Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister please update the House on the government's record of delivering on its election commitments, including tackling union corruption and ensuring that employer organisations are more accountable to their members as well?

Honourable Members:

Honourable members interjecting—

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Members on both sides: the Prime Minister has the call.

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. The government is getting on with the job. We are delivering for the Australian people. We are providing the strong and stable economic leadership Australia needs in this time of great change and even greater opportunity. To secure our future prosperity, to ensure that our children and grandchildren can enjoy the same and better standards of living than that which we enjoy we must live within our means and we must continue to pursue sound economic reforms, and that is exactly what we are doing.

Just this morning, the parliament passed our superannuation reforms, ensuring that the superannuation system is fair and sustainable for all Australians. We are making the 45th Parliament work—an obligation that falls to all of us—delivering important economic reforms, including around $20 billion in gross budget repair; tax cuts to stop half a million middle-income Australians from entering the second-highest tax bracket; building on our big export trade deals by enhancing our free trade and strategic agreement with Singapore; and, for the first time, the parliament has passed the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment Bill 2014. The 44th Parliament rejected the bill three times; now it has been passed.

This will ensure that union officials are as accountable to their members as company directors are to their shareholders. We are cracking down on the dishonesty and the malfeasance, the misuse and the abuse that has become all too common with union bosses. We are standing up for the workers. We are standing up for the members of trade unions. They are entitled to see that their money is well spent. They are entitled to know how it is spent. They are entitled to know where there are conflicts of interest. They are entitled to know whether their hard-earned union dues are being frittered away by union officials on personal extravagances.

You would think that the Leader of the Opposition, a former union boss himself and a former senior union leader, would support this. After all, given the scandals that we saw with Craig Thompson and others—so many of them have been exposed in the Heydon royal commission that there have been two arrests just over the last few days—and the $870,000 misappropriated from the National Union of Workers, who are some of the lowest-paid workers in Australia, you would think that the Labor Party, composed as it is of so many former union officials, would say, 'Here is a chance to clean up the act. Here is a chance to make unions more attractive than they are today and make people more confident about joining them.' Labor did not do that. Labor backed the bosses. We backed the members.