Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is true, he would have sold his grandmother to win the election. But do not worry, in Western Australia we have got a good antenna for crap; we saw it and we stopped him at the border. Anyway, at the time Mr Rudd said that he was not coming back and made a whole series of commitments on industrial relations to prevent the sort of militancy that Mr McDonald and the unions in Western Australia have become notorious for.

But as we heard in the minister's speech, these undertakings were never honoured and never implemented. As the quote suggests, Mr McDonald, Mr Reynolds and their friends have been able to run amok for the last seven years in Western Australia. So it is now up to the coalition to implement these commitments made by the Labor Party in 2007 and get some control back over our industrial relations policy, returning it to the sensible centre.

That is what this bill, the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014, seeks to achieve. In essence, it seeks to implement the commitments made by the Labor Party in 2007 that they never honoured. The second aspect we have to consider, when considering the view of the people Western Australia on this matter, is the fact that the Labor Party and the unions are the same thing. To be a member of the Labor Party, you have to be a member of a union. So, when the people of Western Australia's see union militancy, they know that these unionists are members of the Labor Party and will ultimately do deals to parachute themselves into parliament.

The recent Senate election has shone a big light on these practices. Before the WA Senate election, I called the Labor Party out on this in the Federation Chamber, where I spoke about the reports of intricate deals between Labor unions in WA to decide who got the Labor Senate seats in that election. And I was not the only one to warn of this. According to TheWest Australian on 24 April, Senator Mark Bishop early last year produced a report entitled The Senate in WA—a worrying prospect. But, apparently, despite compiling this 10-page report, Senator Bishop never gave it to the Labor executive, so perhaps his warning did not get through either.

The result of these deals seems to have been the selection of United Voice's Senator Sue Lines, who, according to an article by Paul Murray in The West Australian on 16 March 2013, had not lived in WA for eight years, and of the shoppies' Senator-elect Joe Bullock, who was reported as saying Labor members were 'mad'. It is interesting that the new electoral laws proposed by the joint standing committee have made some points about potentially restricting candidates who do not reside in the state they are standing for election in. The key result of the Western Australian Senate election in April was that Labor's vote collapsed to its lowest rate on record, 21 per cent—

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