Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I've been here nine years, and I've had the opportunity to speak on a lot of motions, but I have to say that the motion moved by the member for Bowman is truly ridiculous. It's probably one of the most ridiculous that I have seen. To link the ABCC to the domestic construction sector and to the housing and rental crisis that we're currently seeing is so ridiculous that I suggest to the member for Bowman: when a shadow minister hands you a motion and says, 'Will you move this?'—read it first. Read it and ask questions. Because to link the two shows your complete lack of understanding of how public policy has worked in this country.

One of the reasons we have such a rental crisis right now is because of the previous government's decade of inaction. They did not build one new public housing, social housing or community housing project. Not one. That is what has exacerbated part of the rental problem that we have right now, and the crisis that we have with affordable social housing. The previous government also introduced the HomeBuilder program at the very worst time, when people already had disposable income, weren't travelling overseas and had the money for a deposit. All they did was speed up people buying first homes—building them in the ground. That all they did. Builders said to me that what they would have sold in 12 months, they sold in three months. And now we have a supply chain lag, trying to catch up.

The other point I make to the member for Bowman and those opposite is that I doubt the ABCC has ever walked onto a domestic home construction site. They're not wandering around Bendigo or the outer suburbs of Melbourne talking to the many subcontractors that work on those sites. The ABCC has targeted the big builds. The ABCC has targeted where the CFMMEU has a concentration of their members. They are not your independent, small-business owners that you have on domestic construction sites. This motion demonstrates how completely devoid of any real policy or focus the opposition have in trying to link the ABCC to what is going on in our housing and rental affordability crisis.

Let's just talk about the ABCC and how completely hopeless it has been in prosecuting the real criminals and fixing the real problems going on in the construction sector. Wage theft is out of control. Sham contracting is out of control. Yet instead of going after those issues and those unscrupulous employers who have unsafe workplaces, who put backpackers and labourers without the proper skills in harmful places, and who are presiding over gross underpayments, they are focused on prosecuting employers and unions for having Eureka stickers on their helmets, and for insisting that a women's toilet be on a workplace.

So many have cases have gone from the ABCC to the Federal Court and have collapsed in the Federal Court because of a lack of evidence. Despite all of the ranting of those opposite, the ABCC isn't a criminal court. It isn't. We in Labor say the rule of law should apply to all workplaces, and, if you do wrong, you should be held accountable. But it should be the same rules and the same laws for every workplace. If you're a construction worker or a cleaner, if you do the wrong thing you should be held accountable. Nobody tolerates violence in workplaces, regardless of the workplace. People should be held accountable.

But the ABCC didn't have the authority to do that. They referred it to the Federal Court or to the High Court, and in almost every instance they lost. Their most recent collapse of a case was two weeks ago. The prosecution against the CFMMEU was dismissed after the case collapsed. It wasn't the only one. There were many. Labour productivity in this sector, as a result of the ABCC, is down 2.4 per cent. It was down in 2017-18. It was down in 2018-19. It was down in 2019-20. During the period in which the ABCC existed under previous government, not only did we see a complete lack of focus on who the true criminals were in the sector; we saw productivity in the sector collapse. If the opposition were serious about getting construction back on track and about solving these issues that we have, it would stop trying to link old policy debates and old arguments into this parliament.

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