Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

Okay, because no-one knows who I am talking about when I say 'Prime Minister'—I understand. The Prime Minister has decided to spend millions upon millions of taxpayers' dollars, $80 million so far, on attacking the leader of the Labor Party. I was thinking, 'There are some issues there,' and you know what? The current leader of the Labor Party is very willing to answer all questions asked of him. But I was thinking just the other day that this is the third leader. There have only been three leaders of the Labor Party that have been up against the current Prime Minister, all three of whom have been called to executive inquiries run by the government to attack them. This is not engagement on policy matters in the parliament. Three Labor leaders—Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and the current Leader of the Opposition—have been forced to go to these executive witch-hunts that have been established by the Prime Minister.

Do you know how much money has been spent so far? Some $80 million. If you asked the public, 'Do you want $80 million that could be paying for teachers, paying for nurses, paying for hospital care, paying for medicine and paying for all sorts of things that matter?' do you know what they would say? 'Why are you spending $80 million attacking the Labor Party?' This bill is being introduced not because the government thinks it will succeed, because this is the third effort by the government to have this bill enacted into law. This is about politics.

As I said to you earlier, the fact is that every employer body that is a registered organisation has made submissions on the record against this bill. It is not that unions are opposed to this. Every registered organisation is against this. I want to make it very clear. Certainly, I engaged with the Minister for Employment many, many months ago to see whether we could reconcile differences and reach an arrangement on this bill. Given that we in government made all the reforms in this area, I was very much looking to reach agreement on the matters that were contained within the bill.

I said to the Minister for Employment, 'You cannot have volunteers who sit on the board of the Australian Industry Group, for example—small businesses who are volunteers on that board—being subject to greater criminal or civil offences than directors of publicly listed companies.' Currently, the bill here would force businesses, mostly SMEs, who sit on the board of the Australian Industry Group—I think there are 60 people on that board—to be subject to outrageous sanctions. They will not volunteer to work in that field if they are going to be subject to, as I say, outrageous sanctions—sanctions that exceed those of directors of publicly listed companies. Unfortunately, in that discussion I had with Minister Abetz we could not reach agreement.

I think if the government were serious it would listen to the employer bodies. I do not expect it to listen to unions, but I would have thought it would listen to employer bodies saying: 'These sanctions are onerous. These sanctions are disproportionate and unfair and they will prevent employers who volunteer to work for employer bodies from continuing that work.' But no—unfortunately, I could not reconcile the differences between the government and the opposition on this matter. I make an appeal to the government. I am still happy to find ways to reconcile these differences because I do believe that if we can improve accountability and transparency on top of the reforms that were done in 2012 we should do that. But we have to be reasonable. You cannot expect small businesses or employers who are volunteering their own time to work on employer bodies to be subject to outrageous laws.

We know the government hates unions and we are not surprised that it wants to destroy unions and kill the union movement but we do not expect the government to try to kill employer bodies along the way. That is why I would have thought that the submissions made before the Senate inquiry by employer bodies would have at least been listened to by this government. Then I realised how much this government hates unions. It does not even care what the employer bodies say. There were seven or eight submissions made, none of which were important to the government as it went on its rampage to destroy the union movement.

Any government that ideologically predisposed to public policy has got a real problem. It has a blind spot—that is the most polite way I can put it. The reality is that we have things going on. People know there are some things happening. We have a royal commission. The royal commission is running on the entire union movement. We are still wondering why there have been no findings, or even observations, on Kathy Jackson, who clearly, on the face of it, has some very serious questions to answer. How can the royal commission hand down an interim report and make no reference at all to Kathy Jackson given the damning evidence before the royal commission?

At the same time the royal commission decided to make findings against others without even calling those people. How can it be that Michael Lawler—and this was on the front page of The Australian today—the man appointed by Prime Minister Abbott when he was the minister for employment, be on indefinite sick leave from the Fair Work Commission representing his partner, Kathy Jackson? Why hasn't the government said anything about his role as a commissioner, given that when the Prime Minister was the minister for employment he appointed Michael Lawler?

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