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

Hey, I knew how the boys in the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers worked, mate. They were very similar to the CFMEU—standover merchants, criminals all of them. You had to have been in Pentridge to get into the Victorian Federated Ship Painters and Dockers. It was the only entry ticket you needed.

I note this bill has been passed by the House before, in identical form, but returned by the Senate. I further note that if this bill is passed by the House and returned by the Senate again it will become a double-dissolution trigger that the government could decide to use.

People in this country are fed up with the lawlessness of the unions and the bullying standover tactics that plague the construction sites across Australia. They are fed up with the intimidation, thuggery and violence that are commonplace on these sites. This is not a case of a few bad apples. It is commonplace behaviour for the construction unions across the country. Again, having worked in the construction industry, starting as an apprentice years ago, I can understand it. I have seen evidence of it and I know how it works. Those on the other side of the chamber know how it works, as well, and they are protecting it.

We have had this behaviour documented in countless reports by royal commissions, including the most recent royal commission into trade union governance. At least 26 people have been referred to public prosecutors, and another 86 as a result of the most recent royal commission. These are the figures from August, so that reality could be even worse. There can be no denying what is going on.

As I have said in parliament before on this topic, I would like to declare my life experiences with the unions. I guess I can go back to a particular time where, as an employee working for a national company that manufactured, designed and built equipment in Australia, we had a situation with a product that had been produced. United Technologies was in the process of trying to take one of the products over to Thailand to have their subsidiary, Carrier air conditioning, look at it and copy it. At that particular time I rang my uncle, who was on the docks in Melbourne, and asked, 'Listen, mate, is there any chance you can get this piece of equipment dropped off the wharf?' He said, 'Well, I'll do better than that. I'll get one of my Labor politician mates to ring you and see if we can sort something out.' Fifteen minutes later Kim Beazley Jr was on the phone to my office—and this is well before I had anything to do with politics. Kim said, 'I will put you in touch with someone who will be able to help you out.' Fifteen minutes later John Halfpenny rang me. In that process John was quite supportive of Australian industry. I think he had a great idea about Australian industry and unions working together, but at the same time he related that the union he was with had no concern for negotiation. He said, 'We just want to be confronting. We just want to attack, attack, and we will worry about negotiation at the end of the day.' But John did the job: he coerced United Technologies in the US, under the threat of having the Australian government cancel the Sikorsky helicopter contract, into saying that they would not copy the Australian product.

Another experience for me with unions was as an apprentice onsite in Bayswater, Victoria. You will not believe it, but a redheaded Scottish shop steward came up to me on the site and demanded to see my ticket. I said that I did not have one, and after a five-minute discussion he decided he was going to shut the site down. I gave him 20 metres to walk away and then explained to him that I was an apprentice. At that particular time apprentices were not required to be members of unions. He was very disappointed that he had missed an opportunity shut the site down and harm the employer's business and the work being carried out on this construction site. Working on construction sites, I have seen for years and years how this works. Again, I say that those on the other side of the House condone it, and they are still protecting it with the arguments they are presenting today.

The Costigan royal commission's investigation soon revealed that many members of the union were involved in a wide range of criminal activities:

The Union has attracted to its ranks in large numbers men who have been convicted of, and who continue to commit, serious crimes. … Violence is the means by which they control the members of their group. They do not hesitate to kill.

Included in the crimes of union members were:

… taxation fraud, social security fraud, ghosting, compensation fraud, theft on a grand scale, extortion, the handling of massive importations of drugs, the shipments of armaments, all manner of violence and murder.

Despite the union's members being 'careless of their reputation, glorying in its infamy' that very reputation attracted 'employment by wealthy people outside their ranks who stoop to use their criminal prowess to achieve their own questionable ends'. It sounds very similar to how they CFMEU operates today.

The unions continue to operate as lawless thugs on construction sites, because they are allowed to by this parliament. There is no strong regulator of workplace laws for the building industry that holds the unions to account any more. This was abolished by the Gillard government. Ever since then the coalition has attempted to bring back the regulator, the Australian Building and Construction Commission. It was in 2012 that the Gillard government folded to union pressure and abolished the Australian Building and Construction Commission. We know that Labor had been under sustained pressure from building and construction unions for at least five years, and it was then that the workplace relations minister, Bill Shorten, gave into union demands and abolished the ABCC, which had been established by the Howard government. Australians are familiar with the disastrous and tragic consequences of many of the decisions of the Rudd/Gillard governments, including over 1,000 deaths at sea from loosening border controls, which comes to mind as one of the most dreadful and regrettable decisions.

What have been the consequences of Labor's decision to abolish the ABCC? What has happened since then? We know a lot has happened. The bad old days of industrial militancy have returned, with wildcat stoppages, militant protests, demands from unions that their mates be employed on projects, ahead of non-unionists, and an increase in construction industry disputes to a seven-year high. Weeks after the Australian Building and Construction Commission was abolished we saw violent scenes on the streets of the city of Melbourne, with militant union protestors intimidating the community and their supporters attacking police horses. Why would they attack police horses? It is just beyond me. We had workers on the site purchasing an advertisement in the Herald Sun, with an open letter to their own union bosses that asked for the blockades to stop. Images of these protests were seen on television screens around the world. What message did this send to national and international companies about investing in building and construction projects in Melbourne or in Australia?

Another incident saw the CFMEU grossly bullying non-members by creating posters labelling them—amongst various other things—as 'scabs' and advocating that they be run out of the industry, in open defiance of the Fair Work Act and Supreme Court orders to end the protests. There was a violent dispute at the Little Creatures brewery site in Geelong where union picketers were accused in court documents of making throat-cutting gestures and threats to stomp heads in; workers who wanted to get on with their work were being told they were dead; and there was shoving, kicking and punching of motor vehicles. Disturbingly, we saw union protestors threatening people with 'Colombian neckties' at City West Water in Werribee, where the dispute was so heated that workers had to be flown in by helicopter. The term 'Colombian neckties' came from the Colombian Civil War of 1948 and involves slashing a victim's throat horizontally and pulling their tongue out through the open wound. It sounds sick, but we have people in Australia making those sorts of threats to other Australians—very unAustralian as far as I am concerned.

In a bizarre incident, CFMEU officials threatened to stop work on a Lendlease project in Adelaide if a union flag was not moved to a more prominent position. I cannot understand how a union flag is going to improve safety on a building site. It is clear that union thugs have been running rampant on building sites and engaging in thuggish behaviour since workplace relations minister Shorten's decision to fold the ABCC. I am going to give a few more examples of what has been going on, Mr Deputy Speaker, and please understand that I have cleaned up the language from these quotes and removed many terms that would be considered grossly unparliamentary. But listeners can use their imagination. Many of these examples involve the militant CFMEU. In the interim report of the recent royal commission, it was found—and this is not ideology; this is evidence—that Fair Work building inspectors were subjected to violent and intimidating behaviour by a number of CFMEU officials on multiple occasions at two significant constructions sites, the Ibis Hotel in Adelaide and Barangaroo in Sydney. One CFMEU official made offensive comments to an inspector including mouthing the word 'dog' through an office window; and saying 'You're a grub, why are you here, go away. You're lower than a paedophile you grub'. The royal commission referred these matters to the Commonwealth and South Australian Directors of Public Prosecution. In the Grocon incident in Brisbane a CFMEU official said to a Grocon-employed foreman: 'Hey scabby, gay boy, gay boy, gay boy, scabby'; 'It's amazing what people become, once a union delegate hey', 'He used to run with us?'; 'Lowest sort of dog ever'; 'Think you would know better than to go against the unions'; 'You know when all this is over, it's just beginning for you then isn't it, the union covers the whole of Australia.'

One of my associates in Perth jumped in a lift on a site and as he got in two CFMEU officials got in with him; by the time he got out on the third floor he was shaking in fear for his family because they had threatened to attack and imjure his family while he was on a worksite—they knew where he lived and they would go around and do it. Why would anyone in Australia want to protect that sort of behaviour? In a case in Sydney, a CFMEU official who had been asked for entry permits said: 'No we're not leaving. You're a pack of murderers, we're gonna get you.' In Western Australia, on 10 March 2014, Justice North restrained CFMEU Construction and General Division WA Branch Assistant Secretary Joe McDonald from entering the premises of four named Brookfield Multiplex companies, in addition to related entities, in the Federal Court of Australia. The consent orders declared that the union, Mr McDonald and the branch's other assistant secretaryhad breached section 348 of the Fair Work Act when they coerced Brookfield Multiplex, the head contractor on the Fiona Stanley Hospital project.

The examples just go on and on and they extend into financial malpractice as well. This is happening right now on our building and construction sites, and yet the Labor and Green parties—which by the way take plenty of donations from the unions—block the tried and tested solution to clean this up. It tells you everything you need to know about those two parties. We all know about the relationships between Labor spokemen and union leaders in this place, including the disgraced CFMEU. It does not matter what the CFMEU does—Labor will continue to do their bidding in parliament because Labor are controlled by the unions.

Beyond the personal cost of all this lawlessness—the crime and antisocial cost—is the economic cost. We have a fair idea what this cost is because we have the evidence of data from when the ABCC existed. During this time the economic and industrial performance of the building and construction industry significantly improved. A 2013 Independent Economics report on the state of the sector during this period found that building and construction industry productivity grew by more than nine per cent,    consumers were better off by around $7.5 billion annually and fewer working days were lost through industrial action. The lost productivity from union lawlessness is a real concern in my home state of Western Australia. There is construction going on all over Perth at the moment—especially in my electorate of Swan. The industry provides many jobs for workers in small business, large enterprises and contractors. My son works in the construction industry as an apprentice bricklayer in the building industry, and hopefully he can have a rewarding life working in the construction industry.

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