Gai Brodtmann (Canberra, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

No. This would mean more government intervention from this government whose favourite catchcry is that they want to cut red tape. They are now introducing special regulation for one industry alone, without justification. Australia's industrial laws should be enforced in the building and construction industry in the same way as in any other industry. As Justice Wilcox said in his review of the previous ABCC laws:

There is no justification for selecting a different maximum penalty, for the same contravention, simply because the offender is in a particular industry.

As we know, Fair Work Australia and the Fair Work Ombudsman already have the capacity to deploy specialist investigators to deal with unlawful industrial action in this sector. If those opposite do not think the capacity of Fair Work Australia is sufficient, perhaps they should consider increasing its resources.

The fact is that Fair Work Building and Construction, established by Labor after we removed the previous incarnation of the draconian ABCC, has been a great success. The Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows that industrial disputes in the building and construction industry are on average one-fifth of the rates seen under the Howard 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. Fair Work Building and Construction has continued, and will continue, to outperform its predecessor, the ABCC. Fair Work Building and Construction already has sufficient powers to deal with unlawful behaviour in the industry. Fair Work Building and Construction is undertaking more investigations, concluding investigations, getting matters to court faster and recovering more money for underpaid workers in the industry, securing over $2 million in unpaid wages and entitlements for more than 1,500 workers.

Under the Howard government's ABCC, workplace fatalities in construction peaked at 48 deaths in 2006 and 51 deaths in 2007, making them the worst two years for deaths in construction in the last decade. Following the abolition of the ABCC in 2012, some 30 deaths were reported, the lowest number of deaths in the past 10 years. Over the same period, the incidence rate of serious injury claims in the construction industry fell by 17 per cent from 23.0 serious claims per 1,000 employees in 2005-06 to 19.1 in 2009-10.

The title of these bills would have you believe this was an exercise in productivity, but this is also not the case. These bills serve one purpose alone, and that is to return to the coercive powers used to intimidate workers and attack unions at the cost of workers' safety and legal entitlements. Tony Abbott has claimed the former ABCC led to some $6 billion per year in productivity savings and cost reductions for consumers in the commercial construction sector. The figure comes from one of a series of reports compiled by Econtech—now Independent Economics—into whether the ABCC and its predecessor body, the Building Industry Taskforce, boosted productivity. The reports were initially commissioned by the ABCC at public expense and were later regularly recommissioned by Master Builders Australia as a tool to push for the reinstatement of the ABCC. The latest report commissioned by the MBA has the productivity savings figure at $7.5 billion.

The research has been widely discredited as being based on faulty or misleading premises. On 28 August 2013, the Fairfax federal politics fact checker found Abbott's claims to be mostly false. The ABS provides three widely accepted measures of productivity: labour productivity, which is the ratio of volume of output produced to the volume of labour employed; capital productivity; and multifactor productivity. However, the method used in the Econtech report was to compare the costs of completing standard tasks in the largely non-unionised housing sector against the more unionised commercial construction sector, as though union density is the only feature that distinguishes the two sectors. Unsurprisingly, the report's systematic finding is that there are significantly larger costs of completing specified tasks in the commercial construction sector than in the housing sector, which they attribute to unionisation.

There is an old saying: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it,' and the coalition would do well to heed this advice. Fair Work Building and Construction has proven year after year that not only can it successfully deal with unlawful behaviour in the industry but also it supports a safer workplace and a safer industry. The fact that those opposite are ignoring this evidence demonstrates that their motives in trying to re-establish the ABCC are purely political. This is not about improving productivity, this is not about creating safer workplaces, this is not about preventing illegal industrial action, this is about the coalition's anti-union agenda. This is about demonising the construction industry, demonising unions and demonising their members. It is about stripping away workers' rights in any way they can, and Labor will not stand for it.

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