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

I was enjoying the soliloquy from the member for Melbourne about the conservative crossbench in the Senate. I thought to myself, 'Geez, this is a good speech. It's a cracker of a speech. I might even steal some of his themes and lines about the conservative crossbench.' And then I thought to myself, 'Why isn't Ricky Muir in the Senate anymore? And why has the Senate got this complexion?' I scratched my head and then I remembered—'Oh, that's right! The Greens party did a deal with the Liberal Party which facilitated the election of the very Senate that he just railed against, facilitated the power of the Nick Xenophon Team—that personality cult—and facilitated the rancid influence of One Nation in this parliament.' And now we have this mock outrage about this conservative crossbench, about the influence it is having on this nation.

But the member for Melbourne is right: the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Amendment Bill 2017 is a bad bill. It was a bad bill when it was presented years ago; it was a bad bill when it was presented last year. We had many speeches in this House about it. We had thorough examination of this bill in the House and in the Senate and it was made—can you make a bad bill better? I do not know. You can improve its operation perhaps. So amendments were made to this bill, with its pernicious civil regime that outlaws workers standing up for their safety, standing up against people who would push them into unsafe working conditions often.

This bill gives plumbers, electricians, building labourers and other tradesmen fewer rights than drug dealers. What kind of nation is this government presiding over when that happens? A sparky or a plumber simply wants to go to work in the day and earn a decent wage in a safe workplace. We all know what the building trades are like. They are tough, they are unforgiving and the companies that operate in them are cutthroat and tough and unforgiving. There is a culture of phoenixing. There is a culture of cutting corners, often, with some of those companies, and they push their workers into unsafe work environments. That is why there is death after death in this industry—sometimes of very young workers.

This is a bad bill and there was a poor process applied to it by the government, who first presented it as a double dissolution bill and then had to wobble into the House here in their normal fashion and try the best they could to make it somewhat workable and then wobble into the Senate, into the other place, to that conservative crossbench—poor process. And now they roll into the next year.

Most governments improve over the summer months because they disappear from view. We know Senator Xenophon and Senator Hinch—two senators who have no lives, apparently—kept working over the summer. They were on TV every second day, scurrying about corporate back rooms—I nearly said 'bedrooms' there!—being influenced on perfectly sensible amendments that they made in this bill. Then they scurried back here in the New Year to make these bills more unworkable. The member for Melbourne is right. No-one has thought through the practical consequences of these bills, which will be to throw up 3,000 industrial agreements, 3,000 workplace agreements, for renegotiation. Think about that. Even if you believe that this is a good idea, the Fair Work Commission could not possibly, even by agreement, process that many agreements in the time.

What will be the consequence? Good companies who try to do the right thing and obey the law will be forbidden to tender for Commonwealth contracts. That can only do one thing: force contract prices up, because there will be less competition. And what is this? It is the big hand of government. For all of this government's rhetoric, this is the big hand of government reaching into the private sector and the free market and meddling in a completely ridiculous fashion—

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