Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Hansard source

I am a union member. I am also a father. I have been a lawyer, a community worker, a bar attendant, a building worker and a teacher. I have done many, many jobs in my life before coming to this parliament, and I apologise for absolutely none of them.

The bill before the House, the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Bill 2013, is everything about the union-bashing agenda of the Abbott government and those who follow in its train. Those opposite are absolutely obsessed with demonising unions, their leaders and the important work that they do on a daily basis in protecting ordinary working women and men.

I am an unapologetic defender of the special role that unions play in our society. There is no other organisation that has the reach, the resources, the capacity and the inclination to challenge tyranny in the way that Australian unions can and do—irrespective of who is in government. Unions are not without fault, but we are a more civilised country in Australia today because they exist.

If you want to talk about tyranny, with this legislation before the House today we can see that tyranny is being turned on its head. It is the tyranny of the government against the organisation of ordinary working Australian men and women that we should be fearful of. This legislation is despicable because it is entirely politically motivated. It is legislation based on ideology with no public policy credentials. Sadly, I fear that it will not be the last of this sort that we see before this House.

Can I address the spurious productivity arguments that have been dressed up and brought before the House today. Once again, legislation brought before the House is based on a fiction; it is based on misrepresentation and a distortion of the facts. Those opposite claim that this bill is about productivity, when there is simply absolutely no basis for this claim whatsoever.

During the federal election campaign, for example, the Prime Minister claimed that the existence of the ABCC had led to $6 billion a year of productivity savings and cost reductions. That is absolute bunkum. The claim was investigated by a reputed independent fact checker during the campaign. It is, I add, a fact checker that did not give a tick to everything that Labor said during that campaign. This is what it had to say about this ridiculous proposition by the Prime Minister: it found the claims to be 'mostly false'.

In his second reading speech, Minister Pyne relied heavily on a report by Independent Economics, formerly known as Econtech, a report commissioned by the Master Builders Association, to justify his spurious productivity claims. I have had a look at the report. It is interesting. You should have a look at it, Deputy Speaker. It says the following:

… it is considered that separate attribution of labour productivity improvements to the ABCC and industrial relations reforms is not possible, because they both need to operate together to be effective.

If you want an independent analysis, go no further than the very well regarded Justice Wilcox, who studied and reported on these laws for the government. He said, not surprisingly, that he found the Econtech study to be deeply flawed.

I will talk about the coercive powers, because the government would like to slide this stuff under the cushion and have not very much said about it at all. The bill authorises the ABCC to exert coercive powers. It will enable the ABCC to require any person to provide information or documents in relation to an investigation of a suspected contravention of the bill. The legislation will also enable the ABCC to compulsorily interrogate any person who may have such information or documents, or they risk six months imprisonment.

You could be forgiven for thinking that you had woken up in Soviet Russia when you look at this legislation before the House. This is a democracy. It is not the sort of country where we want to see innocent people or potentially innocent people subjected to a denial of the legal rights that we provide to criminals or suspected criminals in this country. The introduction of these kinds of coercive powers should send alarm bells throughout the community. It is akin to treating building workers as terrorists.

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