Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question. Obviously, as everyone in the House would know, there is presently in the Corporations Act, under section 461, the ability to wind up a corporation. There are general grounds for doing that when it is just and equitable to do so. There are specific grounds listed as well.

There are also, presently, grounds to deregister either an employee or employer organisation. But they have proved ineffective and, in fact, they have never been able to be applied successfully to deregister any organisation. That is despite the fact that those laws are meant to apply in circumstances where we now have the CFMMEU being the most unlawful organisation in the history of Australia's industrial laws. The most—including the BLF! But we'll get to that in a moment, if you want to talk about the BLF.

What are the amended grounds for deregistration? These are the amended grounds for deregistration, this is what the bill actually seeks to do: allow deregistration where the organisation has failed to conduct the affairs in the interests of members—seems very reasonable; or where there have been multiple breaches of the law by a substantial number of the members; or where there have been serious breaches of the criminal law by the organisation itself. They are the standards that Labor now opposes. They are the standards that are needed to ensure that we can have adequate deregistration of an organisation.

The organisation that we are talking about—the CFMMEU—how might it be described? Here are the words of a Federal Court judge describing that organisation. He said:

There is no evidence before me of the CFMEU taking any compliance action … in order to prevent the re-occurrence of contravening conduct by them in the future.

Nor is there any evidence before me of any compliance regime ever put in place by the CFMEU to address its long history of prior contraventions.

How did the judge describe that long history of prior contraventions? He described it as 'an appallingly long history of prior contraventions of industrial laws.' Despite that appallingly long history, the present laws have never successfully been able to be applied.

Compare that attitude from members opposite to this situation with what real members of the Labor Party did with respect to the BLF. In 1985, when Ralph Willis was the minister, he said about the BLF that they had:

... gone far beyond the bounds of normal industrial behaviour. … the thuggery, violence and intimidation have had a disastrous impact not only on building employers but also on fellow workers in the industry.

What did Labor do then when faced with similar circumstances? They actually brought in a specific bill to give executive powers to get rid of the BLF, to deregister it. Now they will not even support a slightly enhanced standard. How the Labor Party has fallen!

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