Senate debates

Monday, 5 September 2022

Regulations and Determinations

Code for the Tendering and Performance of Building Work Amendment Instrument 2022; Disallowance

7:53 pm

Photo of David ShoebridgeDavid Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise with my Greens colleagues to speak against this disallowance motion. At the outset I acknowledge the contribution of Senator Barbara Pocock, who clearly put the case for why this disallowance motion is just part of the coalition's ongoing attack on unions, part of the coalition's bias against unions. I commend her for her contribution.

The creation of the ABCC and the aggressive code that they enforce was a deeply political attack by the Liberal Party, who designed a body to target unions, to target workers and to do everything they could to make it unlawful to be a union in this country, particularly in the construction industry. We've seen repeated million-dollar fines and police raids, trumped-up criminal charges and perhaps the harshest anti-union laws directed against the construction unions that exist in any comparable country on the planet. And of course this was all drafted by former PM Tony Abbott and the now disgraced former High Court judge Dyson Heydon, and it was designed by those two to target the construction union and try to put the union out of business.

And while millions and millions of dollars of public money has been lavished on this attack on the construction union, the industry is largely unregulated, and construction firms that kill their workers, kill young apprentices, go off without a single prosecution. And what do we hear from the coalition about the deaths of building workers? Not one word. Did we see anybody from the coalition go and see the film Lethal Bias? Did any of them go, to hear from the parents, hear from the mums, hear from the dads, who were talking about their kids who went to work at a construction site—unregulated because of your rules, without a union because of your rules—and died on site and didn't come home? And there was not a single word from this bunch of hypocrites over here. They're still backing in Tony Abbott's war on unions. They don't care about the young apprentice who was killed in a scissor lift or the collapsing scaffold that's been dodgily put together, where it's a crime for the union to go on and do a safety inspection, under their rules. They don't care. They want to criminalise the union, take the union out of business, because they don't care.

Well, we won't support that code. The lawlessness in this industry is not from people putting stickers on helmets or posters in lunch rooms. The lawlessness in this industry comes from builders cutting safety corners, excluding the union, failing to live up to their work health and safety obligations and seeing workers go to work and not come home. That's the lawlessness from the unregulated industry. But I've got to say, at a state level, it has been a combined project of Labor and coalition governments—deregulating the construction industry, making it one of the most dangerous industries in this country, full of phoenix companies, tax dodgers, work health and safety breaches and crimes. That's the industry they love, because it maximises profit. They don't care about the apprentices who don't come home. They don't care about worksite safety. They want to have a war on stickers and a war on flags, not a war about safety or protecting anybody, because that's their politics, right? They hate unions, they love profits and they don't give a rats about safety. That's the coalition summed up in one go, and that's what this motion is about.

A watchdog with teeth is clearly needed in the construction industry to keep an eye on the employers and keep an eye on unions if they step out of line, but not to be running multi-million-dollar cases because you don't like a bunch of posters in the lunch room or you don't like stickers on someone's hat or a flag on a crane. What are you afraid of with a flag on a crane? I appreciate some of the work of Josh Bornstein. He has fought some of these nonsense cases. He wrote a piece in March this year setting out some of the outrageous hypocrisy in this space. He points out a prosecution of union officials who visited a union delegate to catch up over a cup of tea. That was the prosecution: a union official catching up with a union delegate over a cup of tea. It was a case commenced by the ABCC. Do you know what the Federal Court said about it? This is what the federal judge said:

… this is a case where the ABCC should be publicly exposed as having wasted public money without a proper basis for doing so …

But you love that. It's not your money; it's just taxpayers' money! You don't read the judgement. You don't care.

And then Bornstein says:

And who can forget the televised raids by federal police on the premises of the Australian Workers Union in late 2017?

That was apparently because they didn't do their paperwork 10 years ago. It was a highly publicised, televised raid on the AWU for 10-year-old paperwork, all paid for, under this mob in government, by the taxpayers.

Bornstein also points out:

In his zeal to prevent union officials from attending workplaces, Nigel Hadgkiss, then the head of the ABCC, published misinformation encouraging employers to restrict unions from accessing workplaces. Such conduct was found to have contravened the Fair Work Act, and Hadgkiss was forced to resign in 2017.

ABCC itself engaged in serious unlawful activity, and what did we get from this lot? Not even embarrassment. They just put some new headkicker into the ABCC. They don't even care. In fact, they gave Hadgkiss a nice little retirement gift, again at public expense.

Bornstein says this as well:

Two years earlier—

that's two years before Hadgkiss, the head of the ABCC, breached the Fair Work Act to try and discourage union activities—

two union officials had their lives turned upside down when they were charged with blackmail over a coffee meeting with company executives to discuss an industrial dispute. The charges fell apart three years later.

They fell apart. But that's what those opposite want to spend taxpayers' money on, Mr Acting Deputy President.

Meanwhile, under their watch, when the corporate regulator, ASIC, exposed what was going on in Crown Resorts—and again I appreciate Borstein's summary here:

ASIC said that it would not prosecute the directors of Crown Resorts notwithstanding findings by an independent inquiry that Crown had engaged in "conduct that was variously illegal, dishonest, unethical and exploitative" over many years. According to the Finkelstein inquiry, the illegal conduct included money laundering, lying to the gaming regulator and tax cheating. Its board was found to have failed to ensure that the company met its legal obligations.

But this lot love Crown. They love Crown. They love the gross illegality of Crown. They love it.

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