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

I might just repeat that. The Australian Building and Construction Commission filed a case just recently. It alleges that CFMMEU officers threatened and intimidated workers of a crane company in New South Wales, hardworking men and women, including by spitting at them, calling them 'dogs' and 'scabs' and photographing them and uploading the images on social media, where those hardworking Australian men and women were further subjected to abuse and intimidation online.

Of course, it's not just repeated contraventions of workplace law. Just as we have seen New South Wales CFMMEU officers convicted this week of drug offences, a senior CFMMEU officer in Queensland is in court right now facing criminal charges for intimidating a state work health and safety inspector.

We have also seen examples of utterly horrendous conduct against women by officers of the CFMMEU, including intimidating female police officers, spitting at female building inspectors and making abhorrent violent threats about sexual violence to workplace inspectors. Is it any wonder that data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that the number of women working in construction has fallen from 13 per cent 30 years ago to 11.8 per cent today?

So what should any reasonable government do in the face of organisations that engage in conduct such as this, that place themselves above the law on construction sites throughout Australia, that happily spend their members' money on paying court imposed penalties while continuing to do what they like by way of breaking the law? Should a government make an exception? Should they admit defeat? Should they say employers and other unions must obey the law? It surely must be the latter. Organisations such as the CFMMEU are not above the law.

If existing sanctions are not working effectively to deter lawbreaking then a government needs to develop stronger sanctions. If penalties are not working, the courts need other options. It's clearly the case when it comes to registered organisations.

Courts must be able to rationally and reasonably disqualify officers who keep breaking the law—removing them from office or alternatively suspending or taking from the organisation itself the enormous rights and privileges occasioned by virtue of registration. In essence, that is simply what this bill does.

Portraying this approach as an attack on unions, much less their hardworking members, is unreasonable—unless of course one views that these organisations are above the law and therefore somehow beyond reproach. But any such view, at best, is horribly misguided and, at worst, shows a genuine threat to the supremacy of the rule of law on construction sites throughout Australia.

The bill introduced into parliament today incorporates the sensible and constructive amendments, safeguards and further protections proposed to a previous iteration of the bill by both Centre Alliance and other crossbenchers. It also incorporates a provision requiring that the operation of the bill be reviewed in the near future, as suggested by the Greens and by the Jacqui Lambie Network.

The grounds for disqualification and cancellation of registration in the bill are set at an appropriately high level. They'll only be met where courts have imposed penalties for serious or repeated contraventions of the law. Of course even where any such ground is met by way of application, only the independent regulator will be able to decide whether disqualification or cancellation should be sought and, even then, only the independent Federal Court is able to make these orders and, even then, the court can only do so where it would not be unjust, taking into consideration the gravity of the underlying conduct and all other relevant considerations.

To suggest that safeguards such as these and the multitude of other safeguards in the bill will lead to a person being disqualified or an organisation being deregistered for submitting paperwork a few days late, as those opposite have repeatedly and disingenuously claimed, is so far down the path to being legally fanciful. It evokes questions about precisely what sort of serious and unlawful conduct the allegations are designed to excuse.

Under the bill, only amalgamations of organisations with a serious and long track record of breaking the law will be required to satisfy a public interest test, administered by the Fair Work Commission. Members of organisations will continue to be able to vote on whether their organisation should merge with another organisation. But where there is ongoing and serious contempt for laws on construction sites, the question needs to be asked: is it in the public interest for such an organisation to spread its culture of lawbreaking to other organisations?

It is vital to note that ultimately nothing in the bill prevents a registered organisation from exercising its rights under the law to represent workers, including investigating payment issues or acting on work health and safety concerns. The vast majority of unions and their employer groups manage to perform these functions perfectly well. They work hard for their members, but they do so inside the confines of the laws recognised by the Australian people. They recognise that they cannot in good conscience insist that employers pay workers their legal entitlements, bargain in good faith and comply with other legislative provisions if rogue elements of militant unions themselves perpetually ignore and disobey the law.

The bill simply deals with those registered organisations who have shown an absolutely unfettered disregard for the law, who break the law—civil, workplace and criminal—repetitiously and mistreat hardworking Australian men and women in workplaces, particularly in construction. Organisations that contribute positively to the industrial relations framework, work in their members' interests and obey the law—and thankfully that is of course the vast majority of the organisations in question—will not be impacted by the bill at all.

Respect for the law on construction sites goes not only to the absolute integrity and existence of registered organisations but also to the efficiency, the efficacy and the integrity of the entire industrial relations system itself. For all those reasons, I commend the bill to the House.

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