Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution on this disallowance motion on the Code for the Tendering and Performance of Building Work Amendment Instrument 2022. In coming after Senator Paterson's very good remarks, it is appropriate that I start off on this theme of vested interests. The reality is that there will always be vested interests. That will be the case in any organisation. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating was mentored by Jack Lang, who was a former Premier of New South Wales. I believe Mr Lang coined this expression: in the great race of life always back self-interest because at least you'll know it's trying. It is, I believe, a very true statement that conflicts are perhaps unavoidable, but it is the job of ministers to work to their oaths, to take their oaths seriously and to only pursue public policy initiatives which are genuinely in the public interest.

It is true that the Labor Party won the election with a very threadbare agenda. They had some policies—some bad ones and some good ones, to be fair—but they had very few policies. So now, in these first 100 or so days, they have had to pull together, fashion together or thrash together a bit of an agenda for the next little while. They have been able to pick up the speed dial to their closest associates and say: 'What have you got in the top drawer? What are the issues we can work on that will make us look as if we're doing something? We need to do something now we're in this job.' It's like the dog that caught the car.

Senator Paterson eloquently walked through a pretty good list of the vested interests which are ruling the roost here. There is no problem with having a summit and discussing policy issues. In some ways it's quite refreshing. But I'm not sure that the invitation list really reflects the modern economy we have. This particular issue of the ABCC is part of a pattern of behaviour that we have seen already across class action law firms and superannuation.

The point about restraining vested interests and protecting against the concentration of power is very important in a democracy. It's very important that governments are not captured by vested interests. My own political party, or my own side of politics, has had a very mixed history with these issues over the long run. The predecessor party of the Liberal Party, the UAP—which I note has now been reborn in some sort of new capacity here in Canberra—was effectively destroyed because the vested interests which had been involved in the party's governance and had paid the party's bills then sought to set the policies of that party. That party was run into the ground, and Menzies set the party up in a way whereby policies were not going to be set by the people who paid the bills, because they had clear conflicts of interest in doing so. Unfortunately, the Labor Party is now where the original UAP was some 80 years ago. Their paymasters are setting the policies. That is a risk for the nation and it's also a risk for the Labor Party.

On the issue of this particular measure, the case has been made very effectively by my colleagues that when you're looking at an economy of this magnitude, almost 10 per cent, when you're talking about a labour market component of 1.15 million, and when you're looking at unbundling an institution which has already proven its value by reducing labour costs, by increasing productivity and by effectively dealing with the cases that were brought to its front door, you have to ask yourself why you would want to do this.

Of course, we know the answers. I won't bore the chamber with those answers again. They've been well and truly set out. It is, as I say, a pattern of behaviour. The ABCC has to go because the CFMMEU say it's not good for their operation. The regulation we put in place to ensure that all the superannuation funds would have to disclose the contributions they make to unions has to go because, again, the unions don't want to have that. The super funds certainly don't want to tell their members where they're sending their money.

Equally, the class action lawyers don't want to lose money, because the way that it's established now means they can run the cases. It's very important that we have class actions. It's a very important way for people to be able to access justice. But the idea that these class action law firms would not be subject to regulation when they are running managed investment schemes, often on behalf of thousands of people, is ridiculous. The proposals that were before this parliament were simply that you can run a class action but you can't take all the money if you're the law firm. You've got to maintain a reasonable balance, and the bulk of the money that is won in a class action should go to the people for whom you're working. That is a reasonable proposition but apparently no good, because of course class action lawyers and donors don't like it.

I do want to talk about this issue of where some of these things come together, because I think there is no question that the CFMMEU does have considerable power over the Labor Party. We have talked about the donations they make directly to the Labor Party, and we have also canvassed in these contributions this evening and earlier in the day the statement that Mr Stephen Jones, the Assistant Treasurer, made on Friday night when he made a regulation that removes the requirement for super funds to disclose their payments that they make to unions. All they have to do now is aggregate these payments. Mr Jones in his media statement he said that he was going to maintain the requirement for the super funds to disclose their political donations. That's very cute because anyone who has looked at this matter knows that the money is washed through the unions; it is not paid directly to the Labor Party itself. Doing that, effectively allowing the aggregation of the money from the funds into unions to be maintained, is giving a green light for the money to be supercharged.

I do want to talk about the amount of money here that has been paid over the past few years. The CFMMEU is the number one recipient of all the unions out of the superannuation system, from super funds, over the last five years: in 2016-17 the CFMMEU received $750,000, in 2017-18 the CFMMEU received $1.4 million, in 2018-19 the CFMMEU received $3.5 million, in 2019-20 the CFMEU received $4.7 million and in 2020-21 the CFMMEU received $6.1 million. We've gone from $750,000 in 2016-17 to $6.1 million in 2020-21. Those are not Andrew Bragg's figures; those are the figures that were disclosed on the Australian Electoral Commission website. That is a very good example of where people's retirement savings, which are essentially managed for their benefit, are increasingly being filed into the coffers of the CFMMEU. That is a massive increase over the course of five years.

You have to ask yourself how that can be justified. Under the regulations we made in the former parliament, all of those individual payments would have been disclosed to members. The members of these funds, by the way, are not going to trawl through the Australian Electoral Commission website. They're not going to pull together and sticky tape together pieces of paper that are filed by the various unions in their annual returns which show their income that is paid from other sources. Most people have better things to do than go through and do that, so the whole point of the member disclosures was to set it out in detail so people could see it if they wanted to.

With the aggregation model that Mr Jones made through the regulation on Friday we will now not be able to see the individual payments made into the unions. The minister is free to make his regulation. That's his right under the act. He's been given those powers. Now the Senate will have to decide whether it will stand up for integrity and transparency and make a judgement about whether it thinks that people should be able to see the contributions being made by their super funds to other organisations and whether or not that is something that they want to finance. The same goes for this disallowance. The questions are: will the Senate be prepared to hold the line on an institution which has proven that it has been able to successfully consider cases; that it has been an effective cop on the beat; and that its abolition would result in a loss of productivity in our economy, a hit to GDP and a loss of 4,000 jobs? These are very clear questions that the Senate can consider in this disallowance on the ABCC. I'm sure that there will be an opportunity in the near term for this chamber to consider the matter on the super non-disclosure and the loss of transparency. But of course, this is all just a theme of a government that is seeking to work for vested interests.

One would have hoped that the issues that really matter to the Australian people would have been the subject of this government's early initiatives. But sadly, the government is working through its top drawer of issues and vested interests, and these are the issues that are coming up now. Given that there's a pretty threadbare policy agenda, goodness knows what we'll be seeing 12 months from now. It may be more radical. I mean, I have to say, this is a pretty brazen agenda to try and run all these things through and to assume no-one will care, that the media won't be interested, that it is too technical and that it is too hard to understand.

But my sense is that a lot of these things will be stopped because they are not in the public interest. People will not want to go back to their electorates and say, 'Yes, we allowed the ABCC to go because we didn't think it was important. Yes, we thought it wasn't important that you should know where your super funds are going. Yes, we thought it was a good idea to get rid of the class action regulation because we think that the class action lawyers should have more money than you when you win a case.' I mean, these are not the arguments that people will want to run in the retail environment. These may be impressive arguments to people who need to pay off debts to various vested interests but, at the end of the day, this chamber, surely, given it has great power vested in it, should be always looking to maintain the highest possible standards.

Frankly, we would be doing the Labor government a favour by stopping this particular repeal, by not allowing them to proceed with their antitransparency measures in super and all the other things they want to do because, in the long run, as Senator Paterson, I think, pointed out as well, these are not things which will reflect well on the government in the long-term. In the long-term they will have to justify why they did this. The reality is that these are not the policy initiatives that are the most important things to the economy or to the Australian people. These are the list of issues that are important to a few vested interests that have a disproportionate amount of power over the government and over the governing political party. So I'll be voting on this disallowance to ensure that the ABCC can be maintained for the good governance of the construction industry.