Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Withdrawal from Amalgamation) Bill 2024 is a good piece of legislation, and I rise to support it. My question—I've got many questions—is: when are all the ALP people coming in to speak in support of this piece of legislation? I don't see any of them. The newly minted member for Cook—welcome to this place—must be shocked that the Labor Party aren't coming in here to support their own piece of legislation. It's strange.

I start by saying that the trade unions and trade unionism are important parts of our society. Trade unions have done good things over the course of the past 100 years in Australia—and even going back further than that in other parts of the world. The concept that workers come together and ensure that there are safe working conditions and decent pay is something that absolutely all of us agree with.

The trouble with the trade union movement in Australia is that it moved on from getting correct wage increases and those correct and important safety standards and went into the business of not working necessarily in Australia's interests but pushing too far in the antiproductivity space. That wasn't always the case. I've often said in this place that Australia had a very good Labor government in the 1980s. I've also said that that has turned out to be an aberration. The Hawke government—and I also want to give credit to the then leader of the ACTU, Bill Kelty—worked together in Australia's interests to try and move productivity forward. I congratulate that government for that collaboration in working for the common good—the opposition back in the eighties were supportive of this too—and that reform agenda. That modernising of the economy was important.

What we have now is an ALP that is timid in the face of union power. I congratulate them on this piece of legislation. I think it should go further. I think that there are many unions that would like to demerge. This one relates to the textile union. But the way the CFMEU behaves today, the way that their leader speaks and behaves and the general attitude towards Australian industry is a far cry from the ACTU of the 1980s.

As people know, I'm a first-termer. So I'm relatively new to this, but I come from a place where entrepreneurial spirit and private enterprise is valued. Export markets are important to that free enterprise and that entrepreneurial spirit in my electorate of Nicholls. What I think that many people in the trade union movement and many people in the ALP seem to forget is that the globe, the world, is a competitive space. Competition is all around us. We are a trading nation. We export things. We import things. People come here, and people leave us. If we aren't in the global competition game, we lose—and we lose big—because our businesses and our people's living standards go down. For us to be competitive, that means that everyone coming together in understanding that we neither competition. That means the union movement understanding, as they did in the early eighties, that Australia needs to be a competitive space.

In my electorate, obviously there is a lot of construction, but a lot of the construction and a lot of the activity is in agriculture and food manufacturing. We grow almost all of Australia's pears. We grow a large proportion of Australia's apples in the Goulburn Valley. There is a huge dairy industry, and those dairy products go into factories and get turned into infant formula, cheese and yoghurts that are exported overseas. The fruit that isn't sold as fresh fruit goes into a wonderful company called SPC. I've spoken about SPC and the peaches that they produce. I put it to everyone in this place that I'm running a tasting test for the SPC snack packs of peaches and the Chinese imports. It's a blind tasting, and overwhelmingly everyone is preferring the product produced in the Goulburn Valley.

But it costs a lot more to produce the product in the Goulburn Valley, and part of that is because we are not competitive with our overseas competitors, whether they're bringing fruit into this country or whether we're trying to compete overseas. Now, no-one wants us to go down the exploitation path. No-one in the Goulburn Valley wants to. But there needs to be a more level playing field between Australian farmers and manufacturers and their competitors overseas, and the union movement needs to understand that.

This union power has been the theme of the Albanese government, and I think this legislation has been brought forward grudgingly because of the publicity of some of the comments the leader of the CFMEU, John Setka, has made. It harks back to a time when that blokey, bullish culture meant that unions were not saying, 'Let's get Australia competitive and productive,' but: 'Let's try and push everyone around. Let's intimidate. Let's not work collaboratively for Australia's future. Let's try and look after ourselves and no-one else.' Never has that been more seen than in the comments that Setka has made about the AFL and the chief of umpiring.

I have often said I love sport. I love going to sport. I love training with my local footy and netball clubs. We tell our kids not to blame the umpire. We put an umpire in place; don't blame them. It's a given that, across sporting codes, the independent umpires, the referees and the officials are an essential part of the game. You might not agree with their decisions, but, without them, sport has no boundaries, no rules and no order. But I don't believe John Setka and the CFMEU respect the independent umpire. They didn't respect the independent umpire that the coalition put in place, which was the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

The union likes to demand that employers follow the rules, and they even threatened to impose work to rule to have their demands met, but they don't always like the rules applying to them. The former coalition government established the ABCC, which I think was the right thing to do. Some people disagreed with that, but the point is that they established the Australian Building and Construction Commission. In good faith they appointed a gentleman whose name was Stephen McBurney to lead that organisation. That legislation was democratically passed through this place and came into effect. Stephen McBurney, who had umpired over 400 AFL games, including four grand finals, was in good faith appointed leader of that organisation. He did what he was asked to do. He did his job. I think it was important work to try to get productivity back into the construction industry.

But now John Setka is trying to hound him out of any job he might have in the future. That's thuggish behaviour. We can't allow that to pass. That's not the way we should behave in Australia. Stephen McBurney, the respected umpire, did a job in good faith. He got asked by the government to serve his country by heading the ABCC. Now he has moved on to another job, and the union is threatening his new employer for employing him—only for doing his job. That harks back to the themes of antiproductivity and union thuggery, which I don't think should exist in Australia. Would Bill Kelty have done that? Absolutely not. Bill Kelty worked with the Hawke government for the benefit of Australia.

Now we're faced with a piece of legislation which I support but which I think should go further, and I would like to see more ALP members coming in here to support their own piece of legislation and explain to the union movement and explain to Australia why it's important, because that's what we do in this place—we bring our experiences and explain why things are important, otherwise you'd just passed legislation and have no debate. That sometimes happens here, with the guillotines that I've seen going on. But what this legislation seeks to do is say that a union that's incorporated into the CFMEU can demerge if it wishes, and that's the right thing. It's the right thing in this case, and I think we're going to move some amendments that say it should be the right thing to do in a number of other cases.

So this is important. I think this needs to be discussed and debated not only by us—the opposition, who are supporting it—but by the government, who are putting the legislation forward. I think that, if the government did that, they would have the opportunity to come in and say: 'We are the government for all Australians. We're not run by the union movement and we're not going to cower to the union movement, and productivity is an essential if Australia is going to regain its competitive status, which is slipping.' But they're not doing that—they're not coming in here to explain that. I think it's because they're timid. It's disappointing that they're timid, and I encourage them to come in to this place and say: 'If the union movement is on the same page about being a productive Australia, we'll work with them. If they're going to engage in thuggery, we'll be against them.'

I support the legislation. I encourage the government to look at our amendments, which would take it further, but I also encourage the government to come in to this place and speak to the union movement, discuss why you have put this legislation forward and be courageous against the union movement when it's out of line. As I said, I'm not against trade unionism; it's been very important for this country. But, when it gets out of control, then we lose our competitive advantage globally. That's what worries me as a new politician coming in to this place from an electorate where we make things—we still do make things. There's a made-in-Australia bill. Well, we still make things. Let's make those industries competitive.

As I said, I am supportive of the legislation. Make it go further, come in here, say to the union movement, 'We're going to push back against any of your thuggery,' and stick to your lane, ensuring worker safety and competitive wages—very important—but don't get into pushing people around and engaging in the sort of behaviour that Mr Setka has engaged in, in trying to make Australian industry uncompetitive.

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