Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

And very proudly so, Senator Sterle. You are very proud of that. My references are not particularly to you; but, as a general rule, what happens is that the union movement does not create wealth. Their sole objective, and what they are very good at, is to take something off somebody else. And that is a legitimate claim. I am in business myself; I have employees who need to be rewarded in the partnership that they have with enterprise as they go through. But the problem is that, if your sole focus is simply to take more out of a sector—in this case the construction sector—without putting something back in, without improving the productivity, without creating the profitability that is required for enterprises to survive, then of course what happens is that those enterprises go belly-up and the jobs are lost. The people are back out there looking for work again, many of them having to take work in lower paid positions or moving away from the sector or the industry they are in altogether, and for some of these people the whole vicious cycle starts again.

We have something in common: we both want to see those people keep their jobs. We all want to see this sector viable and profitable for all the reasons I espoused earlier and, to do that, it has to operate within the framework of a rule of law. One of the problems we have is that, even after four royal commissions and one current royal commission—and certainly in my last 18 months I suspect some of the organisers from the CFMEU have been mentioned in this place more often than any other entity or identity—we get to a point where, for example, one of their numbers are referred to the Australian Federal Police. This respected organisation brought about charges of blackmail against one of the members of the union, and I suspect the union's response is a response by the CFMEU Construction Division National Secretary, Dave Noonan. I would bet you London to a brick that this is the only statement that Noonan has ever made that I would agree with, because he demonstrates his understanding in his response to a colleague being charged with blackmail when he says:

… police had totally overreacted by charging Mr Lomax with blackmail in relation to what was, after all, normal negotiations of enterprise agreements.

Here we have the contrast: we have the Australian Federal Police, who believe that they have a brief of evidence to indict this individual for blackmail and, relying on the same facts—for I imagine they are not in dispute—Mr Noonan says that this is how enterprise bargaining agreements are negotiated. That alone, in my view, says that this is an industry populated with people like Mr Noonan and dozens and dozens and indeed hundreds of others. There have been something like 670 prosecutions and investigations on individuals. There have been over $6 million of fines levied against this body. We have had Federal Court judges and royal commissioners refer to it as systemic unlawful behaviour. When you look at that in a holistic sense, to an industry that is worth over $170,000 million to this nation, imagine the yield to this country if we were to remove these issues that attack the heart of productivity, to take away the corruption, to take away the special payments and all the charges, imagine how many jobs would be created, imagine the uplift that that would give to communities in our major cities and in some of our smaller regional areas, imagine the tax increases we would appreciate as a nation because of the increases in productivity. These are very simple economic principles. And imagine what our government could do if we had better economic circumstances as a result, the investments it could make, to come back to doing what you and I want to see happen and that would be jobs, jobs and more jobs for the people you and I represent. I thank you for the opportunity to make this contribution.