Simon Kennedy (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I can see why the member for Kennedy is getting confused, because it is very murky. This relationship between unions and the ALP is murky. The Australian people want it exposed. They want to see the transparency. As I was saying, the CFMEU gave $4.3 million to the Albanese government in the lead-up to the last election. What did it get? At the end of the day what it's gotten is the Labor Party's loyalty. They've shown time and time again that they care more about this union money than they do about the worker, than they do about the individual and than they do about stopping the bullying, thuggery and intimidation in the workplace that we are seeing from the CFMEU. This is a humiliating backdown from their previous anti-demerger stance. Minister Burke is now belatedly being forced to admit that they're only acting on this situation because of the attack on the AFL.

If we look at the CFMEU, they're also pushing employers to the wall. Construction businesses are going out of business with record insolvencies. You might ask, 'How can this happen in a housing shortage?' Well, at the behest of these union overlords, Labor has abolished the Australian Building and Construction Commission, leaving our construction industry and its more than 400,000 small businesses—many of them in Cook, my electorate—at the complete mercy of the CFMEU. I'm going to talk about the CFMEU and its character in a little bit, but what's got even worse for these businesses going out is that I've just seen that the inflation rate is back up to four per cent. With that inflation rate going back up to four per cent and with the CFMEU being entitled by this Labor Party to run roughshod over these small and medium construction businesses, more are going to go to the wall.

What we're witnessing on full display from the CFMEU is that anyone who stands up to their lawlessness will be persecuted. That is being put on full display with their dogged pursuit of Stephen McBurney in the AFL, a pursuit which, thankfully, is now under investigation by the Fair Work Ombudsman. Why is Labor doing this attack on the AFL? Because it's an attack on the AFL—that's why they're dealing with this issue. It's not because of the difficulty faced by the women in the textiles division of the CFMEU, which has been crushed and is trying to withdraw from the CFMEU. The textile, clothing and footwear sector has the greatest number of women of any division of the CFMEU. But here are some of the union official quotes that these women have had to put up with. This is what the union representatives themselves have said about the workplace culture:

Within the building there were jokes about domestic violence. It was very uncomfortable to the point where our division had to leave the building.

Let's look further at the head of the union and his behaviour. In late 2019, Setka's estranged wife provided a sworn statement to police, detailing a serious incident where Mr Setka had physically assaulted her. She said:

John was out of control. He hit my head against the table about five times. It was very painful. John is a lot bigger and stronger than me and he can totally physically control me. When he loses his temper, there isn't anything I can do but submit to him.

Look at this man.

In February this year, Senator Lambie brought a private senator's bill that would have allowed the manufacturing division, which includes the textile union, to demerge. But what happened when it was this government's turn to speak on this bill? Senator White got up and said, 'The government will not be supporting this bill.' Who knows what Mr Setka was doing behind the scenes to pull the strings to get this to happen? Over the last few weeks, John Setka and the militant CFMEU have shown Australians why the coalition was right to legislate these demerger laws in 2020. The Labor Party have finally been forced to admit their wrongs and bring this legislation back.

Mr Setka has a long history of lawlessness, and the courts have consistently upheld descriptions of him as a complete and utter thug. Despite the member for Kennedy mentioning him in a favourable light, this man is a thug. He's pled guilty in court to harassing women. Simply put, women do not feel safe around John Setka or his CFMEU, and they have good reason not to.

In the last few weeks, Mr Setka has displayed and has shown the attitude that anyone who gets in his way will be run over or have it attempted. Stephen McBurney, who is the head of officiating in the AFL, has umpired over 400 games and, by all descriptions, is a man of honour and repute. What is Mr Setka's issue with McBurney? McBurney was previously the head of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. He was responsible for bringing evidence of the CFMEU's bullying, thuggery and intimidation before the courts, where they were found to have breached the Fair Work Act in 91 per cent of all cases. The CFMEU was fined millions of dollars for breaches of this, and for this Mr Setka is saying that the AFL must sack him. Specifically, Mr Setka has stated: 'We have an obligation to pursue antiunion, antiworker effers like him, and we will until the end of the earth. This is going to cost the AFL a lot of effing money. I hope it's worth it. Projects without our full cooperation are going to be an effing misery for them. They will regret the day they ever employed him.' This is the type of person Mr Setka is.

Let's look at Mr Setka's character in a little more detail. The Age in June 2019, reporting on legal proceedings against Mr Setka, found that police analysis of Mr Setka's phones revealed that he called Anne Gooley:

… 25 times and sent her 45 text messages, calling her a "weak f---en piece of …

bleep—

… and a "treacherous … f---en c---" and a "f---en dog".

This is the man leading this union. The Labor Party is gladly accepting $4.3 million a year from him and repealing legislation that's going to weaken the union. They're now only doing it because they're being bullied into it by what has been shown by the AFL.

Let's look at this man in another judgement. Justice Tracey describes the most disturbing incident, in which CFMEU Secretary John Setka and three thugs shoved a security firm manager, Mr Smith, into a Melbourne alleyway and proceeded to assault him both physically and verbally. The court's decision describes Setka's acts of violence: 'pinned him to the wall', 'hurled abuse at him', 'knocked his helmet from his head' and 'took turns to ram him into the wall'. This is the group donating $4.3 million to Labor. This is the group that Labor repealed our 2020 legislation for. When Mr Smith protested that he was being held against his will, Setka threatened that he would, 'Shut him up permanently.' These are the types of values that the Labor Party is accepting money for. I would request that the Labor Party stop taking donations from Mr Setka and his thuggish union with behaviour like this.

It doesn't stop there. In a separate incident, Setka abused a Grocon worker. He punched the windscreen of the van he was driving, told him to remember his face because he would come after him, and told him that he hoped he would die from cancer. The worker he was talking to was suffering from cancer at the time. Workers who actually wanted to get to work had to be bussed in, given a special path in with the protection of police fencing and given special duties to hide from the verbal assaults hurled at them by the union protesters, calling them scabs, dogs, rats and much worse—things I can't repeat today—and hurling threats including, 'You will die,' 'You're going to cop it,' and, 'I'm going to kill your family.' When police attempted to escort workers onto the site, union crowds blocked and punched their horses, egged on by John Setka, Sean Reardon and Craig Johnston.

Mr Albanese was confronted by a journalist about some of this thuggery. How did he respond when he was confronted by this? I quote: 'Don't question me on it, because it will encourage him.' What a weak and impotent response from the Prime Minister of Australia on a thug. This is a thug who, with his affiliates, donates $4.3 million a year.

In this humiliating backdown from their previous anti-demerger stance, Minister Burke has been forced to admit they're only acting on this situation because of the AFL. He said:

… that attack on the AFL really made the decision clear and made the timing immediate.

You would hope that, from some of the stories I've told today, from some of the quotes I've looked at or from some of the assaults these people have done, there would have been more then enough evidence in February earlier this year when Senator Lambie brought this forward, or, when we were looking at repealing the coalition's bills, to not repeal it. But, for Mr Burke, the attack on the AFL made the decision really clear and made be timing immediate. Wouldn't you think some of those stories, some of those incidents I'm calling out, would have made it more immediate than an attack on the AFL? What we're seeing here is a government that's more worried about the front pages of newspapers and the Channel 7 news than workers rights, actual thuggery or representing female workers in the textiles union.

But it gets better, because Mr Burke went on to say:

We're not going to have a situation where we have members in the manufacturing division compelled to be part of an organisation that they don't want to be part of.

Does Mr Burke not realise that the only reason the manufacturing division couldn't demerge from the militant CFMEU was that he and his government wouldn't let them? If what some of these women are being subjected to weren't such a sad topic, the irony would be delicious. We're taking the Australian people, the women of the textiles union and the rest of the parliament for fools. He's pulling a bill Shorten by going to the CFMEU and saying, 'Don't worry. We won't let the manufacturing division leave,' and then he turned around to the manufacturing division, saying, 'It's terrible and it's unacceptable that you're not allowed to leave.' This is two-way Tony Burke, playing at both sides.

Yes, I support this bill. I wish there were more members of the Labor Party in the chamber opposite standing up to support this bill to stand up to the thuggery. It's great that's taken an incident to illuminate it and I'm grateful to the AFL for illuminating it.

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