Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of this motion, not because of party political affiliation but because this matter is an important one to this parliament, our community and our economy. I come from a state that has more often than not had governments in which significant decisions were accompanied by payments from those who benefited from those decisions. This was not a characteristic of just one side of politics but rather of both. Until the Greiner government of 1988, it was baked in—the cost of doing business. The people who suffered were the people. No-one liked it, but no-one had the courage to do anything about it.

Those of us who lived during these times like to think of the Greiner government as an inflection point in the history of our state. It was not to be. The name Obeid will be forever synonymous with corruption in government. Corruption is corrosive. It eats away at the bonds of trust that community is built on. When our institutions are corrupted, all of us suffer. Corruption undermines meritocracy, it misallocates resources, it distributes basic rights in a skewed and random fashion, it destroys our understanding of how institutions are meant to work, and it makes us cynical—so cynical, indeed, that people may, ironically, conclude that some laws are unjust because they do not apply equally.

Once corruption is baked into the system, it normalises deviancy. In those societies, both in the present and in the past, in which corruption has been and is pervasive, those who sit at the pinnacle of the corruption so often argue that the payments are necessary because no-one plays by the rules—that the law is optional. Those who benefit from this corruption argue that law is optional because it is unjust. To paraphrase Burke, for corruption to thrive it does not require good people to be corrupt; they just need to accept it.

The Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption concluded that this is exactly what has happened in the trade union movement: good people have become complicit in a system that now not only accepts payments that pervert the cause of what the union movement is meant to be about but actually normalise these payments. It is a system, according to the royal commission, that has taken corrupt payments and turned them into facilitation payments. People often cite the Cleanevent deal, in which cleaners earning the minimum amount had their penalty rates traded away in return for payments of $25,000 a year to the union. However, more recently, in January this year concerns were raised about the legitimacy of over $700,000 in credit card spending in the Queensland branch of the CFMEU, which makes it even more curious that the Queensland Police Service chose this exact moment to advise the Australian Federal Police that it will no longer participate in the joint police task force into union corruption. You kind of wonder, when this happens and when you look at how much money the CFMEU donated to the Queensland Labor Party, why there is no interest in this matter from those in the media. Have they too come to accept that union corruption is baked in and not worth doing anything about?

Of course, this is not just about union corruption; this is also about employer corruption and the lack of fortitude that they have so often shown in dealing with the unions. They should be condemned just as harshly, if not more. If people in the system are not willing or able to shine a light on these payments then, given how much a community suffers from corruption, it is critical that this government—in fact, any government—act to bring these payments into the light.

That is why today the Turnbull government has announced that it will seek to outlaw secret payments between unions and employers—what the royal commission called corrupting benefits and what the rest of us would call outrageous corruption. And, of course, with the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment Act, union members now have more say over how their union is run. Consistent with that, this government will mandate that unions must disclose to their members any money that they receive from employers so that union leaders can be held accountable. Corruption takes what should be common benefit—whether that be in the form of better pay and conditions or more affordable and efficient infrastructure and public buildings—and privatises the benefits to the few insiders presiding over this house of cards. Corruption of this nature hardens the arteries of society. It ensures immobility and regression, but worst of all it makes all of us— (Time expired)

See this speech in context