Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I believe in giving people a second chance. From time to time, we all make mistakes. When someone makes a bad choice, when they regret that choice and ask for forgiveness, I hope that we'd all generally believe in giving that person the opportunity to redeem themselves. But, when that same person, or organisation, makes the same bad choice again and again and yet again, you know what? Our patience gets a little bit stretched. When those choices involve lawlessness and criminal activity, our patience should run dry very quickly. When an organisation racks up $15 million worth of fines, when its officials have committed 106 separate contraventions of the law and when it has 80 more officials still facing the courts, we can't tolerate any more. This is the situation that we find ourselves facing in the form of that most lawless of rogue unions, the CFMMEU—and those opposite think it's funny, because they know that they are lock, stock and barrel owned by the CFMMEU.

Would the minister, therefore, first please advise the House of what consequences for workers and ordinary taxpayers the government has identified that would flow from allowing the CFMMEU to continue along its path of lawlessness unchecked? It's been noticeable that the unions have been in the newspapers a lot recently, calling for various changes to the law. I suppose that they can see the weakness of this Leader of the Opposition as clearly as the member for Grayndler can, but it's surprising that the unions are so keen to change the law, when they show no interest whatsoever in obeying it.

Just last week we saw the latest manifestation of the CFMMEU's culture of criminality. The Federal Court fined the WA CFMMEU and its official Brad Upton a combined $51,300 for a threatening and abusive rant against employees at the Gorgon LNG plant in 2015. Mr Upton called the ordinary workers he claims to stand up for 'dogs', among a number of other unsavoury things. He threatened to display a list of non-union members on the site, implicitly encouraging retaliatory action against them. He also informed workers that Gorgon was a union site and that further union sites would be opening soon, at which non-union members would not be welcome. I'm sure those workers knew exactly what he meant.

Like the CFMMEU, Mr Upton has a long track record of this sort of behaviour. In October 2012, he was found by the Federal Court to have used 'racially tainted, obscene and offensive language' on a Bechtel site when the union's accommodations were not up to the standards he had apparently become accustomed to.

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