Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Last night the Senate passed the registered organisations bill. What this meant was that for the first time trade union officials and, indeed, officials of employer organisations would be subject to the same standards of accountability to their members as company directors are to their shareholders. This was doing no more than applying the same standards of accountability that we expect of company directors. Now you would think that after Craig Thomson, after Kathy Jackson, after one scandal after another, that the Labor Party would have been lining up to support that legislation because they would have recognised that when so many rorts and frauds and malfeasance had been exposed, the best thing to do was to ensure that governance was improved. You would think that is what the Labor Party would have done, but what you saw was a very clear class war shown in this matter—and these were the classes at war. The Leader of the Opposition, a member of the union officials class, of the union bosses class, stuck to his own. He wanted to defend the bosses in the trade union movement. He wanted to stand up for them. And what we saw again was the coalition standing up for the more than two million members of registered organisations across Australia, demanding for them the accountability they are entitled to—

Ms Plibersek interjecting —

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