Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak on the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2013 in this place because it gives me the opportunity to raise many concerns that the coalition and the working public of Australia have with this legislation. It is passing strange that with well over a hundred pieces of legislation on the Notice Paper that this should need to be urgently dealt with in the last 11 days of this dying parliament. We know why: it is to lock in the base of the Labor Party and Prime Minister Julia Gillard in particular. We know that they need to maintain the rivers of gold that come from the unions to fund the Australian Labor Party. The coalition has a strong record of supporting workers. One of the best things you can do for a worker is to give them a job and, under us, unemployment reached its lowest point in modern political history.

I would like to place on the record that the coalition is all for stamping out workplace bullying and providing more flexibility to employers. A lot of this came about because the Cole royal commission found there was a culture of lawlessness and a lack of the rule of law in industrial and building sites in this country. We established the Australian Building and Construction Commission to deal with this, and it was very effective. However, this particular legislation seeks to expand the influence and rights of union bosses in Australian workplaces, particularly through its right-of-entry provisions. This bill states that in the absence of an agreement between an employer and union officials on where meetings with employees will take place, unions will be able to host meetings in workplace lunchrooms or crib rooms. They even charge employers the cost of travelling to and from the workplace.

I am one of the people in this place who actually knows Mick Young, the famous former Labor member of parliament, one of the last real representatives of workers in this place, who said: 'You can't come here unless you've washed your hands in Solvol.' Mick had obviously washed his hands in Solvol, and I have done the same. I have worked on building and construction sites myself and I can tell you that having union bosses enter the lunch room when you want to get away from everything, when you are not a union member, is not very tantalising. It is not a great idea. You want a bit of peace, not the harassment that comes with this right-of-entry legislation.

This is just another attempt by the Gillard government to appease, as I said, the union bosses who have kept them in power and to erode previous reforms that were implemented to curb the dominance of unions in the workplace. The changes to the right-of-entry provisions outlined in the bill will mean that the default location will be the lunch room, as I said. But, with only 13 per cent of Australian employees being members of the union, the remaining 87 per cent will face constant harassment and bullying from union officials on their own work sites.

Once again, this is a broken promise from Prime Minister Gillard. Prior to the 2007 election, the Prime Minister stated on numerous occasions that there would be no changes to the right-of-entry provisions. In a press conference in August 2007, she stated:

We will make sure that current right of entry provisions stay. We understand that entering on the premises of an employer needs to happen in an orderly way. We will keep the right of entry provisions.

She later reaffirmed this position in questioning by journalists, claiming:

I'm happy to do whatever you would like. If you'd like me to pledge to resign, sign a contract in blood, take a polygraph, bet my house on it, give you my mother as a hostage, whatever you'd like.

That is what she promised. Well, we know never to trust this Prime Minister's so-called promises. Remember the carbon tax promise: there would not be one under the government she leads. But to backflip on a promise she so readily pledged to uphold makes it obvious that it is the union heavyweights and Labor's faceless men that are running this country, not this Prime Minister and this government.

In my home state of Western Australia, we have never seen many instances of union heavyweights being arrested for trespassing on various building sites and workplaces. Notorious union thugs, including the CFMEU's former WA secretary Kevin Reynolds and the current acting CFMEU national president, Joe McDonald, have a long history of criminal behaviour associated with their union activities at work sites. Joe McDonald readily says, when he is stopped about his nefarious activities, 'But we're a militant union,' as if to say that is an excuse for misbehaving and breaking the law. Interestingly, the current workplace relations minister, Bill Shorten, went to Western Australia recently and met with the MUA, and said how attracted he was to the MUA because they were so militant. There you are: the current workplace relations minister, who is meant to see the calming of relationships between employers and employees, saying that he wants to see more militancy in the workforce. As I have said before in this place, fancy putting a union boss like Bill Shorten in charge of the ministry. It is a dog-in-the-manger approach, and that is what is happening in relation to this legislation.

Now, Joe McDonald—getting back to that great Western Australian!—and the CFMEU have racked up over $1 million in fines since 2005 from Fair Work Building & Construction in response to claims of workplace bullying. Mr McDonald has also faced criminal charges and has been arrested on numerous occasions, as well as being forced to face court and defend these charges. Last year, Fair Work Building & Construction's Leigh Jones claimed that Mr McDonald was misusing members' fees in order to settle court disputes. So not only is he abusing the workers; he is also using union people's money to pay his fines. So much for those who take money out of their own pay only to see Joe using it to get himself out of jail and to blatantly flout workplace laws. In WA alone, Mr McDonald has been banned from workplace sites for his militant behaviour, further discouraging people from joining this cause—and Mr McDonald is certainly not alone in this type of behaviour.

We know that, in 2007, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd expelled Mr McDonald from the ALP due to his thuggish behaviour and criminal convictions. Guess what? He has just rejoined the Labor Party! As soon as Kev goes, good old Joe gets back in—and he wanted to run for the Senate, I understand. What is even more frightening for employers and employees alike is that the CFMEU has since decided to appoint Mr McDonald national president, despite his great, nefarious history.

As I said earlier, Mick Young washed his hands in Solvol—a real representative of the workers. That is what the unions were based on during the great shearing strikes of the 1900s, the belief that unions were needed to protect the rights of the workers—

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