Ted O'Brien (Fairfax, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In case you do not hear, Deputy Speaker, over the noise from the opposition, who clearly did not want this to be heard, let me repeat that: Clean Event paid AWU Victoria $75,000 to maintain an enterprise agreement that paid cleaning workers well below award rates and that stripped them of penalty, overtime and shift loadings. This dirty deal was done via secret correspondence and was of course never disclosed to Clean Event workers—some of the lowest paid people in the entire workforce. In fact, a Clean Event level 1 casual worker would have been entitled to 176 per cent more per hour under the industry award than under the dirty deal done by the AWU with their employer, Clean Event.

Nothing could better explain the dire need for this bill than the Clean Event episode, for this bill requires that, whenever there is an exchange of money between one party and another, there has to be full disclosure, and that disclosure, which includes to workers, has to be made to them before they vote to accept an enterprise agreement negotiated by the union. Sometimes payments may be reasonable and appropriate and will add value to the deal for workers—no doubt. If the payment from an employer to a union is for training that is actually provided or for back pain research that is actually undertaken, then workers can take that into account when they cast their vote, and workplace authorities will also be in a position, on behalf of the workers, to ensure that all services are in fact provided. That level of transparency is obviously needed to also catch the other sorts of payments, like the dodgy deals already mentioned, or perhaps other deals, where benefits are paid not to union head office but to individuals for personal gain.

In one notorious Queensland case, for example, Dave Hanna, CFMEU official and former major office holder in the Australian Labor Party, used a corrupt payment from a builder for home renovations, in much the same way Bruce Wilson used a corrupt payment for renovations on Julia Gillard's Melbourne house. Full transparency around such payments is obviously crucial and must be legislated. It could save some people a lot of embarrassment, maybe. It could save other people a lot of money. Nine-hundred thousand dollars is a stiff fine for an individual, just as $4½ million is for a company, let alone the costs associated with the publicity such a conviction would bring. Ten years in jail is a long time, but it is clear from the long and sordid history of this issue that only very real disincentives will work.

Finally, it is indeed ironic that this problem, so well documented since at least the 1980s, is still a problem on the scale that it is, and the incidence of these corrupt benefits appears to be growing. Union membership in the private sector is now around 12 per cent. Only entrenched unionism in public services gets it up overall to around 15 per cent. This is, in historical terms, an embarrassingly small sample of the Australian workforce. These sorts of crimes of corruption ought therefore be diminishing, not growing, but of course that does not take account of the emerging shift in the politics of the Left in this country. The union movement, and especially the union movement at the Left of the spectrum, is now in full-scale tilt at taking over the Australian Labor Party. The union movement always has been a big influence, but now it is going for broke. The militant unions are going for total control. Troy Bramston, who writes for The Australian and commentates for Sky News, has worked for Labor and is a Labor historian of increasing note, and he has been saying much the same thing for a very long time—that the Left is taking over the Labor Party and its strongest players are from the Left unions.

At the end of the day, one only has to look to the CFMEU in particular to see not just the damage being done by the union movement but indeed when the Labor Party seeks to have their back, seeks to provide them coverage, by opposing bills such as that which is before the House today. At the end of the day, this bill will provide reliable transparency to protect the interests of workers—and it is the workers who have been the meat in the sandwich in this internal Labor battle. Thank God the coalition will protect them.

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