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

Can I start by just making some observations about the member for Canning's speech. It was all over the joint, which is typical. On the one hand, he said, 'I'm a supportive trade unionist, a former representative of my union, a workplace delegate.' On the other hand, he slagged them and slagged unions generally, not any specific union. In the latter part of his contribution, he said, 'Unions don't care about the welfare of their employees.' He said, 'Unions don't care if businesses are solvent or not.' What an asinine piece of nonsense. I do not know one union official, one union delegate or one union member around this country who is not concerned and not committed to looking after the welfare of the people in his or her workplace, or other workplaces—not one. Nor do I know any worker involved in working in a business who is not interested in making sure the business remains solvent so they can continue their job—not one.

Now we have this puerile attack on trade unionists in this country by the member for Canning, and no doubt from other members opposite, which has no substance. He started by talking about people having Solvol on their hands. Well, I think we have probably moved on to other products, but let me tell him that there are plenty of people on our side of this place who have worked hard all their lives and their families have worked hard all their lives. In my own case, I started working on a building site here in Canberra when I was 15. I was proudly associated with the then BWIU, the Building Workers Industrial Union. One of the people closest to me while I was working on that site, which was for a couple of months, was the delegate and union representative for the BWIU. What this person did for me was educate me about the workplace, about my responsibilities as a worker and about my responsibilities in terms of occupational health and safety. And this was not an unkind workplace.

Let me make it very clear that the sort of nonsense being spoken about by the member for Canning seeks pejoratively to accuse all unionists, effectively by dint of what he said, of somehow or another wanting to undermine their fellow workers in the workplace and of not being interested in the welfare or the future of their jobs because they do not care if the businesses they are working in are solvent or not.

I have had the experience of working on industrial sites and woodchip mills. I am probably the only member on this side of the chamber who has worked in a woodchip mill. There was another—there were two of us in the last parliament. Former minister Peter Garrett, unbeknownst to many in this place, also worked in a woodchip mill. I remember my experiences with this woodchip mill because it was a very unsafe working environment. I was just there as a labourer. What became clear was that we needed to make sure that the union that we were members of that we were associated with understood the nature of the work in that workplace, understood our responsibilities as workers and understood the need to make sure that that workplace remained safe not only for us but for other workers. It was very important to do that. We have this nonsense about the business of visiting people at the workplace, going onto building sites and into workplaces to talk to members, is all about signing up members. That may be a by-product of a visit on a workplace, but there are many workplaces around Australia today that could do with a visit by a trade unionist, by a union official, just to check up on the occupational health and safety issues in those workplaces.

Mr Ciobo interjecting—

You say that to those people who die on workplaces—in the building industry where people die. You have no interest in protecting their interests.

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