Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Good. I would ask this question in this chamber. We have had line after line after line of smear. We have had two former Prime Ministers dragged in front of the royal commission so that we could have some guff to say at the door—some salacious smearing to use in this argument, because you cannot do it with logic. You will not convince the Australian public that we need to take away workers' rights to be safe. You will not convince the Australian public of that, and you will not convince them by quoting your report, which you want to quote, about how good the ABCC was for productivity, because it has been smashed. It was completely discredited years ago, yet you continue to walk through the doors and quote it in here.

This is the heart of our democracy. This debate is about the future Australia that we want to see. This debate is about how we are going to treat our fellow citizens in the workplace into the future. This government is proposing to segregate one sector of the workforce and create different laws for them. It wants different laws for those who work in construction—in this country, in our country, a country where, at every citizenship ceremony, we talk about the strength of our democracy. If it were not so serious it would be laughable.

The case for this has been built on the most recent royal commission and the Cole commission. Nobody from the other side is coming in here to argue that we should reduce a union's ability to ensure that OH&S happens in every workplace in this country. No-one from the other side is coming to argue how we should ensure that every worker is paid a fair day's pay. What we are hearing is a lot of rhetoric about how we need to be able to build things cheaper. I ask again: what price those 25 lives? These rights have been built up through a strong history of workers working together in a collaborative, collective way to mount a case to make our workplaces safer and to ensure that our workers are paid a fair wage. That is what this argument is about. So when I hear 'productivity', like a lot of Australians what I am actually hearing is, 'We want cheap labour.'

Unlike those opposite, we on this side of the House have put together a package of reforms that will ensure that criminal conduct is detected at the earliest opportunity and dealt with by the full force of the law. That is not what is in this bill today. Core to our plan is making the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, with its coercive powers, the regulator of the most serious contraventions of the registered organisations act. On this side we have people prepared to get the work done. On that side we have an ideological war being driven by a need and a want to revert to a Howard-era piece of legislation. Labor has put together a package that will ensure that the future will be different for Australian workers and that, where practices are in breach of the law, they will be rubbed out. The General Manager of the Fair Work Commission will continue its role as the regulator with its current powers to conduct investigations and inquiries and resolve minor compliance issues. It will receive an additional $4.5 million for increased monitoring of registered organisations.

Now we get down to the nitty-gritty. Let us fund the monitor to ensure that the right things happen. We will extend current electoral funding laws to donations and expenditure relating to all elections managed by the Australian Electoral Commission, such as union elections. That is real action to ensure that workers who are members of a union are members of a union that is doing the right thing. In line with our longstanding commitment to greater transparency, Labor will also reduce the disclosure threshold for political donations from $13,000 to $1,000. Labor will also protect and encourage whistleblowers by extending the protections that exist in the public sector to the private sector, registered organisations and the not-for-profit sector. That is real action, real ideas on this side, about ensuring that if there is illegal activity going on it gets cleaned up. A Shorten Labor government will double the maximum penalties for all criminal offences under the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Act.

There is no doubt in my mind that this legislation is about demonising the union movement and the government's political opponents. We on this side of the House will oppose it.

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