Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, thank you for your conduct in that regard. The member for Lilley is well known in Queensland. I have known him for 23 years and he is a bit of a joke, really. He is known around the ridges as the ‘member for gilding the Lilley’. Essentially, whatever he says is always a great exaggeration.

Let me tell you exactly what is in the Labor Party’s policy document with regard to industrial relations. Page 14 of the document says that the bargaining participants will be free to reach agreement on whatever matters suit them. But the key thing to remember is that no employee will be able to escape the mantra of ‘no ticket, no start’. If a Labor government is elected later this year, compulsory unionism, either through membership or by involvement in every employment agreement, will be the way Australia is run. Employees will have a union application form stuck under their nose every time they start a new job. Labor’s policy document says that unions will force employers into having the following requirements in workplace agreements: deductions from an employee’s pay or wages for trade union membership subscriptions, paid leave to attend trade union training or union meetings—it could be a barbecue—and bargaining fees to trade unions. So even if you do not want the union directly involved in your discussion you have to pay the union. There is no doubt what the opposition is about in this debate. It is all about the financial purchase the unions have over their decision making. Labor’s policy also says that it will provide unions with information about employees bound by the agreement; that any future agreement must be a union collective agreement, mandating that union involvement must always be there in dispute resolution.

The point I make is that members on the other side are afraid of the facts in relation to their own ambitions. They want a union thug at every door. They want a union boss at every cash register, deciding who is hired and who is fired, and they then take pointless efforts to stop—

A quorum having been called and the bells being rung—

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