John Madigan (Victoria, Democratic Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak as Australia marks yet another free trade agreement—this time with Japan. I rise at the end of a day of self-congratulation by both sides of politics. Prime Minister Abbott has again confirmed his commitment to free trade fundamentalism. He said that this latest agreement will improve the prosperity of both nations. Only last week, opposition Senate leader Penny Wong, speaking at a conference in Melbourne, said the ALP would not abandon its longstanding commitment to free trade. But I challenge both the Prime Minister and Senator Wong to open their diaries to public scrutiny. I challenge them to show us the amount of time they actually spend on factory floors. In the last 12 months, how much time have the Prime Minister and Senator Wong spent with business owners, industry associations and employees? That is where I spend most of my time when I am not in this place.

Manufacturing, farming and food processing are the engine rooms of this country. That is where jobs are created and sustained. Jobs in these sectors are the key to healthy families and community life. Jobs are integral to creating and sustaining a society that is economically, socially and environmentally viable. That is my ethos as the DLP senator for Victoria, and for almost 60 years now that central credo has been at the heart of my party, the Democratic Labour Party.

The very loud, very clear message I get from Australians I meet is singular and direct. People in manufacturing tell me that the blind adherence to free trade in this country is killing them and destroying jobs. They say no other country in the world operates with such open arms to trade as Australia does. They say no other country in the world allows itself to be swamped by faulty, dangerous, non-compliant products as Australia does, all in the name of free trade. Not only that, the substantial importation of defective products is putting Australian lives and Australian families at risk. The unpoliced, unaudited, inadequately monitored market that exists here is allowing the importation of faulty and dangerous windows and electrical equipment on a massive scale. Free trade agreements are not fair trade agreements. Australia has become a landfill site for crap made overseas. There is a lack of enforcement here. There is a lack of credible deterrence. In the building industry, this is happening in plague proportions.

Let me digress for one moment. I refer to a recent newspaper report of a young woman found dead on the New South Wales Central Coast. She was found wearing headphones and with burns to her ears and chest. The report indicated that a faulty charger, illegally imported from overseas, sent high voltage through her body. The business that sold the charger was subsequently shut down. Hundreds of dodgy and non-compliant USB chargers were seized. But this terrible incident raises serious questions for the government and the opposition. I am not wishing to make political capital out of this tragedy, but the woman who died was a mother of two. She was about to start work as a theatre nurse at Gosford hospital. Any life prematurely struck down is a tragedy, even more so in this case considering this woman's youth and potential and the family she left behind. The disaster seems more poignant and regrettable considering the unusual circumstances of her death.

We, in this country, stand on a precipice. The unchecked importation of illegal and dangerous products into Australia is happening at an alarming rate. Tonight I will address one aspect of this issue—and possibly the most important—and that is the structural quality and safety of family homes. The persistent flood of illegal and dangerous building products threatens the lives of Australians. It threatens their homes. It threatens their jobs. It continues unabated and under the radar. It continues because of systemic regulatory failure. It is a symptom of blind adherence to free trade that operates nowhere else in the world like it does here. Most of all it continues because of the attitudes of the Liberal coalition government and the ALP.

Homes are the biggest investments in people's lives. Homes are their places of sanctuary. Homes are where we raise our children. What is taking place in the home building sector is breathtaking. It is happening because of ignorance and lack of action by governments of both persuasions. What is taking place is killing Australian companies, it is killing Australian jobs, and it will kill Australian people. This is the pink batts fiasco on steroids but with much wider ramifications. In fact, I will speak specifically of pink batts in a minute. I will speak of how a senior government minister, Mr Garrett, the minister in charge of the former government's much maligned program, ignored specific warnings. And we are seeing the same thing again: bureaucrats spouting free trade propaganda, politicians blinded by dogma and policies pursued for an agenda—with absolutely no connection to the reality of average Australians.

A recent report undertaken by the Australian Industry Group, aptly titled The quest for a level playing field, has raised serious concerns about this issue. Of the 222 respondent building sector companies, 92 per cent reported nonconforming products in the sector. Our building sector is drowning in substandard imported windows. Our building sector is drowning in substandard imported electrical and plumbing products. Our building sector is drowning in faulty imported steel and aluminium products. Our newest buildings are packed with imported engineered wood products containing carcinogens such as formaldehyde. And behind walls and under floors and in ceilings, all out of sight and supposedly out of mind, are imported faulty pipes and fittings. If you cared to read the AiG survey, you would see that the new housing estates mushrooming on the outskirts of our capitals and regional cities are ticking time bombs. You would conclude the high-rise commercial and residential buildings in our cities will become sites of devastation, destruction and despair. The level of non-compliant products, the lack of supervision and policing, and the use of dangerous items from overseas will, industry insiders have told me, kill more Australians.

Allied with this is the number of Australian manufacturing firms being crushed by a tidal wave of cheap, non-compliant and substandard building products entering our market. The AiG report said:

Research estimates value the electrical lighting, cable, motors, generators and other electrical equipment market at around $8 billion in Australia in 2013 and employing around 17,600 people.

And according to AIG, this sector is dominated by very low margins and a flood of new market entrants importing products, from Asia and elsewhere, that are not fit for purpose and not conforming to Australian standards.

In the glass and aluminium sector, a $4 billion market last year, employment and manufacturing has been hit hard by the influx of cheap imports. A large percentage of these are noncompliant and undoubtedly dangerous. There were 11,000 glass installers in Australia in 2010, according to the Glass and Glazing Association of Victoria. By 2012, 4,000 of them were no longer in business. Four thousand businesses gone. Many more employees have been cut adrift and many more families impacted.

In 2003, the Australian Windows Association received three requests a year to deal with product or installation issues. Ten years later, the AWA receives three requests a week. The issue of non-compliant, substandard imports is getting worse, not better. Compliant Australian companies are closing because they cannot compete. This is free trade in action. This is free trade Australia-style, where our local manufacturers are being crucified in the face of cheap, dangerous, unregulated imported products.

Just last month an architecture and design website carried a report that a major building project in Melbourne would have to replace $18 million worth of substandard glass—$18 million! The glass came from a Chinese supplier, apparently, and was described by a union as being substandard and low quality. Developer Grocon confirmed the replacement process, saying it was done because some of the glass exhibited blue streaks in polarised light conditions.

All well and good. But what would have been the impact if a faulty glass panel had fallen from the 26th floor? A glass industry person told me a pane of glass plummeting from that height has the capacity to slice through a car parked at ground level. Is this alarmist thinking? Not at all, if you take into account that the rate of velocity is 9.8 metres per second per second.

The Australian Industry Group reports a deeply troubling trend that has resulted in mounting problems around the country. The use of substandard building materials has resulted in expensive and potentially dangerous compromises in safety and quality, not to mention the economic costs to the community and individuals. These include 200 panes of glass that have fallen from the Waterfront Place building in Brisbane. The ASIO government building in Canberra—just down the road—has lost some 21 glass panels. Windows have had to be replaced, in a 24-storey development in Perth, with conforming products. Melbourne's Melburnian apartment block faced a repair bill of $9 million after nine panels of glass failed. These are only a small number of the examples.

If Australian manufacturers were responsible, they would have been pursued through the courts mercilessly. Anecdotally, I have been told of the construction of an elderly citizens' home in Western Australia. The use of non-compliant glass was only discovered when a tradesman fell through a panel. Can you imagine the ramifications if the project had proceeded and the mistake had not been inadvertently discovered?

I dread the state of our building and construction sector in this country. I dread the unimaginable costs of repair and rehabilitation work that we will be faced with over the coming decade. And I fear for the safety of the thousands of Australians who are unknowingly living in houses built with substandard and dangerous glass, electrical and steel products—to name a few. And of course I feel for our manufacturers, who adhere to a strict compliance code. They are valiantly attempting to compete against the cheap and non-compliant building products which are being imported. And I fear for the manufacturers' workers and their families, who face an uncertain future because of this trend.

I acknowledge that Australian companies pay tax here. They pay superannuation and holiday pay and workers compensation. They provide a safe workplace. They do not consume people to make their products. Australian workers receive personal leave and a host of other protections, unlike workers in many foreign companies. And they compete against unregulated and fraudulent operators overseas, who ship dodgy stuff into this market, seemingly at will.

It is now on the public record. Electricians formally warned the then environment minister Mr Garrett that metal roof insulation could cost lives, months before he banned it. Industry sources tell me that repeated advice to the government about industry safeguards was overrun by the political imperative that fuelled the roll-out of the pink batts program. We are on the brink of another disaster. We are again in the grip of a runaway political imperative. This time its name is 'free trade'. But this time I predict we will face a catastrophe that will make the pink batts debacle—even with its tragic loss of life—look like a teddy bears picnic.

People in this place and the other see my opposition to free trade as a historical remnant—an echo from the 1950s and 1960s. 'Poor old Madigan,' they think, 'that poor old senator from the DLP.' But the arrogance of successive Australian governments will go down in history. The avoidable loss of life through complacency and ignorance will go down in history. History will judge this government harshly, as it has already judged the Rudd and Gillard governments. History will look back on our infatuation with free trade and judge us foolish men and women who fiddled while Rome burned. The fires are burning. The smoke is on the horizon. And we do nothing at our peril.