Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to support the excellent motion moved by the member for Wright. It is one that encapsulates the feelings of many Australians who are very angry at the form of the Australian union movement and in particular at the political arm of the union movement, the Australian Labor Party. The reality is that tens of thousands of ordinary working Australians who are making award wages have seen their money frittered away by hacks in the union movement who have squandered the hard earned money of those lowly paid Australians while members of the Labor Party averted their eyes.

This motion seeks to encapsulate the strong community sentiment that enough is enough. Australians are tired of the Australian Labor Party looking the other way while tens of thousands of dollars—and in some instances there are allegations of hundreds of thousands of dollars—of the money of low-paid Australian workers is spent at the behest of union leaders to support the things that union leaders want. This motion is a good starting point, but in reality what we need is a royal commission into the Australian union movement. The Australian union movement should be subjected to a royal commission so that we can get to the bottom of what is going on. A labour force of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are seeing the money that they pay to the union movement—a million dollars in one union alone—misappropriated.

I noticed that Labor members opposite laughed. Labor's fundamental problem is that they think it is funny when potentially millions of dollars are misappropriated. When a member of parliament stands up and says, 'We will stand up for low-paid Australian workers', says that it is not good enough that their money is being misappropriated, it is not good enough that the Australian Labor Party turns the other way and it is not good enough that they fly blind in the face of the allegations, it concerns me that Labor Party members think that is funny. And why do they think it is funny? Here is the great con: the reason they think it is funny is that basically every single member of the Australian Labor Party is a former union hack who has bought their way into the Australian parliament. Workers pay their fees to the unions and that money helps pay for the campaign activities of Labor members. That is why people on our side turn their noses up at the sheer rank hypocrisy of Australian Labor Party members when it comes to the fees that are paid to low-paid Australian workers.

There should be a royal commission into exactly what is going on the trade union movement. But the extraordinary thing is that the allegations have been around for a long time. I have had allegations put to me by an unsuccessful tenderer for a public authority who lost out on a tender despite the fact that they were the cheapest tenderer. They investigated why they lost the contract. What went wrong? It was reported back that they had not made big enough contributions to the so-called training funds of a particular union. This is what concerns us. Allegations like that have been around—

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