Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Women) Share this | Hansard source

You'd be aware that last year, as part of the government's registered organisations legislation, we introduced significant new protections for whistleblowers in the workplace. Unfortunately, the culture of violence and intimidation in some registered organisations also extends to silencing those who actually call out bad behaviour. This has, unfortunately, been demonstrated on numerous occasions.

A few years ago, in 2014, prior to our legislation being implemented, three officials of the CFMEU in New South Wales stood up and had the guts to call out illegal and corrupt behaviour. They actually put their faces on the ABC's 7.30 program on 16 October 2014. This is what they said:

There have been reports of corruption, association with murderers, association with gangsters, association with terrorists, money being paid to union officials, union officials intimidating other union officials, union officials being forced out of their jobs …

What do you think happened to those men? The head of the CFMEU at the time, Dave Noonan, summoned the officials to an internal star chamber and sacked them. He said he sacked them because what they had done in blowing the whistle on corruption was 'gross misbehaviour'. It gets worse, though. When the concerns were raised with Michael O'Connor, the national head of the CFMEU, what did he do to stand by the workers and protect them? He did absolutely nothing. That is why we brought in the whistleblower protections.