Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister of Education, representing the Minister for Employment. I refer to the sentence handed down against the former Labor member for Dobell, Craig Thomson, in the Melbourne Magistrate's Court today after he was found guilty of defrauding members of the Health Services Union. What is the government doing to combat fraud, corruption and other illegal activity in the union movement?

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Corangamite for her question. I can inform the House, more in sorrow than in anger, that the former member for Dobell, Mr Craig Thomson, has been sentenced in the Melbourne Magistrate's Court today to 12 months imprisonment with nine months suspension, so he will serve three months in jail, with a two-year good behaviour bond for the theft of $24,000 from members of the Health Services Union.

This is a very sad day for the parliament. It is a sad day that one of the former members of this place has fallen so far in the estimation of its society that he is going to jail for theft. It is a particularly sad day for the once-great Labor Party and the Labor movement that one of their own—whom they nurtured, brought into parliament and then protected until April 2012—has been sentenced to jail today. It is great sadness that the once-great party of Chifley and Curtin is now the party of Obeid, Macdonald, Williamson and Thomson. But it also represents an opportunity for the Leader of the Opposition to join the government in passing the registered organisations commission bill in the Senate, which he is currently blocking, to pass the Australian building and construction commission bill in the Senate, which he is currently blocking, and to full-throatedly support the Royal Commission into union corruption and thuggery.

Perhaps members opposite should take some advice from Martin Ferguson, from another great family of the Labor movement, one of whom still sits in this place. Martin Ferguson said on the 28 February, 'The Labor Party has got to change and our relationship with the union movement has got to change, both internally and externally—it is not the union movement I grew up in.'

If the Leader of the Opposition took that advice and the advice of Paul Howes, who is also known to support severing the ties between the union movement and the Labor Party, he would be able to show that he was standing on his own two feet, that he was not just a puppet of the union movement. He should sever his ties with the union movement, as advised by Paul Howes and Martin Ferguson, and make a clean break from people like Williamson and Thomson from the Health Services Union and from the Obeid and Macdonald stain that sits on the Labor Party. While he is at it, to really prove that he has separated himself from the dodgy aspects of the union movement, he should pay back the $267,000 of Health Service Union members' money that was used to elect Craig Thomson in 2007 to this place. It would be cheap for him to do that. It would be a sign of good faith with those members of the HSU. I call him to do so and be a big enough man to do so.