Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Wentworth for the question. The oversight mechanism that the government is following through on is what we introduced into the Senate today: to place the CFMEU into administration. The reasons for that are very strong. The three different options, which are to place the organisation into administration, establish a watchdog of some sort, or go down the path of deregistration, all involve fundamentally different outcomes. First of all, going down the pathway of administration allows someone to be in charge who can make sure they look at official by official and say, 'That person should not be there,' who can make sure that the union runs for its members and who can look at the money trail and say, 'That money shouldn't be spent in a particular way.' It is highly interventionist, which is only something that you do in extraordinary circumstances, which are the circumstances we face.

The experience of a watchdog has been all the things we don't want. The first is the current leadership, which has caused the highest level of concern—in particular, some from the Victorian branch—and rose to power while the ABCC was there. That was when they came to power. In 2017, it was admitted by Senator Cash that she knew that Nigel Hadgkiss had been breaching the Fair Work Act while he was heading the watchdog. Labour productivity, referred to in the question, fell in each of the years prior to the pandemic. Every year the ABCC was there, productivity went down. You had an organisation that, instead of trying to deliver on productivity, was obsessed with flags and stickers and would pull down a health and safety sign if it had a union sticker on it. A judge of the Federal Court described it by saying:

I hold the clear view that this is a case where the ABCC should be publicly exposed as having wasted public money without a proper basis for doing so …

Since we abolished the ABCC, the number of days lost to industrial action fell by 30 per cent—fell by 30 per cent! And when those opposite start calling out now about wanting a cop on the beat—

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