Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

You missed the beginning of the speech. The reason that the issue of shareholders is completely different is that a company is there to provide protection for investors in the event that they can't provide for their bills. That's what limited liability is about. Because that's the privilege of it, there's a fiduciary duty in competition law that comes in. There's no national interest test as to whether or not there's a democratic process of shareholders here. That's not how it works, because, at the start, the first role of companies is not to be representative bodies. I don't go out to buy shares in some company so that they'll advocate publicly for my interests, but that is why someone joins a union.

It's about freedom of association. The concept that there could be a vote conducted by the Australian Electoral Commission and then ignored by this government has no precedent, flies in the face of the entire concept of freedom of association and should not be backed by this House or the other house. There are other governments in the world that have laws like this; they're just not the sorts of countries that we want to be compared to. In the countries we'd usually like to be compared to, these sort of laws don't exist.

So, whether it is the capacity to try to weaponise the law against individual union officials, whether it's to weaponise the law against the entire registration of a union, whether it's to put them into administration or whether it's to prevent a democratic vote, the legislation in front of us is transparent. The government wants to make it more difficult for unions because unions will argue for pay rises, against wage theft and for better health and safety at the workplace, and they're the principles that this government has committed to get in the way of. Be in no doubt: we're not running from the argument on this. Be in no doubt: we're fighting every step of the way on this. For those opposite: be in no doubt that, when your attack is simply on workers' entitlements and the organisations that argue for them, we will stand up to you.

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