Andrew Nikolic (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Deputy Speaker, I was not expecting to be spending 18 April 2016 with you and our colleagues, as enjoyable as that is! The recall of parliament does not happen very often, but it is necessary because the Labor Party and their fellow travellers in the Senate have ignored the clear mandate we have for important legislation.

We are here, quite frankly, because the Labor Party have put the union interest ahead of the national interest. They did that when they put the CFMEU interest above the national interest in getting rid of the Australian Building and Construction Commission and now in preventing us from restoring it. They put the interest of the Maritime Union of Australia above the national interest when they brought in new coastal shipping laws in 2012. And they put the interests of the Transport Workers Union above those of 60,000 owner-driver truckies when they set up the RSRT. I spoke this morning to some of those truckies, who had gathered at Parliament House to convey how badly their families were affected by Labor's breach of trust.

But the most compelling example of Labor doing the unions' bidding is getting rid of the ABCC under the Gillard government. They are now joined at the hip with the CFMEU, whose criminality has been exposed again and again by a number of royal commissions. Consider that, after the Heydon royal commission, a hundred union officials are facing in excess of 1,000 charges before the courts. This shows that existing laws are not strong enough to prevent unlawful industrial behaviour in Australia's crucial building and construction sector. Consider that since the abolition of the ABCC the number of days lost to strikes in the construction industry has increased by 34 per cent. Our economy has suffered an almost $4 billion hit from unlawful industrial action each year since the ABCC was abolished.

Cleaning up the construction industry would mean more investment and jobs in the sector. That would mean more schools, hospitals, roads and other vital infrastructure in my home state of Tasmania. I want government funded projects in Tasmania and elsewhere around the country to be finished on time and on budget. That will mean more work, more local jobs, and more services and infrastructure for the taxpayer. An honest and fair workplace relations system is an engine of job creation and economic growth. It is also fair to say that workers deserve to be able to go to work each day without the fear of being harassed, intimidated or subjected to violence.

The consequences of Labor's coastal shipping laws in 2012 were similarly cheered on by the Maritime Union of Australia and were similarly disastrous for our coastal shipping industry. When the coalition left office in 2007, there were 30 major Australian trading vessels with a general licence. Within two years of Labor's disastrous coastal shipping changes, the fleet halved to just 15 vessels. The number of vessels with a transitional general licence more than halved. Freight rates from Tasmania to Queensland almost doubled to $30 a tonne, while rates elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere remained at about half that, at $17 a tonne. There were almost 1,000 fewer coastal voyages in Australia and two million fewer tonnes of freight moved by foreign vessels, and demurrage rates tripled.

Rather than admitting they got it wrong, Labor did the MUA's bidding again in late 2015 and voted down our legislation. The Senate's rejection of this reform was described by the National Farmers Federation as 'a missed opportunity to restore competition around the Australian coast'. How can Australia ever consider the Labor Party as an alternative government of this country when Labor act so flagrantly in support of their union benefactors—the same benefactors who now run millions of dollars of mendacious advertisements paid for by the toil of the union's hardworking members?

This is simply a desperate campaign to distract from the real issue of cleaning up lawlessness in the construction industry. The ABCC bill, rejected again this evening by the Senate, and our registered organisations bill would improve the governance and financial transparency of registered organisations like unions. They would give union members greater confidence that their hard-earned membership fees were being spent lawfully and, more importantly, that they were being spent in their best interests and not in the interests of the few who sit at the top. Labor and the unions' hysterical opposition to the ABCC is very revealing. After all, if the unions simply complied with the law what would they have to fear?