Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

For over a century, unions have played a vital role in securing Australian workers' rights by advocating for fair wages, safe working conditions and job security. They've helped enforce workplace laws, protected against unfair dismissal and promoted equality and inclusion, by driving major reforms like paid leave, superannuation and antidiscrimination protections. Today, women are more likely than men to be union members in Australia. Women unionists have led campaigns for equal pay, for paid parental leave, for antidiscrimination laws and for accessible child care.

The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, the CFMEU, is an outlier. For years, it has been accused of corrupt and criminal misconduct and of having a culture of violence, intimidation, misogyny and bullying. Elements of this behaviour have been documented repeatedly by royal commissions and other inquiries, but they've never been effectively dealt with. We've heard from courageous journalists and from members of the industry that legitimate businesses and individuals are too susceptible to intimidatory tactics—they're too frightened of the potential for commercial or personal retribution to seek redress or to speak publicly about the ongoing issues within the CFMEU.

It's clear that the coalition's Australian Building and Construction Commission failed to bring these issues under control. It oversaw declining construction industry productivity and an increase in workplace injuries and deaths. In July 2024, along with crossbench colleagues, I asked the government for urgent and comprehensive action regarding the CFMEU. Our concern then, which remains, was that the CFMEU's infiltration by criminal elements and its actions within the construction industry compromise the integrity of government spending. They cause individual and social harm through alleged criminal activity, they increase building costs and they worsen housing affordability, business costs and inflation while eroding our economic productivity.

The Albanese government abolished the failed ABCC and the Regulated Organisation Commission, but it has not yet regulated an appropriate replacement body to exercise long-term oversight of the industry. The administrator it appointed in August 2024 has encountered very significant legal, operational and cultural challenges in reforming the union. That administrator, Mark Irving, recently noted that the work of his administration can only take the union so far. The problems across the industry are myriad. No single agent has the responsibility or the resources to fix all of them.

On behalf of the citizens of Kooyong, who have long expressed concerns about the criminal activities of the CFMEU and their effect on housing costs in our state, I call on the government to have the courage to act on this issue and to ensure that this country has a construction industry in which criminal behaviour is not tolerated, in which public investment in infrastructure maximises value for money and productivity and in which politics and politicians prioritise public interest over financial and political relationships with unions and lobbyists. I ask the government to provide adequate resourcing to support all levels of police and all levels of government to conduct thorough investigations into cases involving misuse of public money, abuse of powers of the union and fraud by actors in the construction sector.

I ask the Labor Party to put a permanent stop on receiving any donations or fees from the CFMEU. I ask the federal government to withhold infrastructure funding from state projects until the states show convincing evidence of their effective policing of criminal activity within the sector. I also ask the government to put in place a successor to the administrator. It should establish a new oversight body and legislative framework, staffed by a cross-jurisdictional police taskforce and representatives from industrial regulators, government agencies and industry representatives, to provide us with the accountability and cultural change that is required to permanently address the issues within the construction sector—not just within the CFMEU but also within the labour hire industry and the construction industry more generally.

This body should be developed with engagement across the parliament. It should be protected from political attack after every change in government. While bribery and corruption are allowed to fester in our construction industry, we all pay the price. We need to join together across the political lines to effectively address an ongoing blight on the Australian industrial landscape.

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