Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and good luck in your preselection for the seat of Hughes. Anyway, we are here to talk about the ABCC. The Liberal Party has certainly shown their true colours in this bill, which also reflects the Labor Party's true colours. I am proud to say that not only am I a member of the SDA, but I am also a member of the electricians union in South Australia. I know they have a particular interest in this bill and a particular objection to it. Like so much of the Liberal Party's ideology, it remains dormant until it rears itself into full life. You can see it with the GST; they were talking about a 15 per cent GST when I joined the party in 1992; they are still talking about a GST.

Like a dog with a bone, they keep coming back. So it is with criminalisation with industrial action. That is what they are doing here: they are seeking to take industrial action by workers and make it a criminal offence. This is not a new idea; it has been around for centuries. It is what used to happen whenever workers organised; whenever they asked for anything approaching justice, they were jailed. And it is still going on today. In China recently labour activists were rounded up in the dead of night, taken away and detained. This criminalisation of industrial action is nothing new, and unions know that the forces of capital and reaction will try it.

We have a profound hostility to this bill and the ideology behind it. We heard the last speaker ponderously making his way through it all, but he did not talk about workers in the construction area. He did not talk about Ark Tribe—maybe I should give him the entry from Wikipedia.

Ark Tribe is a worker from South Australia. He was living out at Middle Beach in my electorate; he was a building worker. We normally would not know who Ark Tribe was. He would not show up on the ABC and he would not normally be mentioned in this House, but for the fact that he was prosecuted by the ABCC. What was his crime? What was the cause of the prosecution? It is all up there on the internet. In 2008 Ark Tribe attended the safety meeting at a construction site at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. Workers at the meeting discussed ongoing safety concerns at the site and carried out a union investigation into conditions before resuming work. That was the great crime against productivity and the great crime against his employer that he is alleged to have committed—he went to a safety meeting. Now we all know thanks to the member for Lalor—and common sense would tell you also—that construction sites are dangerous places. And not a little bit of danger, but danger that continues—they are very dangerous places. What did the ABCC do to Ark Tribe? They dragged him into a hearing; he could not have his lawyers there and of course he refused to answer questions; and so they prosecuted him. There is a picture of Ark here; I am happy to table it if those opposite want to look at a real worker with real concerns.

The idea that this organisation is going to go after bigwigs in the union movement—people who might be doing the wrong thing—is not right. The people the ABCC goes after are ordinary working Australians who work in a dangerous industry and want nothing more than to get up in the morning, go to work, to an honest day's work and go home at the end of it. That is their aim, and they want decent wages and decent conditions. They want a decent share of the wealth that is produced by this country and they know that the only people who will make sure that happens is the union. That is why they are members and that is why they are interested in being members. They take an interest in the unions; they have run their unions.

We should remember the people that the ABCC actually investigated and prosecuted at huge cost to the Commonwealth. Think about Ark Tribe, who is a rigger and who is living out at Middle Beach. Suddenly he is in this world, where he is dragged into investigations and hearings and into the court. Who were the only ones to defend him? The union was the only one defending him. We should remember that when we approach this legislation and we should remember how unsafe these sites are. At the new Royal Adelaide Hospital site a construction worker did die; his name was Jorge Castillo-Riffo. And who took up the collection for his family? Well, his workmates did through their union.

So let's remind ourselves how dangerous these sites are. Let's remind ourselves that workers lose their lives on these sites and that their families have to pick up the pieces and that their workmates care about that. What is more, they care about preventing the sorts of accidents that happen on their worksites. How must ordinary workers feel when they go to work in the morning, they work hard and they open up the paper and they see from time to time scandal after scandal regarding workplace conditions—regarding 7 Eleven, regarding Bayada, regarding sham contracting. They do not just see it here, they see it around the world. In particular they see the abuse and exploitation of migrant labour. They do not just see it around the world—all those egregious stories, the most recent having been of the Italian agricultural industry, with the mafia involvement and the exploitation of migrant labour—they see it now in their own country. Construction workers see it on their work sites, and they worry about it—not because they are against foreign workers but because they are against the exploitation of humanity and against the exploitation of workers who are put in a vulnerable position where they can be exploited. How must those workers feel when they see these scandals day after day in the paper?

What is the government's reaction to it? Instead of a legal and moral and compliance reaction from this government in regard to all of those scandals and all of those evils involving the exploitation of vulnerable people, rather than the full weight of the government being brought to bear on employers that exploit people, we have an $80 million royal commission into the unions. A very, very narrow set of guidelines was written for that royal commissioner to just go after the unions. So we see exploitation on one side and then we see a regulatory result that is totally skewed and totally biased. We know from other events—the attendance at fundraisers and the like, the long history of interactions—that those royal commissions cannot come up with unbiased findings.

Then we find that there is a secret report that the government will not let half the parliament see. The minister makes his decision that half the parliament cannot see the secret, redacted report—an Inspector Clouseau style arrangement. The government's reaction is to go to cabinet—'We had better show them something'—and then we have this secret report that only one person from each major party, the Greens and Labor, can see, and they cannot tell anybody; they cannot take any notes; all they can do is view it. Why don't they just show them the front cover? It is a ridiculous end to a ridiculous and biased royal commission.

I suppose $80 million for the Heydon royal commission looks like a bargain now compared to the $60 million spent in the previous royal commission by Mr Cole. Do you know how many prosecutions came out of the Cole royal commission? Zero—a big fat nothing. How do workers feel, when, on one hand, there are these great wrongs that are blindingly obvious, that nearly everybody who looks at them can see—they are in our papers, they are in our Senate committee hearings and they are right in your face if you go and work at any construction site in the country—yet, on the other hand, the regulatory response from the Turnbull government, from the Liberal Party, is to have a witch-hunt into the union movement. What is the result of those witch-hunts? Expensive and selective witch-hunts produce an expensive and selective application of the law. What is the whole design?—to go back to that philosophical grounding that the Liberal Party have, which is to make unions and unionists and industrial action illegal. The Liberal Party have really only ever had one idea, and that is to whip the donkey harder and to feed him less. That is their attitude to the workforce. That is the only idea they have ever had.

This bill is completely insulting, and you cannot blame the crossbenchers for scoffing that the government might take this to the people, that the government might cause a double dissolution. Phil Coorey exposed very well how unlikely that is from a practical point of view—not least that the National Party have not settled their leadership yet. We know those opposite haven't quite sorted it all out.

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