Ben Morton (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Fair Work Amendment (Corrupting Benefits) Bill 2017 restores and defends the rule of law in Australian workplaces. This bill bans corrupt and secret payments made between employers and trade unions. It also requires disclosure by both employers and unions of financial benefits that they stand to gain as a result of an enterprise agreement before employees have to vote on that agreement.

The penalties for secret and dodgy deals will be substantial—and so they should be. Criminal penalties for payments with the intent to corrupt will be a maximum of 10 years in prison and $900,000 for an individual or $4.5 million for companies. Maximum penalties for other illegitimate payments will be two years in prison, $90,000 for individuals and $450,000 for companies. They are big penalties because those officials who rip off workers deserve to be punished.

The role of unions and their leaders must be to put their members first. We have seen through the Heydon royal commission into trade unions that unions have let their members down and have traded away their rights in return for cash and kickbacks. The Heydon royal commission uncovered a raft of payments between employers and unions for favourable treatment and peace in the workplace. It also highlighted the lack of transparency relating to financial benefits obtained by representatives who were supposed to be bargaining in the best interests of their workers. These corrupting benefits are nothing to do with unions' first and only purpose of getting workers a better deal or more take-home pay. They are about lining the pockets of union officials and building union war chests to blindside and mislead union members and the general public on a whole raft of issues.

We have read in the media about numerous eastern state cases where millions of dollars of payments have secretly transferred between employers and unions, and employers making payments to unions, accompanied by a lists of employee names which have been used to secretly sign employees up to the unions, including the Australian Workers' Union in Victoria. In WA, my home state, we have also experienced unions acting without integrity or fairness, including the Australian Workers' Union in Western Australia. These contractors paid the AWU Workplace Reform Association more than $400,000 in return for good relations with the union. These payments were fraudulently siphoned into a slush fund controlled by the then secretary of the AWU WA, Mr Bruce Wilson, who used the money for his personal benefit.

SapuraKencana paid more than $350,000 at the request of the MUA at the same time it was planning to use foreign-crewed tugs for pipeline installation works at the Gorgon project in Western Australia. Dredging International paid almost a million dollars at the request of the MUA, apparently as part of a deal to finalise an enterprise agreement, including $200,000 for sponsorship of the MUA WA state conference. But, in reality, it was to secure an enterprise agreement with the MUA. Van Oord paid over a million dollars at the request of the MUA to avoid industrial disruption, including over $100,000 to the WA Special Purpose Fighting Fund, established by the MUA WA. I wonder what special purposes the unions fight for.

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