Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The bill seeks to re-establish the Australian Building and Construction Commission. That commission was initially created in 2005 to investigate breaches of, and to enforce, federal industrial law in the building and construction industry. If the Building and Construction Commission is re-established, it will have coercive powers that will compel ordinary workers to be subject to secret interviews, to be denied legal representation and to be threatened with imprisonment if the person subject to such coercive powers refuses to cooperate. In my view these powers are excessive, undemocratic and unwarranted. The bill extends the reach of the Building and Construction Commission well beyond where it is now into picketing, 'offshore construction to as far as Australia's exclusive economic zone or waters above the continental shelf', and will encompass the transport or supply of goods to building sites, including resource platforms. The new powers aimed at stopping pickets include a reverse onus requiring individuals to prove that they were not motivated by industrial objectives in order to escape the maximum $34,000 penalty. How on earth can a reverse onus of proof be justified here?

I note that the Prime Minister has made a habit of referring to his workplace policies as 'returning the industrial relations pendulum back to the sensible centre'. But demonising construction employees and their representative bodies by returning to the Building and Construction Commission is a mile away from the sensible centre. For the Prime Minister, going back to the future with the ABCC is highly personal. It is, after all, the Prime Minister who called for the 2001 Cole royal commission into criminality, fraud and corruption within the building and construction industry. This is despite the ABCC having no role in investigating crime, let alone organised crime—which is obviously a matter for the police. After 18 months and $66 million, what was an expensive political stunt failed to produce a single criminal conviction.

In this 44th Parliament, the Prime Minister has resumed his attack on workers' rights and entitlements. The ABCC's proposed powers are extreme, unnecessary and compromise civil liberties. Those proposed powers include unfettered coercive powers, secretive interviews and imprisonment for those who do not cooperate. People interviewed have no right to silence and are denied the right to be represented by a lawyer of their choice. Is this the supposed sensible centre that the Prime Minister has referred to? After promising to revive the ABCC, the Prime Minister has in fact broken his pledge—not the only promise the government has broken, by the way—because this legislation extends the reach of the ABCC into picketing, offshore construction and the transport and supply of goods to building sites. This is not a revival; the re-established Building and Construction Commission will have significantly broader powers than its 2005 incarnation. The Prime Minister's ABCC is not, in his own words, the tough cop on the beat; it is an unnecessary 'workplace bully'.

In its second reading of this bill, the government attempted to justify the need to return to the ABCC by referring to a recent report completed by consulting firm Independent Economics, or Econtech, as it was formerly known. This firm has a long history of churning out report after report which attack workers and their unions while claiming to demonstrate a path to improve productivity. The government failed to disclose that this consulting firm once had the rare distinction of producing modelling so inaccurate that former Federal Court judge Murray Wilcox slammed their work as 'deeply flawed' and recommended that it 'ought to be totally disregarded'. Indeed, former Commissioner of the ABCC, Leigh Johns, has told the Senate that even the ABCC removed the reports from its website.

If you ask why the government would be doing this if their professed reason for doing this does not stack up, you see that it is the barely disguised, thinly disguised, intention of this legislation to cripple and hamstring the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Employees Union, the CFMEU. The House needs to appreciate that this union plays a very important role in the construction industry, which includes blowing the whistle on various abuses which take place in that industry, including abuses of the migrant worker program, such as the 457 visas.

A recent example drawn to my attention was of the group of Hungarian men brought to Australia on temporary visas allegedly as highly skilled technicians but instead being used as labourers in a Western Sydney warehouse. They were promised Australian rates of pay—around $30 an hour. Instead, for the last four months they have been paid around $15 an hour to help build a warehouse in Sydney's Eastern Creek. They were working as riggers, forklift drivers and general labourers, not as the mechanical engineering technicians that the 457 visas specified, and indeed none of them have qualifications or experience as mechanical engineering technicians. The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union was representing the men in this case and putting forward their concerns and the fact that the majority of them have little or no English and that they needed to have this kind of representation and support to avoid being ripped off by what was, in this case, an unscrupulous employer. It is regrettable that the government have a blind spot in relation to this industry and this union. This blind spot is part of their ignorance of the evidence that the current building industry regulation arrangements are working well.

Fair Work Building and Construction, established by Labor, already has sufficient powers to deal with any unlawful behaviour in the industry. Fair Work Building and Construction has to date outperformed—and I dare say will continue to outperform—its predecessor, the ABCC. Fair Work Building and Construction has a full suite of appropriate investigative and prosecution powers to deal with any unlawful behaviour in the building and construction industry, whether by employers, employees, unions or contractors. Fair Work Building and Construction is undertaking more investigations, concluding investigations, getting matters to court faster, and recovering more money for workers in the industry. Fair Work Building and Construction has secured over $2 million in unpaid wages and entitlements for more than 1,500 workers. These were the sorts of breaches that the ABCC was never focused on.

ABS data shows that the rate of industrial disputation in the building and construction industry is on average less than one-fifth of the rate seen under the previous, coalition government. Labour productivity has increased over the last 10 quarters and on average is almost three times higher under Fair Work than under Work Choices. Under Fair Work, the rates of industrial disputes are on average around one-third the rate we saw under the previous, coalition government. This is at a time when more Australians than ever before are covered by enterprise agreements, which shows that the vast majority of agreements are made without any industrial action at all.

It is regrettable that we have a Liberal government with a determination to take Australia back to the ABCC as the beginning of an ideological agenda to deregulate our industrial relations system. This is from a party which is still enamoured of theories of neoclassical economics. It is this kind of world view that blew up the world economy back in 2008. Yet, despite everything we learned from the global financial crisis, we have a government that look the other way and ignore the lessons that this crisis revealed. They still subscribe to that myth that a rising tide lifts all boats. But, as one IMF economist has said:

When a handful of yachts become ocean liners while the rest remain lowly canoes, something is seriously amiss.

As TheGuardian journalist and columnist George Monbiot has written:

The neoliberals … insisted that unrestrained inequality in incomes and flexible wages would reduce unemployment. But throughout the rich world both inequality and unemployment have soared. The recent jump in unemployment in most developed countries—worse than in any previous recession of the past three decades—was preceded by the lowest level of wages as a share of GDP since the second world war. Bang goes the theory. It failed for the same obvious reason: low wages suppress demand, which suppresses employment.

The desire to pursue politically motivated witch-hunts like this is because it is a means of slashing workers' rights and entitlements. Not only will Labor oppose this bill; we will fight the Abbott government's ideological war on working Australians, including in the building and construction industry, every step of the way.

I point out to the House that the Australian government is subject to international human rights obligations under customary international law and as a result of the ratification of international legal instruments. Failure to abide by these obligations, which include a number of basic rights for workers, has significant implications for the protection and promotion of human rights in Australia and for our reputation internationally.

The former Building and Construction Industry Improvement Act 2005 was found by the United Nations International Labour Organization to repeatedly and unequivocally breach Australia's obligations as a member-state and as a signatory to conventions which include the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention of 1947, the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention of 1949 and the Labour Inspection Convention of 1947. That act was found by the ILO supervisory bodies to breach Australia's international obligations in that it exposed building industry employees to penalties for taking industrial action in a wider range of circumstances than other employees, virtually rendering all forms of industrial action in the building and construction sector unlawful; there was an imposition of penalties and sanctions upon workers and unions that engaged in 'unlawful industrial action' that were significantly higher than those imposed on workers in other sectors; there were provisions in the act that rendered project agreements unenforceable; the provisions of the code of practice contained restrictions on freedom of association and collective bargaining; and there were draconian monitoring and investigatory and enforcement powers for the ABCC, including the powers to enter premises, take possession of documents 'for as long as necessary' and compulsorily interview any person for 'compliance purposes'. These things were all found to be breaches of Australia's international obligations.

Reports were initially commissioned by the ABCC at public expense and were later regularly recommissioned by Master Builders Australia as a political tool. We have seen, however, that the Econtech report on which the government relies is seriously flawed and makes all sorts of assumptions which cannot be backed up or substantiated. When they talk about union involvement accounting for cost differentials across various sectors, they ignore factors such as the difference between construction on a high-rise as opposed to a single-storey dwelling. Economic experts from the Queensland industrial relations department and from Griffith University found no evidence of costs narrowing between the two sectors since the establishment of the ABCC—if anything, the gap slightly widened.

Labour law should be balanced, promoting both the interests of employers and employees and the value of fairness and collectivity. Labor opposes this legislation which forces a return to the draconian Australian Building and Construction Commission that is based on flawed modelling. Its proposed powers are extreme and unnecessary and compromise civil liberties. We already have sufficient powers to deal with any unlawful behaviour in the industry. This legislation is all about an ideological agenda and a nudge and a wink to employers that the good ol' days are returning where diminution of wages and conditions and compromised safety on construction sites will be the order of the day.

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