a minister makes a decision under the delegated authority provided to him or her by legislation, there is always the ability of either chamber of the parliament to disallow that decision if they choose to do so. If a minister made a decision, say, on a certain amount of where fishing could occur in the oceans under legislation, either chamber could pass a resolution to disallow that decision under the default provisions of the way regulations work in this country.
This bill says: An instrument made under subsection (1) is a legislative instrument but section 42 (disallowance) of the Legislation Act 2003 does not apply … Why? For what rationale at all can there be a justification that the minister does not want to be accountable to a disallowance motion by either chamber? There’s no rationale for that at all. Sometimes, there’s a rationale for that if the decision is of a national security nature or has to be made urgently and any kind of hold up by the parliament might create issues, but this is not one of those issues. This has been festering for years. It’s hardly been something of urgent attention for this government. There is no reason why the parliament shouldn’t have that review mechanism that it normally retains to be able to disallow a minister ‘s decision. This is just a power grab. That’s what it is. It’s a power grab. It’s criminal activity, exposed criminal activity, and a crisis now in the construction sector being used and abused by this government to just grab more power and to try to do so under the distortion that they are actually doing something good for our national interest. It’s absurd. So that should be changed. That’s a very simple change. At the very least, there would be some level of parliamentary accountability there. There are also some other things that we should clearly do. After everything that we know now, why doesn’t this bill ban the CFMEU from making political donations? That seems to make some sense, and it raises questions if the government doesn’t want to do it. Why don’t they want to do that? They are not going to give the money back, apparently. Again, if they really want to be trusted, if they really want to convince the Australian people that the very people who were the closest to the CFMEU can now be trusted to rein in this fox and protect the hens, give the money back. Give back the $6.2 million that the Labor Party received from the CFMEU since Anthony Albanese became leader. It’s tainted money now, clearly. It’s been tainted by crime. You can’t give it back to them. They’re under administration. At least give it to charity or something. That’s exactly right. Don’t take the money. But they are not going to do that. Let’s be realistic; they won’t do that, of course not. But we could easily put in a provision here that the CFMEU no longer makes political donations while in administration. That seems fair enough. If they are in administration, why would they be making clinical donations anyway? No corporate business would do that. They’ve got to focus on getting themselves out of this process and should not be involved in politics while they’re doing so. They should be clearly focused on their members right now, not on trying to influence politics. There is also the issue here that the minister, with just a stroke of a pen, can take the organisation out of administration—again, with no parliamentary accountability and no ability to disallow. We think there needs to be a proper and more vigilant process here than simply giving one minister of a government that’s compromised by the CFMEU this untrammelled power. There are some very reasonable amendments to be made here. There’s also a suspicion that we have, understandably, that the government is somehow trying to ram this through with these clear issues in the bill and not expose them to public scrutiny. There should be some hearings on this.
We can do that quickly, and we can make sure we get it through, but the government has not felt the need to act for two years while it’s been in government, and now it wants to pass this within two weeks. There’s something fishy about that. It should be done properly. It’s a serious issue, and there is no reason that there shouldn’t be proper hearings and proper accountability so we can get to the bottom of these particular issues in the bill and make sure we get this right. It’s very important we get this right. Obviously, there’s the issue of making sure that people and significant
institutions like the CFMEU abide by the law. That is very important in our law-abiding society. If we allow people just to break the law willy-nilly and not face consequences, then it will destroy our harmonious society. That is the principal reason we need to act here. But there is also a broader issue: the conduct of the CFMEU, their tactics, are imposing an enormous cost on Australian society, and especially on average Australians. The biggest issue people face right now is simply the cost of living—their ability to buy basic things at the shops, to stay in their own home, pay their mortgages. It’s a major issue, and there is a connection here because one of the major reasons for this cost-of-living crisis is our poor productivity performance. That’s been going on for a number
of years, but to some extent the chickens have come home to roost the last few years. We have constantly had an inferior productivity performance for some years; meanwhile we kept spending government money, we kept interest rates low and eventually, when you have too much money, too much government spending chasing too few goods being produced you end up with inflation. That’s positional. There are two ways we can fix that. There’s a hard way and an easier way—well, they’re both hard, but one of them is much harder on Australian families. The harder hard way for Australian families is we have to have the Reserve Bank keep raising interest rates until the pain’s too much and we take out that excess demand from the economy. That’s very hard for people, and we’re seeing the consequences of that now. The less painful way—it’s still hard, but it’s less painful—to impact on Australian families is to increase our productivity to produce more goods so that we soak up excess demand and then we don’t have to raise interest rates by as much to bring inflation
down. The productivity performance of the construction sector in particular has been absolutely woeful. In fact productivity in our construction sector is effectively at the same level it was in the year 2000. There has been a 0.2 per cent a year increase in multifactor productivity growth in the construction sector for 24 years. For a quarter of a century, for a generation, we’re basically at the same level. It’s one of the worst-performing sectors across the Australian economy. If we could lift the construction sector’s productivity performance to that of the economy wide average—just the
average; get it to the average level and have some moderate increase in productivity performance over time—that would unlock $56 billion in savings—$56 billion we could potentially spend to build other things. And if you put that into real things, tangible things that people can understand, $56 billion could build a thousand new schools. It could build 10,000 kilometres of new roads, and don’t we need that! We need that in regional Australia in particular. Regional roads are horrible at the moment. I don’t know what’s happened there, if it’s the productivity performance or not, but in the last few years the basic standard of our roads, like the Bruce Highway and other country roads,
have become horrible. It’s a safety issue right now. We’re losing people because of that. We could do that—10,000 kilometres of new roads. That would be great if we could improve productivity in the construction sector. It would also help us build 25,000 new hospital beds too, that $56 billion. Again, we need that. We have public hospitals currently sending people to private hospitals because they do not have enough beds, they do not have enough space. We could invest in that.
There is a real cost here for not reining in the lawlessness of the construction, the C of the CFMEU. And while this is a belated effort by this government to do this—it is a mess that they have made by abolishing the ABCC, which they’re trying to clear up—it is very important that we get this right for those reasons, for all Australians to get this right and make sure there is a proper cop on the beat. We could strengthen this legislation. We also need to reintroduce the ABCC, if the government was serious about fixing this problem and making sure we have a construction sector that delivers for all Australians and is not corrupted for the political purposes of the Labor Party.