Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

and they certainly do not like workers to know that the Health Services Union and the CFMEU, both of which will be the subject of this royal commission, gave between them over $6 million of their union members' hard-earned money to the Labor Party to keep them in government from 2007 and to dismantle the Australian Building and Construction Commission to ensure that it was defanged and then eventually abolished and replaced with a tiger that was so toothless it was unable to even prosecute if two parties had agreed and settled a matter, in spite of it being criminal or civil activity.

I am not surprised at all that the Labor Party is sensitive about this answer, but it is worse than that, because the Leader of the Opposition continues to stand in the way of the royal commission, the re-establishment of the ABCC and the Registered Organisations Commission, which would address the issues to do with slush funds and corruption in the union movement.

I know that the Leader of the Opposition spent some of the summer in Paris, where he obviously picked up his latest idea to crack down on the unions at workplaces around Australia, because he came back from Paris and said he would attack them with the fashion police. He would make sure they did not wear their colours on worksites if they were bikie members and union members. He got some very good ideas from his trip to Paris, the fashion capital of Europe, because he returned and unveiled this startling policy to strike fear into the hearts of union members. We want to put a tough industrial cop on the beat; he wants to put the fashion police on the beat. He believes that the best way to attack union thuggery is by exposing it in the pages of Vogue magazine. The problem with the Leader of the Opposition is that he will never rise above his background.

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