Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I'm hearing interjections from those opposite. I assume that the member who's intervening supports the fact that Mr Hadgkiss will be given $400,000 to pay for his legal costs when he knowingly broke the law. Mr Hadgkiss knowingly broke the law. The minister was aware of the fact that he broke the law, left him in that position for a year and, once it was reported and disclosed, left him in that position for an extra two weeks to indemnify him against the costs of legal expenses so that the taxpayer has to foot the bill of $400,000, which would not have had to be paid if he'd accepted the fact that he knowingly misrepresented the law and intentionally did so to mislead employers and unions in the building industry. We hardly need any lectures from the government about the law when they have a regulator intentionally giving misleading advice on the law.

As I said, there will be more questions for the minister to answer. We haven't finished with that matter, I can assure you. But let me just say this finally—and this isn't left until last because it's the least important but perhaps because it's a crucial point to finish on. There's a real potential that this bill contravenes international law in that it contravenes ILO core convention 87: Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948. Even the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights has raised serious questions in this regard and has requested further information from the minister regarding the compatibility of aspects of each of schedules 1 to 4 of the bill. We ratified that convention. Every Labor and conservative government has upheld that convention. That ILO convention provides that, article 3:

And article 4:

Workers' and employers' organisations shall not be liable to be dissolved or suspended by administrative authority.

Article 7 says:

The acquisition of legal personality by workers' and employers' organisations, federations and confederations shall not be made subject to conditions of such a character as to restrict the application of the provisions of Articles 2, 3 and 4 hereof.

Significant concerns in this regard have been raised by the Parliamentary Join Committee on Human Rights in its Human rights scrutiny report, No. 9 of 2017. No responses to those concerns have yet been published, and the committee has not yet published a concluded finding. No-one should think for a moment that the government cares for this convention or its breach, but it is an important matter that should be placed on the record.

It is for these reasons that we oppose this bill. This bill is in its breadth and depth quite remarkable in terms of its attempts to undermine the ability for registered organisations and unions to conduct their business in this country. I have seen previous conservative governments, certainly with the introduction of Work Choices, take on conditions of employment in a pretty savage way. With the introduction of Work Choices we saw that writ large, but I'd have to say the combination of proposed laws by this government—the Turnbull government—is, in terms of the extent and nature of proposed legislation to undermine the capacity for working people to organise and be represented effectively in work places, probably the most I have ever seen. I don't think there is any equivalent to the scale of this.

As I have said very clearly, this legislation goes well beyond the recommendations of the Dyson Heydon royal commission, which in itself should ring alarm bells. The fact that we had a discredited royal commissioner hand down recommendations when it was clear that he had an appearance of a conflict of interest at the very least, and that this government has chosen to exceed those recommendations, is of great concern to Labor, and it should be of concern everyone who believes that unions do have a right to represent working people in this country. Any country without a lawful union movement is a dictatorship. Really, to the people on the other side: I know you are not best friends with the unions, but you might want to consider what it would mean if you do not have a sufficient right to represent workers in work places. It would mean that the character of this country was changing for the worse. It would mean that we were not a democratic civil society. And it would mean that working people who are suffering now as a result of their wage growth being at its lowest in a generation would have an even harder time to properly advance their interests when engaging with their employers.

Labor wants to see a greater level of collaboration and cooperation in work places. We want to see unions and employers work with government to tackle some of the structural challenges of this nation. That cannot happen if all we continue to do and continue to see in this parliament is a government that's at war with working people and their representatives.

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