Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

If you actually allow me to run through this argument, because this is the most serious of all. If the Prime Minister has his way, construction workers will be hit with a $36,000 fine for acting on safety concerns at work. The last time this was the case we saw more workplace deaths and more serious workplace injuries. During the period of WorkChoices and the ABCC under the Howard government, fatalities for all workers increased by more than 25 per cent, while fatalities for construction workers skyrocketed from an average of 2.5 fatalities per 100,000 to almost five fatalities per 100,000 workers. They, effectively, doubled in that time. In 2007, when the ABCC was last in place, worker deaths on construction sites hit a 10-year high, with 51 workers dying in that year. After Labor abolished the ABCC, workplace deaths dropped by 60 per cent.

I am the first one to accept that there are a myriad of reasons for workplace injuries or workplace fatalities. But the evidence would suggest a significant correlation between weakening health and safety rights and such tragedies occurring. Sadly, since the former Prime Minister put the incompetent zealot Mr Nigel Hadgkiss in charge of the Fair Work building inspectorate, workplace deaths have started to climb again. Giving Mr Hadgkiss, or another hand-picked Liberal operative, more powers in the form of the ABCC will only make matters worse.

I want to talk about a couple of real tragedies that underline Labor's concerns. Two workers, Joe McDermott and Gerry Bradley, were killed at Jaxon Construction's Bennett Street project, despite union delegates raising a number of safety concerns in the months leading up to the tragic deaths. They died because the company had not set up an exclusion zone where they were lifting concrete blocks from a truck onto the site. Both were crushed to death by a falling concrete slab. In August 2015, the CFMEU started proceedings in the Federal Court against Jaxon Construction. The matters relate to hindering, obstructing, refusing or delaying entry to various sites preventing union officials from carrying out their right to investigate suspected health and safety breaches on a number of Jaxon sites in Perth.

The Fair Work building commission has been known to advise Jaxon management on the right-of-entry issues in relation to suspected safety breaches and holding discussions. It is clear that the Fair Work building commission is giving employers the view that cooperation with unions is a bad thing, even when someone has died in the workplace. If you do cooperate, you will be prosecuted yourself. In many cases, it is not the builder who wants to charge the union or the workers, it is the Fair Work building commission that has gone back in time and dug up old cases. As a consequence of Fair Work building commission interference at a site level, it is not uncommon for site supervisors that have a good working relationship with the union to tell them that, if it was up to them, they would be happy to let them on site. As the Bennett Street site was a social housing project and had a component of government money, strict FWBC right-of-entry protocols were enforced.

In another example, at the Royal Adelaide Hospital two workers, Mr Castillo-Riffo and Mr Steve Wyatt, were tragically killed on site, both in scissor-lift incidents. Both were crushed between a scissor lift and the head of a low doorway. There were multiple complaints about fatigue, schedules, disorganised sites, and consistent and calculated blocking of legitimate health-and-safety initiatives from unions, at that hospital site.

The week that Mr Castillo-Riffo died, he told his now widow that he was worried about using a scissor lift to do a job that required a scaffold to be used, but that management needed the scaffold for use on another part of the site, as they were running behind on the project. Three months prior to the death of Mr Steve Wyatt, the shop steward raised the issue, noting that scissor lifts should not be used to drive through site or through doorways, yet nothing was changed. I met with the family members of Mr Bradley and Mr Castillo-Riffo, and of course they are wracked by grief and want answers as to how this happened.

If these examples are not enough, in the past fortnight there have been a further three tragic deaths in the building and construction industry. On Thursday, 6 October, two workers were killed at a construction site at Eagle Farm racecourse in Queensland. Ashley Morris, 34 and the parent of two young children, and a 55-year-old colleague were killed instantly when a nine-tonne concrete slab fell on them in a pit at the track's infield. On 10 October—last week—a 27-year-old German woman, Marianka Heumann, fell 13 floors to her death on the Perth construction site of a Finbar and Hanssen development.

These sorts of tragedies are entirely preventable, and they will be so much more easily prevented if we deny the government its wish to return to the draconian ABCC. Lives are quite literally on the line here. The construction industry is dangerous, and it is difficult work. Why would any government want to make it more dangerous? It is beyond me. I appeal to members and senators to meet with the families of those who have died on construction sites so they can tell you about the health and safety concerns exacerbated by the ABCC laws.

So there are many, many reasons why we cannot support this bill. There is no correlation between its introduction and improved productivity. The Productivity Commission says so, as do others. There are fundamental breaches of human rights and civil rights in relation to this legislation, as eminent lawyers have confirmed. There are very serious concerns about the correlation between the former ABCC and the increase in injuries and fatalities at that time. Once it was repealed, there was a fall in the number of deaths and injuries in the industry. We believe it is very likely that, if this bill is successfully introduced, the result will be more fatalities and more injuries. I think the government should rethink its position, stop playing politics with this and consider the impact that its laws will have on ordinary workers in the building and construction sector.

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