Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

It is interesting, because your minister has commented on those reports. Maybe you should refer back to her speech. It is interesting that members opposite would interject that this is not true. So apparently there has not been any bad behaviour at the Westgate Bridge. This is probably a great example of the sort of denial the Labor Party members are in. If they were not in that denial, how could they support the abolition of this body that has brought law and order back to this industry?

Let me just go through the examples of behaviour that apparently have not occurred at the Westgate Bridge site. What has happened is that union officials there have surrounded the manager of the construction company, called him a dog, abused him, banged on windows, kicked the front door off its tracks, impeded people from going to work and abused staff. Even a cursory search on the internet, if members opposite would like to undertake that, will show documentary photo evidence of this happening. This needs to be considered in the context that the company is paying workers on that site, on average, $135,000 a year, which I think by any measure is a reasonable wage.

We have also seen balaclava clad, militant raiders involved in high-speed car chases. There have been allegations of bikies being paid money to attend protests. There have been attacks on the private homes of supervisors. There has been damage to vehicles. There have been bricks thrown through windows, with death threats. Ultimately, police have been called in to protect workers who just wanted to go onto that site and do their job. All of this has happened within the last 12 months. Now we find this government is going to abolish the one body that has the powers to  control this sort of behaviour.

I am happy to go on with examples of bad behaviour. Again I will turn to Western Australia, which is subject to the CFMEU in particular, who have an incredibly blackened record of behaviour within the building and construction industry. The infamous Joe McDonald, whom I referred to earlier, had his right-of-entry permit withdrawn at state and federal levels some time ago. Despite this, in 2008 the Industrial Relations Commission had to force an undertaking from the secretary of the CFMEU’s WA branch that Mr McDonald would not continue to enter sites unlawfully. This was a result of a complaint from Multiplex. Mr McDonald had entered their sites on over 30 occasions without a valid permit. In a media interview afterwards, Mr McDonald said that he would continue to illegally enter building sites, despite the undertakings that had been given to the Industrial Relations Commission. So clearly this is not a union or a union official with much respect for the law.

The Cole royal commission  found that payments had been made to the CFMEU in Western Australia of over $1½ million for so-called casual tickets, which is basically money paid in return for industrial peace on sites where all workers are not members of the union. The Cole commission found that, of the $1½ million that had been paid, they could only trace less than $500,000 of that money. So $1 million of this money paid to the CFMEU has just disappeared.

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