Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to speak on the same disallowance matter, but first I want to say that there's nothing that sets the Liberal and National parties into fits of hysteria more than the mere mention of the CFMMEU. I'm not sure whether anyone in the opposition has ever actually met a CFMMEU member or official. They seem to think construction workers and unionists are three-headed fire-breathing monsters. Being a lifelong trade unionist myself, I'm going to let the opposition in on a little secret about trade unions. Union leaders are elected by union members. Union members are everyday rank-and-file workers—members of the community fighting for better conditions and fair rates of pay for their work mates and their families. So, when the coalition gets up and talks about 'union thugs', they're actually talking about construction workers and those people fighting for decent rates—the people who built this building, built their offices and built their homes. I know that some of those opposite don't like to mingle with the hoi polloi, but if they ever find their way out of the boardroom or the Qantas lounge or if they meet a construction worker, they might realise that they aren't that scary.

When this disallowance motion was first introduced, in the last sitting week in July, I spared myself from sitting through some of the absolute nonsense that was being spouted in this chamber. Instead, I went over to the parliamentary theatre and watched the premiere screening of a documentary titled Lethal Bias: The War to Criminalise Australia's Construction Workers. It was commissioned by the construction union and produced by the celebrated former ABC journalist Matt Peacock. Anyone contributing to the debate should watch it. It is packed with something that is often lacking from the debate about the ABCC and the CFMMEU: facts. For starters, the notion that the ABCC has anything to do with making work sites safe is utter nonsense. Construction is up there with road transport as one of the deadliest industries in Australia. There is an organisation that goes on to work sites to make sure things are safe, and that organisation is the CFMMEU. There is another organisation that exists solely to harass and impede the union from doing that work. That organisation is the ABCC.

Let hal Bias tells the story of Christopher Cassaniti. Christopher was an 18-year-old apprentice who died at a Macquarie Park work site in 2019 when 17 metres of scaffolding collapsed on him. The scaffolding was massively overloaded and was not tied together appropriately. It was obvious to anyone who knew anything about scaffolding that this was a disaster waiting to happen. Christopher was trapped under tonnes and tonnes of concrete and steel. He was stuck under there, screaming for help, for 20 minutes, while his work mates, many of them in the CFMMEU, frantically tried to pull him from the rubble. Those are the real heroes.

The ABCC never once bothered to look into the safety on that site—or on any other site, for that matter. What is the ABCC doing instead? While Christopher and others are dying on construction sites every week, they are spending millions on running court cases about stickers and flags. They are losing cases in the High Court seeking to block a woman's bathroom from being installed on a work site. The ABCC's core business is to stop the CFMMEU from making work sites safe. The ABCC's core business is to protect shonky property developers and contractors who want to cut corners and use loopholes to squeeze out an extra buck. When you cut corners on safety, construction workers die. This is the system the ABCC exists to protect. This is the system that the opposition is trying to save.

Not only does the ABCC run a protection racket for deadly worksites; they also run a protection racket for wage theft and sham contracting. In six years, the ABCC has recovered the grand sum of $15,000 for sham contracting. In six years, the ABCC has not prosecuted a single employer for sham contracting. In six years, the ABCC has recovered $4 million in wage theft. In that same period, the CFMMEU has recovered over $100 million for workers, despite the best efforts of the ABCC to stop them from going about their work. The ABCC has nothing to do with safety, pay or conditions. That's obvious.

So why are those opposite wasting time with this disallowance motion? It is because this is really all about the right wing's ongoing scare campaign about unions. Does anyone remember the coalition's royal commission into the unions, when the coalition hired a sexual predator named Dyson Heydon to run a show trial more befitting a Third World dictatorship? For those opposite who may have forgotten, the dog and pony show did not lead to a single conviction. In fact, all it led to was the creation of the ABCC to continue on the anti-union witch-hunt.

The first ABCC commissioner, Nigel Hadgkiss, was forced to resign for breaching—get ready for it—the Fair Work Act. How about that? The Liberals went two for two: Dyson and Nigel. I'll congratulate the current ABCC commissioner for being the first to avoid committing a crime or breaching the Fair Work Act—as least as far as I am aware—although he does lose points for collaborating with the Master Builders Association during their campaign to re-elect the Morrison government. I would love to see Mr McBurney's notes from the 14 separate meetings the ABCC had with the MBA during the campaign.

Speaking of the Master Builders Association, perhaps the greatest farce of all in the debate has been notion that the ABCC has improved productivity in the construction industry. The last time we saw productivity growth in construction was after the previous Labor government abolished the earlier iteration of the ABCC. Since it was reinstated, productivity has actually declined in the sector. What do the Liberals and Master Builders rely on to support this absurd argument? A survey commissioned by the Master Builders Association, which, as it turns out, has just 49 hand-picked respondents—a survey that has been described by respected University of Sydney economist Dr Philip Toner as 'empirically empty and useless'. I couldn't sum up the ABCC nor the disallowance motion better if I tried.