Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Employment) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Bernardi for his ongoing interest in seeking to clean up fraudulent misuse of union members' funds, which I would have thought those opposite would agree with. Today we were told that the five-year-old Thomson case would be dragging out even longer with today's appeal against conviction and sentence. Members of the Health Services Union are right to feel frustrated at the time taken to deliver justice in that case.

Generally I can inform the Senate that the government are adopting a two-pronged approach to stamping out corruption in the trade union movement. Firstly, we have introduced the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment Bill. We have designed that bill to give proper transparency to prevent the kinds of frauds we have seen and witnessed with alarming regularity. Indeed, according to Mr Bolano of the HSU, this is not 'one or two bad apples'. He says: 'There is a protection racket around these people. It is symptomatic of the union movement.' So let us make no bones about it: using members' funds to run re-election slush funds is just plain wrong, as it is to spend that money on elections in other unions or for the House of Representatives let alone on more nefarious purposes.