Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak on the bill before the House today, the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014. This is one of the many pieces of legislation that seeks to ensure this government will deliver on its promises and commitments made to the Australian people during the 2013 federal election. Specifically, this bill seeks to bring a balance to the workplace relations system, protect the rights of workers and ensure that a culture which encourages cooperation and mutual respect is fostered. It is not one which rewards acts of industrial terrorism in the workplace.

I wish to remind the House, particularly those opposite, of what happened in the election of 2013. I stand here because over 61 per cent of people in the electorate of Canning believed that, if I were elected and became a member of the Liberal government rather than opposition, we would be a better option to lead this country. More than 53 per cent of people nationally agreed with this sentiment, and at a state level in Western Australia more than 58 per cent of people voted for the coalition. This is over 738,000 Western Australians who voted to abolish the carbon tax and mining tax. These 738,000 people wanted to see the ABCC re-established. That amount of people wanted this government to take a hard line on people smuggling. We have done that. This cohort of people who voted for us wanted the government to take the necessary measures to ensure the 'fair' is put back into the Fair Work Act when it comes to the conduct of militant unions in workplaces.

Predictably, once again, the Labor-Greens alliance is standing in the way of change that the overwhelming majority of Australians voted for in 2013. The Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, has decided to back his union mates over the prosperity of this country and its people. He would rather get into bed with Mr Noonan of the CFMEU than actually stand up for the 87 per cent of Australians in the private sector of the workforce generally who are not union members and want to get on and earn an honest day's pay.

But we know why those opposite do this. Every one of them has to be a member of a union to be preselected. We know that unions control their preselections. So they come in here, and you will hear speaker after speaker after I have sat down, defending the unions' militant behaviour on the work sites. You expect them to do so, because he who pays the piper calls the tune, and this is what happens in this place. The Leader of the Opposition talks about reforming the preselection process of the Australian Labor Party, yet it is all words; nothing has happened.

But I want to turn to the gamut of this bill. This bill deals, for example, with the right-of-entry provisions. Believe it or not, like a lot of people in this place and as that great Labor member of parliament once said, 'You don't really have a right to a say on these issues unless you've washed your hands in Solv-all.' I have washed my hands in Solv-all. As Mick Young was one of the former Labor members who got out amongst the workers and got his hands dirty, he had something to say which people would listen to. But, as we know, in this place today those opposite have either been members of the union or worked for another member of parliament. They have not washed their hands in Solv-all like their predecessors. They have not been in the workplace—though, as an aside, when I said this in the House once, the former member for Batman, Martin Ferguson, came up to me after my speech and said: 'I've washed my hands in Solv-all. I used to work down the mines when I was a young student, so I know what you're talking about.' And he was one of the good guys in this place because he had actually done a hard day's work.

I have worked on industrial sites. As a young guy I worked down at the Worsley refinery, digging ditches. One of the things that you like to do when you've come in for lunch or morning tea is go into the crib room and have a bit of peace and quiet, but you cannot, because those opposite put into the industrial laws the right-of-entry provisions for militant unionists, particularly those from the CFMEU.

Everyone in Western Australia knows the name Joe McDonald and his flouting of the industrial laws that existed under the previous government. There are plenty of articles—I have heaps of them here—but an article in the Herald Sunfrom 2 February 2014 shows Joe McDonald again invading the crib rooms of the workplaces in Western Australia continually with thuggish behaviour, threats and coercion along with his other CFMEU mates. He has cost the CFMEU over $1 million in fines. Workers' moneys are paying for fines for Joe flouting the law. McDonald organised an unlawful strike on the Pilbara project in February 2014. When asked if he had permission to enter the site, this article alleges, McDonald said, 'I haven't had one for seven years, and that hasn't stopped me.' He was expelled from the Labor Party in 2007 following reports he had called a building manager 'a parasite dog' who would be 'working at Hungry Jack's when you're finished and I'm still a union official'. Interestingly, though, Mr McDonald is back now as a member of the Australian Labor Party.

The rights of entry are a scam for recruitment, thuggish behaviour and intimidation on work sites, and this was no more borne out than in the Cole royal commission. Just about every examination by the Cole royal commission pointed out bogus safety issues where militant unionists decided to go onto sites to ply their trade of standing over workers, entering their crib rooms and giving them a hard time. I even had in my own electorate some electricians call me. They were trying to work on the yards. They said: 'You've got to stop this bloke. We're contractors and we're only trying to earn an honest day's quid, and in comes McDonald threatening us that we'll never work again.' So I did. I called the ABCC, and they went out and dealt with him. They got him off the site.

At the end of the day, this intimidating behaviour has to stop, and that is what this legislation moves towards, but you will not get any support for this from the other side. They will say, 'They're only entering the site because of safety conditions.' Most of the safety conditions were either conjured—not true—or used as a bogus means of getting on site. There has to be a better way, and the better way is that the union will have to apply to the Fair Work Commission for an invitation certificate. Before the certificate is issued, the Fair Work Commission will be satisfied that a worker who performs work on the premises and whom the union is entitled to represent has invited the union to the workplace and the union has not just invited itself. This is a commonsense move that does not affect any right of entry for any reasonable and responsible union official.

And I want to put on record that there are plenty of responsible union officials. I have told this place many a time that when I was a school teacher I was the union rep at my school because representing the workers and the teachers in a collective way at my school was something that I thought was a good idea. But I did not use this thuggish union behaviour. Being a member of a union is quite a good thing as long as you are doing it for the right reasons—that is, supporting the terms and conditions of those around you and not using it for empire building. Those opposite talk about the workers all the time. They use the workers: they use them to help finance the union bosses so that they become union elites and most of them end up in this place—see the former head of the ACTU. Most of them end up in this place as a member of parliament. Only recently, since Jennie George, have they started missing out.

This legislation is designed in a common-sense way that does not affect the right of entry. Employees and employers do not want their workplaces turned into battle grounds or territory disputes for or on behalf of the unions. The employers and the employees just want to get on with the job and earn some money so that they can pay their mortgages, and these coalition amendments help them do that. As far as the coalition is concerned, it is common sense to allow an employee to designate a reasonable and alternative location for a union official to meet with employees. When I was working up north as a young guy it was outside the gate. You did not have to meet on site; you could meet out at the front gate. The problem was they were all going outside the gate and it nearly brought Cliffs Robe River to its knees at the time because the workers were striking over things like not getting cream biscuits for morning tea. They had a whole lot of ore carriers 'hanging off the pick', as they used to call it, because they could not get the right biscuits for morning tea. This bill is a sensible vision.

One of the other things it deals with is what is known in the industry as 'helicopter tours'. These amendments seek to remove the requirement for employers to pay for the cost of a 'helicopter tour' to remote locations. The last thing hard-working employers and employees need is some jumped-up union boss getting onto a helicopter at someone else's expense. AMMA estimates that the direct cost of these joy-rides is $4,200 per visit, not including the cost of inducting, training and escorting the union officials around the work sites, and the costs associated with indemnity insurance issues.

Some offshore employers have also reported having to charter special service flights because seats were simply not available on normal flights that the workers were on and that this would have resulted in exceptionally critical people being excluded from the trip out to the rig or remote location offshore. This saw an operator pay over $80,000 simply so a union official could come on site to try recruit members. In this day and age, surely it is just as appropriate for officials to communicate with workers and members via programs like Skype. It can be done. They ask us here to do it by teleconference. Further, given 60 per cent of most of the offshore workers' time is spent ashore, why can't the unions simply organise information sessions when they are onshore instead of having to fly out to the rig at great cost and inconvenience to everybody. It is because no-one would be interested if they were onshore. They would not even turn up to the meetings—we know that—so they have to do this to head out there to invade their lunch rooms. The coalition is not trying to see unions not represent the workers in workplaces where they are invited to do so. In fact, that is against all rules of freedom of association. What the coalition is doing is putting 'fair' and 'common sense' back into the rules of entry and the way you get there. If the Labor Party was serious about supporting Australian jobs and supporting Australian employees, they would support this amendment.

In the very short time that I have left, greenfields agreements are part of this legislation. In 2012 the then Labor government tabled a review of the Fair Work Act. One of its findings related to the ability of the unions to veto greenfields agreements—a form of industrial relations extortion. Unions would refuse to accept any offer or refuse to make any agreement with an employer until the demands of exorbitant wages and conditions were met. In other words, a whole lot of ambit claims before they had even negotiated. Such tactics on these greenfields sites were extremely dangerous, often taking business to the brink of collapse. So unions would rather collapse a business than get their own terms and conditions up. How is that for looking after the workers and their jobs? They would rather business go down the tube and stop them from working than to give away their ambit claim.

These tactics are dangerous, and AMMA has stated that members have identified the union monopolies on greenfields agreements have not just been restricted to new projects. This has now permeated into other areas of agreement making. For example, unions are now commonly withholding greenfields agreements until a business—that business, or an alike business—concedes to the demands in other agreements for brownfields sites. In other words, sites that already up and running. So they are trying to crosspollinate the greenfields into the brownfields sites. The unions do not care about whether the company is solvent or about the welfare of the employees; they would rather head towards this vexatious agenda. As the former government's Fair Work review noted 'such practices potentially threaten the future investment in major projects in Australia.'

I am not alone on this. The coalition is not alone on this. In the Australian Financial Review on Tuesday, 1 April 2014 Simon Crean, former head of the ACTU, said, 'Clean out the CFMEU'. Martin Ferguson, former head of the ACTU, has been out saying the same thing: bring these rogue unions into line. Get fair work back into the workplace. Allow the workers to actually get out there and turn a dollar. And no matter what the member for Kennedy says, or anybody speaking after me, we have to get Australia back to being competitive. We know that in Western Australia and all around Australia—but I say Western Australia in particular because we provide nearly 50 per cent of this nation's export income—there are mines, potential mines and expansions on facilities that are not going ahead because of the cost of doing business. Why do you think Shell are providing their offshore platforms? Because putting anything onshore makes it prohibitive. People say, 'Shock, horror', as the member for Kennedy did, about the wage rates in Third World countries. I am not talking about Third World countries; I am talking about our competitors like Canada and Chile, who can remain competitive because they have their wages and industrial relations on a firm footing so that they are competitive. This legislation deals with this and I support this bill in the House today.

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