Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

The Cole royal commission? It had not one single prosecution in 18 months and cost $66 million. It was stimulated by the now Prime Minister and it had zero outcomes. And then they had the ABCC. What do we know about the ABCC? Let me quote from Professor David Peetz. He says:

The culture of the ABCC is not and has never been impartial. It has concerned itself almost exclusively with transgressions by unions, or by employers who have facilitated or acquiesced to transgressions by unions.

He went on to say:

If it is going to haul before the courts a union member who refuses to tell them about what happened at a meeting to discus safety breaches by the employer, it must also haul before the courts the employers who breach the safety laws in the first place.

This is no trivial matter. There were 36 fatalities in the construction industry in 2007-08, twice as many as in 2004-05, immediately before the ABCC commenced operations in late 2005. Under the ABCC, construction became the industry with the highest number of deaths. As observance with occupational safety tends to be lower where unions are weaker, this trend is not surprising. But nor should it be allowed to continue.

Let us be clear: this is about taking a knife to the Australian workers movement, the trade unions in this country, for protecting the rights of workers. It has got nothing to do with productivity.

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