James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Government Waste Reduction) Share this | Hansard source

It's your bill. If you're—

An honourable member interjecting—

Right, there we go. You should be proud of that. This bill comes before us because what John Setka has done is said that people that are his political opponents—or, indeed, organisations like the AFL which aren't renowned for being political whatsoever—or particularly against the current government on the issues that are important to them will be punished by the union if they have someone in their employ who the union does not like. And what John Setka has done is publicly ventilate the business model of the CFMEU. In a way, some of us always knew what their modus operandi was, but now, of course, it's much more publicly known: they will punish you if they don't like you. They will punish businesses that they don't like—just ask the Grollo Group in Melbourne. That's one of many examples. If you don't do what they say and if they can't push you around, then you'll be punished. Your costs will go up, your projects will be more expensive, and there'll be significant delays. John Setka laid this out with a degree of pride. The member for Casey just articulated, in some colourful language, what Setka very proudly and publicly said would be the punishment to the AFL if they didn't do what they were told to by the CFMEU.

It's just utterly disgraceful and deplorable that this kind of conduct occurs, and now we have a situation where the government has been shamed into bringing a bill before us to allow one element of the CFMEU to leave it. How is it that the law of the land doesn't allow this to happen as it is? How is that we need to pass legislation? It's currently illegal for the old TCF, who I know very well—I worked in the textile industry, and that union were the union representing the workforce at my company—to leave the CFMEU without legislative change. This is a free country. This is a country that should believe in fundamental principles of freedom of association, and that's not just the freedom to join a union or not but also the freedom for unions to organise how they see fit.

We as a parliament have to change the law because it is illegal for a division of the CFMEU to break away. They find the conduct and behaviour of this union to be so abhorrent and members of its leadership to be so vile and disgusting that they don't want to be associated with them anymore, and they have to come to the Labor government and say: 'Hey, you know that policy that you don't support—to allow us to freely demerge from a union? Well, we'd like you to change your tune on that.' Thanks to significant media coverage about the grotesqueness and disgusting, vile behaviour of John Setka and his cronies, the government has decided that, despite in principle not thinking that a union should be free to demerge—to de-amalgamate—in this case it's hard to defend that in a public setting during a press conference so they'll allow this brief little window of opportunity through the legislation before us to go through the parliament despite opposing it when Jacqui Lambie brought a similar bill forward in the Senate—because the behaviour of John Setka has gotten to the point where it's indefensible.

John Setka was already a disgrace. We already knew that. The member opposite was just bragging about the fact that he was kicked out of the Labor Party, as if they're really tough on these brutal, nasty, awful union leaders that behave in such an appalling way and make jokes about domestic violence and the treatment of women. To trivialise that is pretty low. This guy is still the leader of a union affiliated with the Labor Party, so the CFMEU can still finance the Labor Party in their election campaigns. We had the Prime Minister in question time yesterday bragging about the way unions like the CFMEU are going to be campaigning on nuclear policy. So they're mates with John Setka when he signs the cheques and runs the campaigns that they want, but then they've got this tough talk when he mocks and trivialises domestic violence and when members of another union want to leave a union that he so insidiously controls and can't bear to be in the same building or the same room as him. That's the legislation that we've got in front of us right now.

We shouldn't be having to legislate to allow the free de-amalgamation of unions. It should already be the law of the land, and it should be a permanent right of unions to organise however they want. It shouldn't be legislated, and we shouldn't have to be debating right now an approval for them to separate from the CFMEU. The CFMEU have got form in this area. In my home state of South Australia, the state chapter of the CFMEU has been taken over by John Setka and the Victorian branch. We had a guy called Aaron Cartledge, who was the state secretary of the South Australian union, but John Setka didn't like him. So he got dumped. Instead, the Victorian division of the CFMEU said: 'We're going to take over the South Australian division of the CFMEU, and it's going to be run by the Victorian division of the CFMEU. That's how we're going to organise in South Australia.' Then that Victorian division of the CFMEU—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 10:24 to 10:36

In conclusion, in Adelaide we have the threat via John Setka that the new headquarters for the Adelaide Crows team will be sabotaged, disrupted, delayed and have enormous cost blowouts. If the AFL doesn't dismiss a very innocent employee of theirs whose great high crime was legally working for the Australian Building and Construction Commission, then that will be the punishment meted out by Mr Setka and his thug mates at the CFMEU. This behaviour is completely disgusting and utterly unsurprising. It underscores why we need to bring back the ABCC. And it definitely underscores the importance not only of passing this bill but also perhaps of the government recognising the fact that it should never have been illegal in the first place for unions to have the right to demerger, particularly in circumstances such as this one. With those comments, I commend the bill to the House.

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