Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

Today is a landmark day in the exposure of union corruption in this country. We know that, last year, Geoffrey Watson SC was commissioned to deliver a report into the corruption of the Queensland CFMEU—not just the corruption but the violence. The report directly catalogued the scale of corruption that sits at the heart of the Queensland CFMEU, including a time following a Queensland Labor government election when CFMEU officials walked into consultations, stood over and intimidated public servants and said, 'You work for us now.' This is a fundamental issue of corruption that goes to the heart of the CFMEU-Labor model in Queensland, and now we are seeing it directly in the context of Victoria.

Yesterday, Transparency International released its latest report on corruption in Australia, and, under the Albanese government, corruption has increased and our international ranking has fallen. We are seeing explicitly why in the report that was finally tabled for public consumption looking at CFMEU corruption in the context of the state of Victoria. This report, which we know was provided to the CFMEU administrator on 1 December last year by testimony from Geoffrey Watson SC in the Wood inquiry in Queensland—it has been exposed in the Nine press that there has been a deliberate attempt to redact two chapters of this report. Why are they seeking to redact those chapters? Because those chapters go to the heart of the CFMEU-Labor cartel business plan, which has seen $15 billion of taxpayer money laundered through a process of Albanese government funded projects and Victorian government projects under the Allan government. And it's found its way where? Into the hands of organised crime and bikie gangs. This is the most disgraceful example and abuse of public money that could ever have been proposed. In fact, had someone suggested at the start of this inquiry that that was what was going to be revealed, I suspect most of the members on this side of the chamber would say it was impossible. This is now the lived reality of the CFMEU-Labor cartel of corruption and the consequences. The tragedy is the minister still won't answer basic information in this House.

Yes, it was absolutely a report that was commissioned by the CFMEU administrator. Yes, we now know that she received a copy of it on 9 February—only a few days ago. But what she's refusing to admit is whether she's been in contact with the CFMEU administrator, whether she asked for a copy of the report—we wrote to the minister last year saying: 'This report has been published. You should be requesting it, and why haven't you requested it? If you do have it, release it.' It's very clear to me that the minister knew full well that she didn't want to receive a copy because she knew how scandalous it was, and it took whistleblowers coming forward and saying the report had been redacted and the information had been kept from the public square—it is now clear that the minister is engaging in 'see no corruption, hear no corruption' so she does not have to answer for CFMEU-Labor corruption.

She also can't tell us what reports she received. We asked today in question time what version of the report she had on 9 February—whether it was the full report, a redacted report or the report that excluded two chapters. She hasn't answered that. There will be further questions, because we know exactly the consequences of when the minister won't reveal this information—she is running away from the consequences of CFMEU-Labor corruption because she knows how directly it connects back to the heart of the Albanese government. We know it. The Australian taxpayer knows it, and now an independent report to the CFMEU commissioner has confirmed it.

It's not just that part of the dishonesty that we are facing from this report. We know—once it was revealed that the CFMEU had become an enabler of organised crime and bikie gangs to launder money through Victorian government big build projects, the Prime Minister and various state premiers and leaders from the Australian Labor Party said: 'We'll never take money from the CFMEU anymore. We don't want their tainted cash.' But what we know from AEC disclosures from just last week is that that has been exposed as a falsehood. They might say they're not going to take the cash, but they seem happy to cash the CFMEU's cheque. When you think about the $15 billion that has been laundered through these public projects into the benefit of organised crime and bikie gangs and about how now some of those cartel kickbacks are going into the Labor Party's coffers, it directly compromises the foundations of this government.

More than that, the licence of this government and their willingness to tackle corruption is brought directly under question. While the minister stands here and boasts at the dispatch box that there are all these people removed from the CFMEU who have serious allegations to answer, what she won't tell you is that they're resigning just before they're sacked, and then they're walking over to the Electrical Trades Union to propagate the business model—the CFMEU-Labor business model—so that they can continue the extortion racket that is going on in public projects in this country. That's why the Labor Party wants multi-employer bargaining. It empowers the unions to engage in an extortion racket of public money to drive the cartel kickbacks and send them flowing through from the unions to organised crime, and some of it is ending up in the coffers of the Australian Labor Party.

We know that Labor has actively sought to undermine the limitations that we want to put on the flow of cash that has gone into redundancy funds. Why? Because it provides a slush fund for the unions to wash money around as they see fit. But, when it comes down to this report that was tabled by the author in the CFMEU inquiry in Queensland today, we get a shocking picture of the lived reality of union corruption that has been presided over during this period. You just need to go to the report. You can quote from it directly, but, of course, we can't quote from it directly as a document tabled in this parliament, because the Leader of the House refused to allow it to be tabled in the lead-up to question time. He wouldn't make it a permanent and public document so that it can never, ever be silenced or whitewashed again.

But let's go to what the report says:

But from those great heights the CFMEU in Victoria collapsed into a squalid mess. It slid from being a union which fought hard for workers to one which started a fight just for the sake of it. It devolved from being a union which honoured the dignity of working Australians to a union which cultivated the company of underworld figures. It deteriorated from being progressive, tolerant and respectful—

I would contest that, but I'll accept the author's claim—

into a violent, hateful, greedy rabble. It degenerated from being a union where people were respected for their honesty and decency—

again, a contestable claim—

to one where a good person, a decent person who spoke out against corruption, was shouted down and told they were a "dog," or a "rat", or—

a word I will not mention in this parliament. The report continues:

The cause of the collapse of the CFMEU was not from within, it came from the top.

To continue:

… it was shocking to see so much crime, so much corruption, such a perversion of values. The CFMEU was no longer on the right side of civil society, it was proudly on the wrong side. The Union was no longer the champion of the working class—

in fact, it turned to—

… looking after gangsters, standover men, bikies, heroin traffickers, and even killers.

By the end of this investigation I have been left with the empty feeling that the … Victorian branch of the CFMEU was no longer a trade union, it was a crime syndicate.

This is how $15 billion was fleeced from Victorian and Australian taxpayers, through big build projects that have been contributed to by the Victorian government, the Victorian taxpayer and the Australian taxpayer, and found its way into organised crime, criminal syndicates and bikie gangs. The least the minister and the Prime Minister could do is actually answer basic questions truthfully and honestly in this parliament about what they knew when, what they requested, and, more to the point, the type of the report that every single member that opposes this motion is going to be condemned for—seeking to run interference for that agenda.

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