Ben Small (Forrest, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Electoral Matters) | Hansard source

'Beltway banditry', as the member for Cook describes, is the Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Building Cooperative Workplaces No. 1) Bill 2026. Let's strap in and continue to examine exactly what is going on here. It sounds innocuous enough, 'building cooperative workplaces'. On this side of the chamber, we believe in that. We believe that employees and employers should be empowered to come to an arrangement at their workplace that delivers value for both parties. However, what this bill seeks to do, in a sneaky and underhanded way, is to require the Commonwealth to prefer its procurement to those contractors and suppliers who have union based agreements. If that was argument they wanted to make, they could have made it before the election. But this just continues a pattern that we see of a government that does one thing before the election and then rams through some 'wedge-islation' later—and from a prime minister who promised he was going to end 'wedge-islation' because he cited the Australian people as having combat fatigue. Well, here we go again.

So why is it a problem? The 2022-23 October budget, the first of the Albanese government, included a buy Australian plan committed to establishing the so-called secure jobs code. That, ostensibly, was to prioritise secure work in government contracts and ensure that government purchasing power is used to support businesses that engage in lawful, fair, equitable, ethical and sustainable practices. So the fluffy-sounding, nice things that we can all agree to can continue. The consultation paper invited comment on whether that so-called secure jobs code could require contracting entities to demonstrate, amongst other things, that they 'support freedom of association and representation in the workplace' and 'ensure that enterprise agreements used on government funded projects are genuinely agreed'. The issue with that is that, if you actually believe in the freedom of association, you accept that employees have a right not to be part of a union and a union based agreement just as much as they have a right to be part of such a collective agreement. What we're seeing here is, a couple of years down the track, the government trying to take away that very fundamental freedom for Australians en masse.

The submissions on that paper closed on 20 February, and there have been no further announcements since. That was until the government released a media statement saying that the bill 'does not impose any obligation on the Commonwealth to require enterprise agreements in contracting, but how and when to do so is being carefully considered as part of the development of the Secure Australian Jobs Code', notwithstanding that we're in 2026. The reality—the simple reality; we see this time and time again—is that union donations go into the Labor Party and Labor Party policy reflects the union demands. That's how it works—union donations in; union policy out. We've seen it time and time again. So it's a little bit cute to say that this wouldn't be a mandatory requirement of the legislation if it were passed, because we know very clearly what the Labor Party will do in government. They will absolutely enforce this sort of preferment to the union cartel in Australia. We've seen that in the state of Victoria—the formerly great state of Victoria, I would say—where some $15 billion to $30 billion at the moment has been squirrelled away into organised crime and union facilitated corruption. That's just unacceptable. For it to be included, as the member for Cook rightly said, as some beltway banditry in this bill is not something that we will let slide.

The Gillard government's 2009 introduction to the Fair Work Act, including principles that made a condition for participation as part of the federal government's procurement principles, included a requirement that tenderers for government work operate under an enterprise agreement containing a dispute resolution procedure that allows the settlement of disputes by Fair Work Australia. The government in 2014, the then Abbott government, repealed those. Here we go, 12 years later, because this bill is seeking to make amendments to the Fair Work Act regarding exactly that—discrimination in procurement related to bargaining. But I thought it was called the 'building cooperative workplaces No.1 bill'! Well, this is because you've got to look at the detail. The so-called end of legislation, which was promised by the Prime Minister, has gone exactly the same way as all of his other promises. It has been broken. So, currently, the Fair Work Act prohibits discrimination against an employer based on whether or not its employees are or are not covered by certain industrial instruments, including the National Employment Standards, workplace instruments and enterprise agreements. That's a reasonable position because it means that no-one in Australia, including the Commonwealth government, can prefer one company over another just because it has union affiliated enterprise agreements. But this bill creates an exemption that would allow the Commonwealth to do exactly that, to discriminate, and allow the Commonwealth to prefer procurement from a supplier whose employees are covered by a union covered enterprise agreement. Put simply, the bill is creating an exemption by allowing discrimination where the employer's employees—that is, their workers—are not covered by an enterprise agreement or a kind of enterprise agreement that does not reflect the union coverage. That's one-directional. It only excuses discrimination that favours union dominated enterprise agreement coverage in workforces.

Shouldn't that be, if we refer to those earlier comments where we believed in the freedom of association, as the government says that it does, a complete contradiction in terms? As I said, that freedom applies both ways—the freedom to associate and the freedom not to associate. Again, I turn to the claim that we hear from the government that it doesn't force any agency or entity to use those provisions. This would be the only such discrimination that would be allowed under the act, and it would permit the government to do something that is currently prohibited by the Gillard government's Fair Work Act 2009. The government claims that the secure jobs code will provide the detail on how this will be used in practice. But let's not skip past the fundamental point. In this country, we believe in Australians making the right decisions for themselves. Here, the government is creating a loophole for itself, and itself only, to provide taxpayer funded support in union preferred procurement. It is an outrageous and blatant attempt to curry favour with their union mates. We understand why. Union donations in; union policy out—I get how it works. But they should look the Australian taxpayer in the eye and explain that that is what they are doing. They shouldn't bury it at the back of the so-called Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Building Cooperative Workplaces No. 1) Bill 2026. It should be called the 'giving taxpayer money to our union mates bill'. In that case, we could have a rip-roaring debate in this place about what they are trying to do.

These provisions are particularly concerning because they allow—and the moment you allow something when you've got the Labor party in charge you know that it will result in Commonwealth procurement contracting processes that will preference employers with union covered enterprise agreements. If you are a small or family owned business in Australia who's done the right thing, who's sat down with your employees and negotiated individual agreements, for instance, that might best reflect the skills and experience and the particularly productive employees in your workplace, you've got no chance now. The Commonwealth government is not going to use the taxpayer money they take from you to enable you to bid for work and to supply the Commonwealth, because they've gone and slammed the door shut so that they can shovel that money off to their union mates. That is limiting freedom of association. It is a conflict of the very central procurement principle that the Commonwealth should be focused on value for money. It also risks turning Commonwealth procurement into a mechanism for pushing union covered enterprise agreements across government contracts and down through supply chains.

When you consider just how big the federal government has got under this current government—at some 27.1 per cent of GDP on the government's own budget papers—it should be gravely concerning that they're opening the door to this sort of discrimination. It would be gravely concerning on a point of fundamental value, but it is particularly concerning in the wake of the Watson report, which I know previous coalition speakers have touched on. The title of that report Rotting from the top by Geoffrey Watson, SC should say it all. It is a looking glass into what would happen if we allowed this sort of legislation to go through without belling the cat. Watson found that the enterprise agreement system in Victorian construction had been so thoroughly corrupted that he described it as an old-fashioned 'pay to play' corruption. There was no genuine bargaining under that system. A CFMEU official told a contractor executive:

There is no bargaining—no, nothing will be changed in this agreement.

The quotes continue:

… they control the market. The Big Build is theirs. You can't get in if you don't know someone.

An individual being recorded in an undercover sting, and who described himself as a fixer, said about the price of entry:

There's a fee to get an EBA.

I think the upfront fee is cash.

Is this the sort of thing that we should be encouraging the Commonwealth government to be setting as a national standard for procurement? On this side of the House, we actually don't believe in that. We don't believe in taking taxpayer money off hardworking Australians and funnelling it straight into that sort of corruption. But, because we're dancing to the tune of union paymasters, it would seem, this bill, the workplace relations legislation amendment bill, which has been very cutely named, as I said, is a trojan horse for an absolutely egregious assault on freedom of association in Australia and a complete perversion of any decency when it comes to Commonwealth government procurement.

We could have looked not just at Victoria but also at Queensland to learn some lessons here from the so-called Queensland best practice industry conditions. I guess this is a bit of a trend we've got here. It sounds great—best practice industry conditions. What could possibly go wrong with something like that? We actually know. Having booted the then Queensland Labor government out, Queenslanders are now discovering that the project costs in their state were inflated by some 25 per cent, creating a blowout of $17.1 billion. This is on top of the $15 billion to $30 billion that we saw squirrelled away into organised crime and the union corruption racket that we had in Victoria. So to see that the best-practice industry conditions, having been abolished in Queensland, are now being resuscitated by the backdoor with this federal legislation and put on steroids—given the government's addiction to spending—we should be gravely concerned.

But it's not just the coalition members of this place that are concerned; it's stakeholders across the board. The Housing Industry Association are particularly concerned, of course, because those who have been at the coalface of construction know just how bad this can be. They're joined by the Master Builders of Australia, who said:

The potential exclusion of those legally operating under an industrial award, including those providing above award conditions, is fundamentally unfair, particularly for small businesses operating in the building and construction industry who make up 98 per cent of the industry and generally do not rely on an enterprise agreement.

Well, we're seeing what the Labor government are planning for those small and family-owned businesses; they're going to crush them out of existence. They are going to mandate a union cartel across the construction sector in Australia and funnel taxpayer money into it accordingly. It is a disgrace that it's dressed up under the Building Cooperative Workplaces No. 1 bill title. As I said, it should be the 'racketeering and union rorts bill of 2026' instead, because then the Australian people would have a real sense of what their government is trying to do here today.

As coalition members have said previously, when it comes to the sensible parts of this bill that were put forward, we could absolutely support those any day. But the fact that they have been tied together with such an egregious assault on our freedoms is unacceptable.

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