Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Not far from here, there is a great little development down in New Acton—the Nishi precinct. There is a couple of hotels there. There are restaurants, offices and apartments there. I think a lot of people would agree it has brought a lot of life to that little area of Canberra. But for Jason, who I want to tell the parliament about today, it nearly cost him his life. Jason started work on a job at the Nishi precinct when he was 21. We heard a lot from the previous speaker about people who just want to get on, get ahead and get a job. Jason started there as a young worker. And many young workers are a little afraid of their boss. You want to keep your income coming in. You presume that the other people around you know what they are talking about. You presume that, if your boss tells you to do something, they know what they are doing and have your best interests at heart. Jason was working with other people on that site. They were working in pairs on various floors and levels of the buildings. At one point the boss said to him, 'I want you two to split up your pair because we'll get the job done quicker that way'. Jason was not sure—he was a bit apprehensive, being new to the job—but he went up to one of the higher levels as he had been told. Jason fell several metres. He landed on his back and he broke it, and he lay in a hole for a couple of hours until people came and found him. Obviously, his fellow workers were distressed. Jason was taken to hospital for treatment. That was several years ago. He is still not working and fulfilling the dream he began—on that day back at that site—to become a carpenter, here, in Canberra and provide for himself and his family. It has been a long hard road to rehabilitation for him and he is still not fully fit.

Who looked after him and who came and helped when he found himself in that dire situation? Was it the government inspectorate and the forerunner of the ABCC, the Fair Work and Building Commission Inspectorate, headed by the person this government wants to head up their new ABCC? No. It was the union. The union came and spoke to him, looked after him and got him back into rehabilitation. It is now helping him find a new job. It is not his ideal job but it has helped him get back on his feet.

It is the same story with Pam who lives in Adelaide. Last year Pam sent her husband off to work, one morning, and her last words to him were, 'Be careful of the scissor lift at work.' He was going off to work not on some small site; he was working on the Royal Adelaide Hospital site, a big government project. He did not come home that day. He is never coming home. He was killed by that scissor lift. Who came and helped? It was not the government department. It was the union that came and helped. In fact, the only response by the federal government's authority was to prosecute the workers on site, because a couple of months beforehand they had walked off the job and had said, 'We're worried about safety, here.' That was the federal government's response.

The government comes along, here, and says, 'There are problems in the construction industry and we want more powers to deal with them.' Are they coming along and saying, 'There are too many people dying in the construction industry every week'? No. Are they coming along and saying, 'We're finding too many exploited workers coming in from overseas, working on $10 or $12 an hour or ABNs, and locals and apprentices are not getting enough jobs'? No. They are coming in and saying, 'We want you to give us more powers so that we can prosecute the very people at workplaces who are looking after the interests of people who turn up to work and do not come home at the end of the day.'

There are so many things we could be looking at if we wanted to fix up the construction industry. We could be looking at sham contracting, the practices whereby subcontractors—who are under a lot of pressure, sometimes, from big multinational developers—say, 'We'll give you a job but only if you pretend you're an independent business and come along with an ABN and look after your own insurance and holidays.' The government could be tackling sham contracting, but they are not doing it.

What are they doing? They are saying, 'We want to attack some people who sit on the opposite side of the political fence'—namely, the unions—'and we will turn a blind eye to everything else that is going on.' How do they want to do it? They want laws, from this legislation, that will give workers in the construction industry fewer rights than accused criminals, fewer rights than accused terrorists. This is because the government wants to set up a new secret police, in the construction industry, that will have the right to take workers off-site and pull them in for questioning. They will not have the right to silence. They will not be able to talk to others about the fact that they have been pulled in for this secret questioning.

It is a star chamber they want to set up. What is the supposed justification for it? They tell us the royal commission has had a look at the industry and has said it is necessary. We had a royal commission into the construction industry a few years ago. It produced a secret report that was full of claims of criminality. Do you know what? Not one criminal prosecution came out of the last commission they set up. They have set up another one because they did not get the answer they liked from the first one. This, too, 'has a secret report that is full of findings of wrongdoing and, really, you have to pass this legislation'.

When they said that to us, the Greens, we said, 'Okay, show us the report.' The government said, 'No. We are not going to show you the report. We are not going to show parliament the report, because it is too secret and too important.' They came back, a couple of days ago, realising that was probably not a clever answer. So they wrote us a letter late at night and said, 'We will let you look at it, but only one member of your parliamentary team can look at it and they have to sit in a room and look at it. They are not allowed to take notes and they are not allowed to tell anyone else what is in it.' They cannot go back and tell their colleagues what is in it. I think they made the same offer to the Labor Party.

As a result, the government is saying, 'If you are a chosen person, in this parliament, we will let you see this report but you cannot tell anyone about it. Everyone else can take us on faith that what is in there is so important that if you saw it you would change your mind and vote for this legislation.' If the government really thinks it has uncovered systemic widespread corruption, do what every other government has done: come to the parliament and put the facts on the table. The fact that they will not shows us that they know the real situation. The real situation in Australia is that in the construction industry there are too many deaths and injuries. But they do not want to talk about that.

There is another truth they are hiding from. If you really want to tackle corruption in Australia do, at a federal level, what they have done in New South Wales: establish a national corruption watchdog, a national ICAC, that would have the power to look at employers as well as employees, that would have the power to look at politicians as well as public servants and decision makers. If you want to tell me that the only corruption that exists in Australian society is a few building workers and that the rest of the industry is squeaky clean, if you want to turn a blind eye to the fact that on this government's watch one large construction company has been reported to have given $300 million to Saddam Hussein's regime—where is the royal commission into that? Why are you not holding a royal commission into the construction companies that are bribing Saddam Hussein's regime? Instead, you are picking your political enemies.

Enough is enough. It is time to stop using royal commissions and claims of corruption to gain political advantage, in this place. If you really want to tackle it and you are really serious, you will get rid of this bill. What you would have, instead, is a national anticorruption watchdog that can look at everyone without fear or favour. That way, if there is wrongdoing in the construction industry they will find it—but if there is wrongdoing elsewhere they will find that too. And the public will know it is not a political witch-hunt. The public will know it is being done even-handedly and without fear or favour. But at the moment we cannot have that confidence, because this government has never seen a union that it did not like and could not wait to attack and has never seen someone's rights at work that it was not prepared to take away as quickly as possible.

Other parts of this bill also deserve attention. Under this bill, if there is a clause in your local agreement at the workplace that says, 'We want to make sure that young Australians get a job, so we are going to guarantee that there will be X percentage of apprentices on this job, so that young people can be trained up', they are going to be able to put forward a new code that will have the force of law that will say you cannot do that. If you want a clause in your agreement that says, 'We're going to give a certain number of positions to Indigenous Australians to ensure that they get a step up' or 'We're going to have some requirements about local labour to ensure that local workers get some of the spoils of international investment and the mining boom', you cannot do it. Under this bill, the supposed free-market government is going to have a seat at every negotiating table around the country and is going to be able to write what is in and our of enterprise agreements around this country.

And they are going to be able to say, 'Oh, well, you might have negotiated yourself some good conditions, but we don't think they're good enough, so, by force of law, we're going to take them away from you.' And they are going to impose a code under this legislation that says, to a subcontractor or a small company, 'If you ever want to get work on a government job, well, you'd better not promise to take on more apprentices, you'd better not promise to take on more Indigenous Australians, you'd better not give the union representatives the right to come in and inspect safety, because if you want that we're not going to give you any work.'

So, with this bill the government is actually going out and saying that, for all the infrastructure they are going to build, and all the big projects, they are going to use that to ensure that young Australians do not get jobs, to ensure that there is less ability to monitor safety at workplaces. As we know, and have heard time and time again—and the stories I have explained to the parliament today are just the tip of the iceberg—the construction industry is dangerous, and it is where safety should be at its highest. And we know that the people who have the strongest interest in ensuring that everyone who turns up to work comes home safely are the workers themselves, and their representatives, which include their unions. Those representatives should have the right to walk onto a site and say: 'We're worried that this scissor lift might kill someone tomorrow. We're concerned that if you split people up and we're not there to inspect you and keep an eye on you another young man might fall to his death. We're worried that without the proper laws we're not going to ensure that enough locals get jobs.' They are the issues we need to be tackling.

On the question of so-called corruption, if there is one silver lining of the government bringing this bill before us it is that it might start a debate about how we can have an even-handed national anticorruption watchdog in this country. That is why I move the following second-reading amendment:

That all the words after “That” be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

“the House declines to give the bill a second reading because the objective of dealing with alleged wrongdoing in Australian society would be better achieved by establishing a broad-based national anti-corruption watchdog.”

This is a no-brainer. If you asked most people in this country, 'Do you think that at a national level there should be a body that is able to look after everyone, including members of parliament, including public servants, including decision makers, including employers and including employees, not only in the construction industry but in every other industry as well, to keep an eye on them?' they would say yes. And if you said, 'Look at what happened in New South Wales when they had a state-wide commission against corruption that was broad based; look how it unearthed wrongdoing'—from Labor and Liberal, from ministers, from people who were making decisions and issuing coal licences, from people who were getting brown paper bags of money in order to influence decisions—'do you think, really, corruption is limited only to New South Wales and is not happening in the rest of the country?' they would say, 'Of course not.'

So, let's grab the bull by the horns. Let's stop the charade of attacking one particular section of society that just happens to be political opponents of the government, and let's use this as an opportunity to tackle corruption more broadly. The Greens, for many, many years, have pushed for a national ICAC, because we know that is what is needed, and transparency and integrity are important. I urge all members of this House to support the second reading amendment: ditch this bill, and let's get on with establishing a national anticorruption watchdog.

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