Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Urban Development and Consumer Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

The previous contribution was obviously wide ranging, with expertise with regard to graffiti et cetera, but I will try to keep slightly closer to the legislation. On one level, it obviously deals with some rather uncontroversial areas: ensuring that people are accredited under the scheme; the time for entering the contract of building work; extending the accreditation requirement for direct and indirect funding arrangements; clarifying that section 35(4) of the act overrides Commonwealth provisions to the extent of inconsistency et cetera. But I want to join the previous speaker with regard to his citation of the views of the President of the ACTU. Greg Combet was obviously speaking in rather broad terms when he said that he is going to return Australia to the time when the trade union movement controlled the country. Unfortunately for Greg Combet, unfortunately for the real world, we are in a very different circumstance in this country and internationally with regard to the labour market. We no longer have 1,500 people in my electorate employed in the asbestos industry at James Hardie and Wunderlich. We no longer have the same numbers of workers with that sense of solidarity and connection at Australian Gypsum down the road. We do not have plants like Bradford Insulation and we do not have a painting industry with employment of the size it once had.

We do have a casualisation of the workforce. Internationally, we are the country with the highest proportion of people in casual employment—not the highest in Oceania, the highest in the world. We have a situation where many people now work at home. As I said earlier, the workforce is essentially in small employment sectors. The trade union movement, if anything, has had to reorganise itself so that it can try to recruit people. I do not really care if Greg Combet used this very broad phraseology in his wish; the reality is that it will not happen with all the will in the world.

However, one point I make to the previous speaker, the member for Hasluck, is that Greg Combet might still stand by his words. That does not seem to be the case with the previous speaker’s great friend and associate, Mr Len Buckeridge, a person well known in conservative politics in Western Australia and a person who makes the same kinds of comments as the previous speaker with regard to industrial relations. Mr Buckeridge is becoming somewhat more reticent, somewhat less vocal, about some previous views he expressed. In May 2003 he gained some notoriety by saying that the solution to Australia’s industrial relations problems was to kill a few trade union officials. This is a person who is closely associated with the previous speaker and closely associated with the coalition and its drive to put down industrial relations conditions in this country, to smash workers’ rights, and, at the very least, if not put down their wages, to make sure that in a period of labour shortages their ability to organise and recover real wage increases will not happen.

Mr Buckeridge is very unwilling to stand by his words. I had the Parliamentary Library recently contact his office about those remarks at the HR Nicholls Society. This was the response of Mr Buckeridge’s secretary:

We do not appear to have a copy of the notes for the speech given by Mr Buckeridge at the above conference and he has asked me to let you know this.

Sincerely

P Castley for: LW Buckeridge

This guy made outrageous comments in the confines of the HR Nicholls Society and someone recorded it. That is his real view. That is what he is saying to a group that is driving industrial relations changes historically in this country: that the solution is to kill trade union officials. As I say, Mr Buckeridge is always available to make comments supportive of this government’s industrial relations policy, but perhaps he is a bit worried that that comment actually went public.

On one level this is an uncontroversial bill. The only controversy is that the government legislated in 2005 and we thought that was the end of the road—that they had got it right—but they have come back here two years later with amendments to the original legislation, which was supposedly the greatest thing since sliced bread. We see a significant number of amendments now. There is no real reason why they failed to pick up on these points earlier. Basically it is incompetence in regard to the ministry. As I say, it is uncontroversial in one sense, but the broader agenda was perhaps the question of the royal commission.

We had the previous speaker bemoaning the fact that the opposition might get rid of the ABCC in a few years time. I actually think that would be a good decision because, quite frankly, looking at this organisation, $60 million of taxpayers’ money has been spent on a series of allegations for which very few people have been charged. There is innuendo, allegation and backdooring to journalists about individuals but very few prosecutions. In the same period there has been the death of one worker every week in the building industry—an area that this commission was not very interested in. End of story. They were not interested in that matter and not interested in tax evasion. They spent $60 million of taxpayers’ money, slightly more than the current advertising campaign to defend their industrial relations system. As I say, 23 union officials recommended prosecutions against them. It did not occur in most cases. That is the genesis—the excuse—for this kind of legislation to drive down workers compensation rights in this country.

Of course, that is accompanied by gestures to push people onto Comcare. We know that in that case there is no workers compensation coverage when travelling to and from work, during ordinary recess breaks or for temporary absence from work, unless the absence is at the direction of the employer; there are tighter definitions of injury, stress and disease to deliberately restrict employee rights; there are lower death benefits for dependants—that is, widows and partners; maximum lump sums under Comcare for permanent disability are capped at $142,000 et cetera. So the background to this is the attempt to restrict the union’s ability to organise and their right of access to the employees.

I had the privilege last night of attending the launch of a video, by Joe Loh, called Constructing Fear. It deals with Australia’s secret industrial inquisition, otherwise known as the Cole royal commission, and the role of the ABCC. One of the cases shown was about a six-year-old kid who was confronted in his front yard and quizzed about his father by about a dozen or so inspectors. He was asked, ‘Did your father really go to the doctor’s today?’ and that kind of thing. People are hauled in to appear before these bodies and they are not able to tell their families what occurred. They are basically forced to give evidence and they face prosecution and jail if they do not give evidence. It really does sound like a parallel to the terrorism laws in this country—except that the reasons are not anywhere as good as the reasons for having antiterrorism provisions.

So the background to this very placid legislation, which on the surface is uncontroversial, is essentially the broader agenda that we saw coming out of the royal commission, where we had a former university law school associate of the Prime Minister, a very reliable hand, to deal with these matters—and, of course, another hand who is quite reliable from the ABCC, a person who worked for Kerin and, 100 years ago, for Peacock, the former Leader of the Opposition.

What we have here is a broad agenda to basically diminish the rights of people in this country to talk to employees on work sites, to diminish right of entry—and I heard the previous member talking about the member for Banks supposedly advocating unfettered access. Of course, he did not say that. Of course there have to be restrictions. Of course you have to be mindful of the way an industrial situation occurs. You cannot just have people walking in there every day of the week on no pretext. I will tell you something: they have actually got better things to do, quite frankly, than to go in there for no good reason.

As I said earlier with respect to Comcare, we know there has been a reduction of conditions, but it is interesting to note the safety activities of various bodies around Australia. In 2005-06, Comcare—this glorious operation that everyone should be under—had 32 inspectors, compared with 312 in New South Wales and 207 in Queensland. Its workplace visits totalled 189, compared with 3,960 in the ACT. Its safety prohibition and improvement notices totalled a massive 22, compared with 21,286 in New South Wales. That is the kind of oversight that they are supposedly going to have in order to protect people from injury. Those figures are publicly available. I want to cite the comments of Steve Mullins, the OH&S officer of the ACTU, in a speech on 16 February this year. He said:

It is worth noting at this point that the ILO estimates more than 6700 Australian workers die every year from occupational injury and disease. Access Economics puts the figure at 4500.

ABS statistics show more than 477,000 workers suffer some form of injury or illness at work each year.

I would have thought that when we know something works to reduce these appalling injury, disease and fatality statistics, the government would encourage that activity.

In contrast, the government are basically trying to minimise activity to stop this. They are basically arguing that we have to have productivity and we cannot have it hindered by union officials coming on the site, and that we cannot have effective OH&S committees because they might restrict unsafe conditions.

We need more than slogans from the Minister for Workforce Participation, who said on 29 March this year that we need cultural and behavioural change. We are not going to have cultural and behavioural change when people’s rights are restricted. The only way you are going to get effective workplace safety is if the workers on the site have some say about what is occurring, if they have the ability to police the situation, if they can actually stop jobs when they are unsafe. Now the government has placed the onus on workers to establish that a situation is unsafe; otherwise they could face legal impediments.

In conclusion, the previous member was all over the place about police numbers in Western Australia and, whether they have graffiti units et cetera. The fundamental issue here is the attempt by this government to restrict the ability of workers on the job to organise so that they can ensure safety in their job, so that they can reduce this horrendous figure of one person killed every year in the building industry, and so that they can make sure that they have minimal conditions to protect themselves.

I do note the emotionalism of the member who is scheduled to speak next in this debate. He was famed for being the most hardline person on industrial relations in the parliament. In recent years he has become somewhat jealous of the previous speaker, who has in a way outgunned him as the hardline proponent of these kinds of things in the government. But perhaps that member will not be here in the next parliament and he will again be able to ride the horse as the main advocate in this area.

Debate (on motion by Mr McArthur) adjourned.

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