Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

So pardon me if I sometimes skip a line by mistake.

Introduction

Today I reintroduce the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Bill 2013.

The construction industry provides many jobs for workers in small business, large enterprises and contractors. It is critical to a productive, prosperous and internationally competitive 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 bill re-establishes the Australian Building and Construction Commission, a genuinely strong watchdog that will maintain the rule of law to protect workers and constructors and improve productivity on building sites and construction projects, whether onshore or offshore.

This bill will reverse Labor's changes to the laws which underpinned the Australian Building and Construction Commission before it was abolished in 2012.

The bill prohibits unlawful industrial action, unlawful picketing, and coercion and discrimination. Penalties that are high enough to provide an effective deterrent will apply to breaches of these provisions. A wide range of effective remedies such as injunctions will also be available to the ABCC and persons affected by unlawful behaviour.

The need for the Australian Building and Construction Commission to be re-established

For many years, the building and construction sector provided the worst examples of industrial relations lawlessness. Then workplace relations minister in the Howard government, Tony Abbott, was prepared to tackle this longstanding bad behaviour and in 2001 established a Royal Commission into the Building and Construction Industry. The final report of that 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. It 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 conduct, 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 about for 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 Australian Building and Construction Commission in 2005 provided a genuinely strong watchdog, dissolving the 1970s-style practices that plagued 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:

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. The Labor government procrastinated for five years before the then workplace relations minister, now the Leader of the Opposition, gave in to union demands and abolished the organisation in 2012 and replaced it with a regulator with significantly reduced funding and powers. This saw the 'bad old days' return—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.

No-one needs reminding of the scenes we saw in late 2012, merely weeks after the Australian Building and Construction Commission was abolished: violence on the streets in the city of Melbourne, with militant union protestors—

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