Teresa Gambaro (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I support the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Bill 2013, which will deliver enormous benefits to the 3,066 construction businesses based in my electorate of Brisbane. The main object of the bill is to provide an improved workplace relations framework for building and construction work to ensure that it is carried out fairly, efficiently and productively for the benefit of building industry participants and for the benefit of the Australian economy as a whole. The bill aims to improve the bargaining framework so as to further encourage genuine bargaining at the workplace level. Enterprise bargaining negotiations must be harmonious, sensible and productive and should be tailored to the particular workplace.

The bill upholds and promotes respect for the rule of law and ensures respect for the rights of all building industry participants. To that end, the bill contains provisions to ensure that unlawful actions, including unlawful industrial action and unlawful pickets, are dealt with appropriately. The bill also gives the courts the power to impose significant penalties on individuals and organisations that participate in unlawful actions.

The bill provides effective means for investigating and enforcing the law. The Australian Building and Construction Commission, the ABCC, will be able to exercise their power to obtain information quickly and effectively without being hindered by unnecessary bureaucratic red tape around the issue of examination notices. However, to ensure accountability and transparency, the use of these powers will continue to be reviewed and reported on by the Commonwealth Ombudsman.

Most importantly, the bill encourages productivity and the pursuit of high levels of employment in the building and construction industry. It will ensure that the government's policy to deliver the infrastructure of the 21st century is delivered on time and on budget. The bill will create jobs and investment by ensuring employers and employees in the industry can get on with the job without fear of intimidation.

The construction industry provides many jobs for workers in small businesses, large enterprises and contracting firms. In my state of Queensland, approximately 240,800 individuals are employed in the construction industry. It is critical to the productivity, prosperity and international competitiveness of Australia. The coalition government recognises the importance of an industry that is vital to job creation and essential to Australia's economic and social wellbeing. This is something that is understood by many people—not, sadly, by the Labor Party—in the construction and business sector, including bodies such as the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland, the CCIQ, in my electorate of Brisbane. The CCIQ strongly supports the re-establishment of the ABCC and its full suite of powers. They were one of the many voices in industry who were opposed to its abolition by the former government.

More specifically, in relation to the government's bill, the CCIQ said:

We believe that it is primarily a productivity enhancing measure that will provide certainty to businesses that their livelihood will not depend on the arbitrary actions of rogue union officials. The re-establishment of the ABCC is a reflection of the realities of the building and construction industry, and the capacity of projects to be held to ransom by union groups seeking that their unreasonable demands be met. The building and construction industry represents around eight per cent of GDP, and re-establishing the ABCC to watch over the industry is an important step in increasing productivity and boosting long term confidence and investment in infrastructure projects.

Small and medium businesses are particularly vulnerable to the effects of industrial action and industrial activity in the workplace—they often do not have the time or the resources that large companies have to devote to expenditure on the legal battles that these situations often necessitate.

While much of the industrial action that occurs on building sites is unlawful, by the time it is brought to a halt, businesses have sustained significant economic harm because the workplace has come to a standstill

The Fair Work Building Industry Inspectorate did not provide businesses with certainty that unlawful industrial action would be dealt with firmly and decisively, because it inherently lacked the powers to do so.

That was a very deliberate aspect of its establishment. The CCIQ goes on:

The fact that it was established within the architecture of the Fair Work system, rather than as an independent regulator, is highly problematic, given the perception among many employers that the system is designed to assist employees, rather than employers

By contrast, the ABCC will be an independent industrial regulator which has already demonstrated its capacity to be the 'tough cop on the beat' for the building and construction industry.

This voice of business and industry has provided an overwhelming endorsement of the government's actions in introducing this bill into the House.

In the government's Policy to Improve the Fair Work Laws, the coalition has committed to re-establish the ABCC to once again ensure the rule of law and improve productivity on commercial building sites and construction projects, whether onshore or offshore. We took this commitment to the Australian people in the 2010 and 2013 federal elections as a key policy. So important did we see this commitment that we also committed to re-establish the ABCC within 100 days of the parliament first sitting. This government was given a clear mandate by the Australian people to make this change. The introduction of this bill into the parliament is proof of the coalition's commitment to delivering upon that promise and provides yet another example of what can be done when you have a government that is run by adults and is focused on governing as opposed to celebrity campaigning.

Australian workplaces can no longer be lawless regimes dominated by standover merchants and thuggery. For many years, the building and construction sector provided the worst examples of industrial relations lawlessness The workplace relations minister in the Howard government, the Hon Tony Abbott, was prepared to tackle this longstanding bad behaviour and in 2001 established the Royal Commission into the Building and Construction Industry. It says a lot that it required all the power of a royal commission to break through the wall of silence and intimidation that had so dominated the building and construction industry for so many decades.

The final report of the royal commission provided compelling evidence of the need for reform in this industry. It found consistent evidence that building sites and construction projects in Australia were hotbeds of intimidation, lawlessness, thuggery and violence. Projects were delayed, costs blew out and investment in our economy and infrastructure was being jeopardised. Central to the royal commission's findings was industry lawlessness, and it appears from all of the opposition to this bill coming from the other side of the chamber that the Labor Party is suffering from collective amnesia on these findings. Just to correct any memory lapses those opposite may be having, let me remind them that the royal commission concluded that the standards of commercial and industrial conduct exhibited in the building and construction industry represented a significant departure from that in the rest of the Australian economy. Witnesses reported criminal, unlawful and inappropriate conduct, including breaches of the relevant workplace relations and work health and safety legislation, and a disregard for Commonwealth and state revenue statutes. Inappropriate conduct was defined by the royal commission as 'behaviour that infringes the Workplace Relations Act 1996, a person's right of choice or other conduct which departs from recognised norms of civility and behaviour.'

The royal commission's findings publicly established what everyone in the industry had known for many years but previous governments had been unwilling or too intimidated to tackle. The Howard coalition government was prepared to step in and make the tough decisions required to clean up this sector. The establishment of the ABCC in 2005 provided a genuinely strong watchdog, dissolving the 1970s-style practices that had long dominated this industry. It was a strong, specialist regulator that enforced the rule of law applying to the building and construction sector.

While the ABCC existed, the economic and industrial performance of the building and construction industry significantly improved. For example, a 2013 Independent Economics report on the state of the sector during this period found that building and construction industry productivity grew by more than nine per cent, consumers were better off by around $7.5 billion annually and    fewer working days were lost through industrial disputation. In the manner of all Labor governments who take their orders from the unions, the former Labor government came under sustained pressure from building and construction unions to abolish the Australian Building and Construction Commission and the building code that supported its work. Even then, you have to wonder whether the Labor Party's heart was really in it. This issue was such a burning bridge for them that the previous Labor government procrastinated for five years. Before then, the workplace relations minister, Bill Shorten, gave in to union demands and abolished the organisation in 2012, replacing it with a regulator with significantly reduced funding and powers. This saw the bad old days return, and they returned with vigour. There were wildcat stoppages, militant protests, demands from unions that their mates be employed on projects ahead of non-unionists, and an increase in construction industry disputes to a seven-year high.

What I find even more disturbing is the apparent continuation of the Labor Party's collective amnesia in relation to the scenes we saw last year, merely weeks after the ABCC was abolished. There was violence in the streets of the city of Melbourne on the Grocon site, with militant union protesters intimidating the community, and their supporters attacking police horses. We had workers on the site purchasing an advertisement in the Herald Sun with an open letter to their own union bosses asking for the blockades to stop. Images of these protests were seen on television screens around the world. What message did it send to national and international companies that were thinking about investing in our building and construction projects in Melbourne or in Australia generally? Notably, not a single member from those opposite has been able to answer that question.

The Abbott government is committed to ensuring that the rule of law is maintained and that workers in the building and construction sector can go to work free from intimidation and harassment. As the Cole royal commission concluded a decade ago, the behaviour that we too regularly see in this industry marks it as singular. It is an industry in which conventional standards of commercial and industrial behaviour do not apply—like in the textiles, clothing and footwear sector, special circumstances require special laws.

We also promised that a re-established ABCC will administer a code that will govern industrial relations arrangements for government funded projects. This step will ensure that taxpayer dollars are used effectively. We promised we would work with state governments to ensure consistency with guidelines introduced by those governments who saw the urgent need to set up their own schemes in response to the Gillard government's abolition of the ABCC. A new statutory code is being developed that is intended to commence at the same time as the re-establishment of the Australian Building and Construction Commission on 1 January 2014.

We have also had the CFMEU grossly bullying non-members by creating posters labelling them, amongst various other things, as scabs and advocating that they be run out of the industry, in open defiance of the Fair Work Act and Supreme Court orders to end the protests. We saw violent disputes at the Little Creatures brewery site in Geelong, where union picketers were accused in court documents of making throat-cutting gestures, threatening to stomp heads in, telling workers who wanted to get on with the work that they were dead, and shoving, kicking and punching motor vehicles.

The coalition government believes that workers deserve to be able to go to work every day without fear of being harassed, intimidated or the subject of violence. Unlike the Labor Party and the unions, we do not believe that the employment relationship is one that must be based upon an ideological commitment to conflict. Rather, the coalition believes that the employment relationship should be defined be cooperation and mutual commitment to the achievement of prosperity and productivity. The former Labor government undermined confidence in the building and construction industry. Abolishing the ABCC has seen a return to lawlessness and an increase in the number of days where work is simply not being done in the industry. Australia cannot afford to have a building and construction industry which is inefficient and unstable, and the restoration of the ABCC and this code that supports the work is critical reform for Australia. The content of this bill reflects this commitment, and I commend the bill to the House. (Time expired)

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