Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Fair Work Amendment Bill 2014 is an important contribution in what I see as a redirection in employer-employee relationships after six years of a union feeding frenzy that we saw sponsored and encouraged by the Rudd-Gillard government.

Of course, all of those good times for unionists do have to come to an end and, increasingly in a world of transparency and more rapid dissemination of some of their antics around the nation, there is a general shift away from the view that we need a patronising union body to be brokering arrangements between the worker and the boss constantly to an understanding that in 99 per cent of cases both employees and employers are actually there for mutual benefit. It is something that is lost on unions. Historically, while I think both sides of this chamber would recognise the very vital role that unions play, I guess we have all been involved in groups—and unions are effectively a group of people who sit down, devise a constitution and then spend inordinate amounts of time to work out how to get what they want out of the system.

There was a period in Australian history, as there was in many economies around the world, where union membership was compulsory. That meant it was compulsory that you handed over your money from your wallet to somebody else to spend as they saw fit, usually without telling you. We have moved on from that to a point where unions now engage in paralegal and sometimes, unfortunately, illegal activities, spending union members' resources on court cases—and that is the most obvious use of those resources that we see publicly—but also increasingly for their own private purposes and their own personal preferences. At that point, I think you have seen some kickback from the general public.

In the bill today, we are looking at a range of areas where union activity has done nothing to help workers—let us be honest—but everything to help the union rep and the person who has their hand in the till and access to the credit cards and the bank accounts. What we saw initially was a focus in greenfield mining sites. It was presumed to be, probably, the most effective area of union engagement, and this was the basic principle that, once you strike a deal on one mining site, you then take that deal, slap it on the table at the next mining location—regardless of the difference in conditions there—and simply start negotiation from that point and begin ratcheting up. What we were left with was senior union representatives able to negotiate, just for their mates, 20 days of annual leave a year, potentially 18 days of sick leave every year, 13 days of long service leave, and then a nine-day fortnight on top of that. Most Australians have not had 13 days of sick leave in their life.

Of course, the cloak of legitimacy that is used by this group over on the other side of the chamber is, 'Oh, we're doing it for the workers.' That is right: the workers who potentially know nothing about these antics and how the money is spent. Most Australians do not have any intimate engagement at all with unions, because the proportion who are paid-up union members is declining annually, but some of us do see union members at work. For me, it is usually around election time. It is usually someone who does not live in my community, who drives across from the other side of town in somebody else's vehicle, usually on somebody else's time, and then follows me round with a video camera and uploads it onto YouTube—all, of course, in the interests of the workers, because that is the cloak of legitimacy that these groups constantly fall back upon to legitimise their antics.

The result of that has been extraordinarily expensive power. You need look no further than the New South Wales situation, where up to 70 per cent of all of the expenditure in power is labour costs. That is right: in an area that should be almost fully automated, 70 per cent of costs are labour costs. It is just basically this ugly triumvirate that has been referred to in the press: compliant membership, militant unions and effectively public ownership allowing this whole unholy alliance to proceed. We go to Victoria and we see the Wonthaggi desalination plant, where not millions, not hundreds of millions, but billions of dollars was effectively poured down into these unhealthy agreements, into a desalination plant that ended up costing way more than it ever should have.

People often ask what happened to the boom times. Did we squander the boom times? So we have to almost forensically trace back the money flows through a period when Australia had, unchallenged, some of the best terms of trade it has had in its short history. Much of this money was simply siphoned off to union-friendly agreements struck by union-friendly Labor state governments. We need to remember that the corollary here is that ultimately the money did find its way into someone's pockets, and it most commonly found its way into an Australian's pocket, so at that level I guess there is some mitigating circumstance there. But in the end what we saw was that the money flowed to where the union strong arm could get it to flow to, not to where it was most productive.

If the money had flowed to Australian workers who were productive and ingenious, taking a progressive and forward-leaning view to making their industry more effective, then we would have seen even greater economic outcomes. But no: what we saw was simply the money being transferred to the union individual, who did as little as they could for as much money as possible. I do not deny that that is human nature, but in a system where the sand in the wheels is coming from a union working as hard as it possibly can to slow down the project, to make the project more expensive, of course you can potentially grind a great economy to a halt, or at least slow it down enormously.

So, if you are looking for what happened in the last 10 years, look no further than the infrastructure projects in our great states and our great capital cities, in particular, that cost probably 50 per cent more than they should have, that just had way too many paid up union people wandering around the workforce on salaries between $100,000 and $250,000 and doing little more than gazing over the worksite, passing on some orders and barely getting their hands dirty. We paid enough of those people through compliant management in the major construction firms to end up with projects that could not pay for themselves with the tolls that they were collecting or whatever other source of revenue they gained. What we ended up with were road projects that should have been a great advance for our capital cities that ended up having a cost-benefit ratio of between 1.01 and 1.05. That is barely viable when you are paying such extraordinary labour costs. As I have said, there is nothing wrong with a higher wage, but not if it is going to workers who are not making any productive difference whatsoever to the project.

The only way to get a project funded initially—usually with state Labor governments—was to enter into labour friendly agreements and union friendly agreements. This complacent attitude to working with unions, because it was the easiest way to get the job done—regardless of the cost—is where not tens or hundreds of millions of dollars but potentially billions of dollars of taxpayer funds were directed. That is why we can look back after years of Labor state governments and see infrastructure that, yes, was delivered but way more expensively than it should have been and way later than it should have been and, in the end, was barely cost effective—meaning that, for instance, the tolls on major road projects barely paid the exorbitant costs that had been accrued by the project.

The previous speaker alluded to rights of entry. As a person who does not deal intimately with unions, it comes as a bit of a surprise that, if there is a safety issue on site or some form of concern, there should not be every possible public resource devoted to addressing it. But I just do not understand the penchant that unions have with getting an extra set of their armpits into workers' lunchrooms. Can you think of the last place that you would want to encounter a union rep? It is in your lunchroom, in your lunch hour—and addressing you even if you have not invited them.

Well, it gets worse—because the Rudd-Gillard era led to intrusions and incursions by union House of reps into workplace lunchrooms even if they were not a union directly related to that field of enterprise and even if they had not been invited. Twenty years from now we will look back and be amazed at how the excesses of the union movement led to such an expensive bill for building infrastructure in this country. To be able to take protected union action, even before bargaining has begun, breaks virtually every rule of Australian fairness that ordinary citizens would find incredible. But, no, what we have here are individuals who have made being in a union a lifestyle and gaining access to the funds of those members a focus.

Let's be honest: there is always one Uncle Arthur in the organisation who reads the constitution and knows it backwards and gets their hands on the membership list and then works out how to get the credit card. That is how all organisations work. The fundamental problem here is that, if it leads to power prices being hundreds of millions of dollars higher than they need to be and if it leads to average residents paying $200 a year more for power than in an equivalent situation in another state, someone has to stand up and do something. You simply cannot let that unholy alliance of public ownership, militant unions and compliant management harm low-income individuals and low-income families. And to cloak oneself with the legitimacy of saying, 'It's for the worker,' is just not going to cut it anymore.

We need a review of the right of entry. We urgently need a review of greenfield site negotiation by unions—before it kills off new starts altogether—and, of course, we need to remember that taking protected union action for union purposes rather than for the benefit of the enterprise needs to come to an end. I think everyone here in this chamber—as would most Australians—would concede that there is an important role for unions to be protecting vulnerable workers. The great problem is that we cannot get them to stick to that, can we?

I am pleased to say that we have worked very, very hard in Queensland to ensure that the royal commission is livestreamed on the internet and after a number of interventions we were finally successful in ensuring that everyday Australians can watch and listen live online to some of the testimonials that are being delivered and, of course, to listen also to the unions defending themselves for their antics. It is vitally important and I congratulate the court for making all of these proceedings available to the general public. Australians deserve to be able to hear and see exactly what Australian unions have been up to. My next focus is on making sure that all submissions that are made to this royal commission are available online. Every submission made to this royal commission into union corruption should be available to every Australian if they choose to view them. It is a very important step in exposing some of the excesses that were fermented by the Rudd-Gillard government.

I have described what is, I think, the centrepiece of union activity, and that has been skimming as much as they possibly can from projects and setting up favourable deals for themselves. No-one has any disagreement with decent wages for workers, but that is not going to be achieved by the current union arrangements. This bill changes that. It makes important changes. They are the first of many. Let nobody say that this will in any way impact workers. If you speak to workers, you find that all they want is some flexibility to negotiate. It is all they have asked for and they never got it. After six years of Labor intransigence workers can look forward to a period where they can negotiate directly with employers—adult to adult; none of this union patronisation—and set up individual agreements based on the principle of flexibility, which Australians have always held onto strongly.

There have been times where we have seen these union antics on display, particularly in Melbourne. We have a number of members here from Melbourne, where union antics were on display in the last year. We have seen in the power sector in New South Wales the tragic result of leaving power exclusively in public hands—allowing militant unions to basically negotiate whatever agreements they want. As I said at the start of this speech, that time may well becoming to an end. This bill is the first small but significant contribution in that direction—more flexibility for workers, more productive greenfield agreements and, yes, we will not see an extra set of union armpits in the lunchroom of working sites around Australia from here. Let's pass this bill and make it law.

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