Kristina Keneally (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to the debate on the government's union-bashing legislation, the supposed ensuring integrity bill. But I want to begin by telling you a story. It's a story I previously told in my first speech in this place, but it bears repeating in the context of this legislation. It's a story that highlights the important role that the labour movement has played in many workers' lives, in my life and in the lives of many ordinary people around the world.

The story starts in 1987, just after I graduated from high school, a year before this chamber opened. I took a job on an assembly line at Johns Manville, a fibreglass manufacturer that had two factories in my home town. The work itself was tedious and hot, and the hourly rate was quite good. I worked eight-hour shifts, sometimes 12 hours, in a crew of four people. In our work, we had heavy canvas jumpsuits, and our job was to get giant rolls of fibreglass off a giant machine. We got them off the machine, we tested their quality and then we got them wrapped in plastic and shipped on down the line to go out to the shipping docks. Our products looked like massive paper towel rolls as we shipped them down the line. My responsibility in this factory was to attach adhesive tape to a four-metre-long rotating spindle so it could grab the next sheet of fibreglass as it came off the machine. When I worked there, that spindle rotated at about three kilometres an hour. I was told to stand back three metres behind a safety line. I held that adhesive tape on a specially designed hook, and I had in my hands, on that hook, a safety stop switch.

Months earlier, a young woman named Leslie Lambert had my job. She worked there before I started there. Leslie did not have the same safety equipment or practices. When Leslie was working there, the spindle rotated at about 20 kilometres an hour. There was no instruction to stand three metres back. There was no hook or safety switch. One afternoon Leslie was caught by the adhesive tape and spun around 10 times, cracking her head and back on the machine, before she was thrown to the floor. Leslie was 19 years old and she died that day. I know from Leslie's obituary that, like me, she was working in that fibreglass factory to put herself through university. I know that she, like me, was a member of the Teamsters Union, a union that had been pushing for safer conditions in that very factory on that very machine. Only a few months separated Leslie Lambert and me, a few months between a dangerous and deadly workplace and a safe one.

The difference between Leslie Lambert and me was just a few months—it is also 31 years. It is 31 years in which Leslie Lambert has lain in a grave in East Swanton, Ohio. It's 31 years in which I have been able to raise a family, get an education, migrate to another country, have a career, work, travel, raise my children—simply be alive, simply live a life. I know that the Teamsters Union made their members' safety at work a priority in that factory. I know they had my back as a worker and I have never forgotten that. You could say the importance of a safe workplace and the role that unions play in keeping workers safe and in advocating for safe working conditions is seared into my very existence. I concluded that story in my first speech by saying the following:

Here in the Senate, I will continue to fight alongside my colleagues in the union movement for all Australians to be paid a living wage and for all workers to be safe at work.

As I rise today, I do so to oppose this bill for that very reason.

With this bill, the government is orchestrating a direct attack on Australian workers and their right to be represented, their right to be safe in their workplaces and their right to be paid a fair wage. After this legislation went through a Senate inquiry, Labor senators said in a dissenting report that they had:

… significant concerns about the adverse impacts this bill would have on the rights of workers, workers' safety and the safety of the public, the economy and the state of democracy in Australia if it were to be passed by the Senate.

Those are significant concerns. They also said:

This Bill would allow for Government interference in democratically-run organisations in a way that goes beyond what we have seen in any developed country. Australia already has some of the most restrictive industrial laws in the world, and this would take the country further down an authoritarian path.

Labor senators did not make these observations lightly. It goes to the seriousness of the legislation that is before this chamber.

This bill is extraordinary for a number of reasons. It is extraordinary in its overreach, it is extraordinary in its callousness and it is extraordinary in its naked partisanship. The 45th Parliament saw the first iteration of this bill. It was dangerous and extreme then, and it was roundly rejected. Now this bill is back, with the government banking on the crossbench to pass the laws they couldn't ram through the last time.

It's important to understand what this bill would allow. Not only will the bill expand the grounds for disqualification but, worse still, the grounds will require only one or, at the most, two instances of unlawful conduct for an application to be able to be made. It doesn't have to be repeated, serious or wilful conduct. The minister or any person with 'sufficient interest'—and that could include employers or employer organisations—can apply to the court for orders disqualifying a person from holding office in a union. Imagine that. James Hardie executives could have applied to have persons who held office in a union disqualified when unions were trying to hold James Hardie to account for the untold damage they did to their own employees, the victims of asbestos related diseases. That is the kind of outcome this legislation would facilitate. That is what this government wants to do to working people and to their representatives. This bill would also include a minor issue like a technical breach, such as not giving the right notice in the right form when inspecting a dangerous worksite or investigating the rampant underpayment of workers. A person with a 'sufficient interest' could be the very business that was being investigated for underpaying workers. This bill will literally put the fox in charge of the henhouse.

On the other hand, directors of companies which recklessly expose workers to risk of serious illness, injury or death or who engage in systematic wage theft are not exposed to disqualification. To go back to the James Hardie example, those directors and executives don't face the consequences, but they themselves could raise a complaint that would be sufficient for the court to disqualify the representatives of the working people who are suffering because of their actions. If there were corporate equivalence in this legislation, a union could bring disqualification proceedings against the director of a company where the union was pursuing an industrial issue such as systematic wage theft, but this isn't proposed or even considered by those opposite.

Contrary to the government's claims, the requirements imposed by the bill go further than the requirements on corporations. In the bill, the grounds for disqualification from holding office in a registered organisation are broader than the grounds for disqualification of company directors. The penalty for the offence of a disqualified person continuing to hold office in or influence a registered organisation is double the equivalent provision in the Corporations Act. This bill also allows the courts to disqualify union officers for conduct unrelated to their union role. For example, an application to disqualify could be brought against union officials on the basis that they were not fit and proper persons because they had breached a law relating to the intentional damage of property. There is no equivalent disqualification for company directors. I can only imagine the uproar in the corporate boardrooms if there were.

The bill also provides new and expanded grounds for deregistration—again, new grounds that require only one or, at most, two instances of unlawful conduct for an application to be able to be made. Again, it doesn't have to be repeated, serious or wilful conduct. It can involve a single instance of unprotected industrial action. Yet there is no equivalent for companies to be deregistered if they breach industrial laws by stealing wages or breach workplace health and safety laws by failing to protect their employees. Again, the minister or any person with 'sufficient interest'—there's that phrase again—can apply to the court to deregister a union for breaching these extreme and intrusive orders. Again, no equivalent provisions exist for corporations. If the same thing applied to companies then the minister, an employee or any other person with sufficient interest could apply to a court to wind up a company or impose one of these orders. Wouldn't that be magnificent, if we were talking about a company that was stealing their workers' wages! I'm sure that companies wouldn't tolerate that. Why should they? And why should unions? Why should working people and their representatives tolerate such a scheme?

Clearly, these are extraordinary provisions. There is already an effective and longstanding regime for the disqualification of union officers and the deregistration of unions. The act was amended as recently as 2017 to provide that a union official could be disqualified on the basis of any civil penalty breaches of the Registered Organisations Act. There is currently a range of offences that automatically disqualify a person from standing for or holding office, including fraud, dishonesty, the intentional use of violence and damage to property—the latter of which has no equivalent for company directors. But we all know that union bashing is in the Liberal-National DNA. This is the party of Work Choices, after all, and this bill is from the very top drawer of their regressive agenda.

The government are claiming that this is a new and improved version of the bill and that it's been revised to 'more closely align these reforms with their corporate equivalents'. It is just not true. As the examples I have outlined demonstrate, it is simply not the case. There are no corporate equivalents. This bill is far more extreme in the regulation of unions than anything that exists for businesses or, indeed, politicians. There is no justification for the provisions in this bill; they go far beyond what the Heydon royal commission recommended. The hypocrisy of those opposite is astounding. On the Liberal Party's website they say this bill will cancel 'the registration of an organisation where it or its officials have not acted in the interests of members, not complied with court orders, committed serious offences or have a record of law-breaking.' The government would have you think they are the tough cop on the beat here, yet their actions speak louder than their words.

Seven years of this Liberal-National government show it is utterly toothless when it comes to real lawlessness. We have seen countless examples of employers ripping off their workers in recent years—7-Eleven, Domino's Pizza, Chatime, Michael Hill jewellers, recently Woolworths and even the ABC. And what has this government done to combat worker exploitation? Absolutely nothing. We've seen up to 100,000 people trafficked into this country by people smugglers through our airports. They've sent people here to work for as little as $4 an hour. They've subjected them to slave-like conditions and sexual abuse. Minister Dutton won't even acknowledge this crisis, let alone act on it. But do you know who has been standing up for those vulnerable, exploited people? Unions have been doing that. Where the government has failed to step in, unions have been acting to draw the attention of this government to the crisis that is occurring when it comes to the exploitation of temporary migrant workers.

This government, particularly this Prime Minister, had to be dragged kicking and screaming to support a royal commission into the banking sector. They voted against that royal commission 26 times. This week it was revealed that Westpac had broken the law 23 million times. What did the Prime Minister say about that? Did he say the CEO should keep his job? Did he have a view? No, he said that's a matter that 'the board and the management need to determine themselves'. So if you breach the law 23 million times it is just up to you and your board and your mates to work out amongst yourselves what happens, but if you misfile paperwork on three occasions this government will have you taken to court, have a democratically elected representative of working people removed from office and deregister the organisation from being able to stand up for the rights of working people. If that's not a double standard, I don't know what is. And it certainly isn't corporate equivalence.

This third-term Liberal government is a pantomime police force—unless you happen to belong to a union, in which case you can expect both barrels to be aimed at you. Never forget that this is the government that created the Registered Organisations Commission and then watched as a dodgy minister ended up before the Federal Court over serious allegations of misconduct. It is deeply ironic that the biggest fish that the Registered Organisations Commission nearly fried was Minister Cash herself, until the supposedly law-and-order party over there stepped in to protect her. Those opposite are the party of double standards; this bill proves that. And yet they come into this chamber and lecture the rest of us on being tough on lawlessness. So today we see a bill debated in this parliament that holds working Australians and their representatives to a higher and, I might add, extreme standard.

Now, I acknowledge there may well be legitimate concerns in the community, and they are sometimes shared by the Labor Party, about the behaviour of some union officials in some unions in some parts of Australia. As I've already shown, we have laws to deal with this. And Labor have shown how we will respond to this behaviour: we expelled John Setka from the party, and we were right to do so. But one person does not characterise an entire union or the entire labour movement.

The Liberal Party would have you believe that somehow 'union' is a synonym of 'crime gang'. The average unionist in this country is your child's teacher or nurse, or your local police officer. It's a firefighter. It's the person who goes to work on an assembly line or who works in construction. These are the people who belong to unions. We have unions in our schools, in our hospitals and in our hospices; we have unions for our journalists, our artists and our Defence Force personnel; we have unions for our police, our ambos and our firefighters. These laws will apply to every single one of them—each and every one. These laws will make it possible for government ministers and disgruntled employers to shut down unions and deny working people their right to choose their own representatives and push for decent wages and good conditions.

We must call this bill out for what it is. It is an attack on our schoolteachers, our police officers, our nurses, our ambos and our firefighters. The government would never propose laws like these for the banks, the multinational pizza chains or the celebrity chefs who have been found to be stealing wages, committing crimes and exploiting workers. No wonder that, under the Morrison government, Australia is set to be a country where your autonomy can be bought at a premium.

I want to end my contribution where I started, and that was with a story about how a union stood up for safety in a workplace where one of my colleagues had died because a union's warnings had not been heeded. Make no mistake: when we weaken the right of working people to raise their concerns and when we weaken the right of working people to come together collectively to bargain, to negotiate, to demand and to agitate for better wages, for better conditions and for safer workplaces—when we make that harder—we weaken not only the economy but the very fabric of our society and we weaken the very safety that Australians have enjoyed in their workplaces. The sad result, I fear, of this legislation will be not only a loss of autonomy for unions and a loss of democratic rights but the loss of good wages, secure employment and safe working conditions for all Australian working people.