Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

You can raise your eyebrows over on that side! I would love to hear your contribution. In fact, I will go even better: we can go outside and debate it all around the country—not a problem. The union movement is not against foreign workers. The union movement is against foreign workers being used to knock out Australian kids and the opportunity for them to have a job. The union movement is opposed to foreign workers being exploited. That is nothing new. We have always done that and we will always continue to do that—we in the Labor Party and in the union movement.

I will come back to the bill. There was a Senate inquiry that looked into it. I note that the Senate inquiry made a number of recommendations—not from the government senators but from the Labor senators. Of course, you would not expect the government senators to look too deeply into it. With all fairness to the government senators, they are following the instructions of their ministers and the instructions of the Prime Minister. When you really are as bad a government as the one we have here at the moment then—what is that thing you can get on with the Twitter bird?—you get on Twitter and see that there is actually #worstpmever. I can understand that they want all these distractions, so they say, 'Let's go knock Australian workers.'

Let me just touch on something that I found out in Perth last week. There is a job at the Old Treasury Building, which is a union site. There are union wages and the CFMEU have the membership there—the guys and girls are all proud members of the CFMEU and enjoying a decent wage. I do not know how many hundreds of millions of dollars it is worth.

I spoke to a carpentry contractor, a chippie, at a candlelight vigil—he was there supporting the workers of a ceiling contractor who unfortunately lost his life—and he told me that he has more-than-competent employees, fully qualified tradesmen and fantastic chippies, but he cannot get on the site because there are foreign workers. I am not going to say what nation they are from; it does not matter what nation they are from. He raised it with me. He said to me: 'Do you know what I want? All I want is honest politicians.' I thought he was having a dig to start with—I had never met him before—so I said, 'There's a racehorse called that'. But I worked out that he was not having a dig; he was being deadly serious. He just wanted honest politicians who would stand up there and defend Australian jobs.

I think he said he had about six guys. He said: 'My guys are now taken off the job and there is some fitting being done'—I do not know exactly what the extent of the work was. He said: 'Why have foreign workers been brought in? Why aren't we good enough to do that work?' How do you argue with that? I am not going to be silly enough to think for one minute that it just happened that one employer had a heap of workers all from the same country. This is the sort of nonsense that goes on.

It really does annoy me no end when all the government can do is attack the CFMEU. They make these absolutely ridiculous statements. You would think there are lawless gangsters on these sites. If there is a bad apple—the whole union movement has made this very clear—deal with the bad apple. There are laws in the land that this falls under. Police have those powers—whatever the issue may be. Why do we have to have one entity that will just target one industry?

If you are going to be fair dinkum, if you are going to be honourable and concerned about the viability of employers, then get out on the farms and find out if those workers are working safe hours, find out if they are here on the right visas. They should not be exploited. We just saw a show on the ABC on Monday night—Four Corners—about the great exploitation of foreign workers on farms. This is not new. We have been saying this for years. For years we have been talking about it. In my home state of Western Australia we have had a number of occasions. There is a case going on now—a farm up north of Wanneroo somewhere. I do not know if it was strawberries—whatever it was—very high profile. Why isn't the government worried about that? Why aren't Mr Abbott and his ministers targeting that sort of nonsense? Not a word! We have to wait for it to come on TV.

There was the unfortunate situation that was also on TV about three Filipino workers killed on one ship. What the hell is that all about? Was the government saying: 'My goodness me! What is going on with these foreign workers on these foreign vessels?' No, not worried about it one little bit. We had to bring it in to the Senate with the support of the crossbenchers to get an inquiry going. I am going to chair that inquiry and we are going to do a darn good job on it. We are going to tour around and listen to what is going on; because the government is not worried about three Filipinos on one ship. Two were killed, and one is missing overboard somewhere—just mysteriously fell off on the way back from China.

Do we have the government saying: 'Crikey, what is happening out there? And what are we creating if we are going to try and deal with Australian ships and Australian jobs?' The silence is deafening. I have not heard one senator stand up and say 'This is not on. Maybe my son, my daughter or my grandkids might want to be seafarers. Maybe they want to work on Australian ships and maybe they want decent pay.' What is it with this nation that we all raise our eyebrows—you want to throw stones at us because we stand up for decent pay? Or is it only us politicians who are allowed to have decent pay? 'How dare we let Australian workers on construction sites have decent pay? If they have decent pay and they want to be safe there is something drastically wrong. Let's blame the CFMEU.'

The hypocrisy that I have witnessed in this place for 10 years! I worked on transport sites for 14 years prior to that and, before anyone else wants to have a cheap dig, for 14 years I was an owner-driver running my own little business. So I do not come here as some apparatchik who went through university and thought, 'I wouldn't mind being a senator one day'. Like the majority of my mates on this side of the chamber—Senator Urquhart and Senator Moore here beside me, for example—I actually have had dirt under the fingernails. We know what it is like to have to get up in the morning you are crook as a dog; it is 5.30 in the morning; it is freezing cold; you have to go to work.