House debates
Tuesday, 14 February 2017
Bills
Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Amendment Bill 2017; Second Reading
4:22 pm
Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I return to the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Amendment Bill 2017. Labor will oppose this bill for the reasons I have outlined and also for some other reasons, and I will go to some of those. I will recap. As I have said, this bill will bring forward a code to apply to the building industry and will have a number of implications, not least of all employers, their workforce and unions will be unable to bargain in exactly the same manner as every other employer, workforce and union in every other sector of our economy. In particular, the code, if implemented, will restrict the capacity for those parties to enterprise agreements to bargain on a range of things, including the ratio of apprentices. That is currently allowable under the Fair Work Act but would be disallowed by the code for this industry. For example, it would not allow an employer, workforce and union to strike a deal to have a ratio of apprentices for a number of workers. We think this will limit or diminish the efforts by some in the industry to improve the ratio of apprentices and give young people an opportunity to work. That is why we are so surprised that Senator Xenophon, who likes to say he supports workers, Senator Hinch, One Nation senators and others are supporting this bill.
It also will deny employers, unions and workers the ability to regulate the forms of employment in any way. Therefore, it will not allow some restrictions about temporary worker use. We know temporary workers are often exploited in many industries in this country. We have seen recently some awful examples of exploitation, but so too some employers may seek to employ them over and above and instead of local workers. There are provisions currently in enterprise agreements, for example, in Queensland and Victoria that restrict that use or at least ensure that there is some preference for local workers. If it is the case that temporary workers are used to supplement areas of demand in the workforce, it is understandable, for example, that parties to an agreement might want to ensure that, if there are to be redundancies, local workers who have been there longer are not made redundant before temporary workers are laid off. There are provisions in agreements currently that in fact do favour local workers over overseas temporary workers. That will not be allowed to be inserted into enterprise agreements after the code takes effect.
We hear a lot from One Nation senators, Senator Hinch, Senator Xenophon and others about supporting local workers and, indeed, regulating the use of temporary workers. Government members have to understand that in supporting the code they are supporting restrictions on protecting local workers to keep their work and even denying the right of employers, unions and workers to say that, if there are to be redundancies, it should be temporary workers first. I think that is a regressive step and it shows the lengths that this government will go to to introduce this code even though it is against the interests of Australian workers.
Further to this matter, Senator Xenophon likes to make great deal of his interest in asbestos and safety generally. Indeed, he is a co-patron of an asbestos safety organisation in South Australia. He certainly is on the record arguing in favour of improvements to prevent the use and importation of asbestos. He also talks about workers' safety, yet his support for this code will deny provisions in agreements that currently exist—they will have to be struck out if they are to be code compliant—that enable five days training on asbestos safety in Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and other states. How can a senator so unequivocally support the need to educate workers and provide opportunities for them to be better informed in order to protect their health and the health of their colleagues while at the same time support a code that will not allow for such provisions to be inserted into future enterprise agreements if they are to be code compliant?
He joins the government in supporting the code. Further to that of course he supports the government in bringing forward the code, as this bill would do if enacted. Labor do oppose the code, but we said that, if the code were to apply, it should apply only once agreements have nominally expired. That would only be fair. Why should parties have regard to a code that was not passed by the parliament? What the parties did instead was enter into agreements pursuant to the Fair Work Act and, subsequently—after many rejections, I might add—the parliament then introduced a code to take effect on 29 November next year.
The Prime Minister no less was the one who wrote the compromise of 29 November 2018, as we heard from Senator Hinch in the inquiry yesterday on this bill. He wrote the compromise and passed it across the table to Senator Hinch to say he was happy to have a two-year period of grace before the code was to take effect, which would mean that companies that have agreements that are lawful and yet contrary to the code would be able to tender and win Commonwealth funded contracts. So the Prime Minister—no-one else—suggested 29 November 2018 as the date when the code would take effect and today we are debating a bill that completely contradicts the commitments made by the Prime Minister in the last sitting week of last year. This shows how dishonest this government is. It is willing to tell lies about matters that come before the parliament and of course is willing to prosecute an argument that will indeed attack the interests of working people in the building industry with no genuine benefit, just a terrible effect on workers.
So we say to the government: this code is unfair. It treats building workers and building employers differently from workers in every other sector of our economy. It limits the ability to negotiate on things like Australian made content for protective clothing, asbestos safety training, apprenticeship ratios, forms of employment and hours of duty in ways that no other sector has to endure. It is intrinsically anti worker, this legislation, and the fact that the crossbench senators are contemplating bringing forward the code by supporting this bill is quite frankly unconscionable. Those crossbench senators said that they told the industry in December they had reached an accommodation. The Prime Minister stood at the dispatch box last December and said this was a good deal, and now he is seeking to renege on that deal. It is for these reasons that I have outlined that Labor opposes this bill and will always, always, oppose the code that it contains.
4:31 pm
Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I rise to support this bill. The Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Amendment Bill 2017 makes a welcome adjustment to the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Act 2016. The ABCC act and the building code contained a two-year transition period which delayed the requirement, under the building code, for building and construction companies to have code-compliant enterprise agreements before they could tender for Commonwealth funded work. This transition period allowed construction companies to continue to use non-code-compliant enterprise agreements made before 2 December 2016.
This bill does two things. It decreases the transition period included in the act from two years to nine months. This will see the new code come into practice by the end of the year. The bill will also prohibit companies with non-code-compliant agreements from being awarded Commonwealth-funded building work after the commencement date of the bill.
These changes are directed at the massive union pressure placed on building companies to sign non-code-compliant agreements that contain non-productive and discriminatory terms. There is evidence that unions are already trying to dodge the code. Just days after the code was released, the CFMEU shut down 13 sites operated by Kane Constructions in Victoria. Kane is a construction company that has resisted intense coercion from the CFMEU to sign non-code-compliant enterprise agreements.
These changes are a welcome tightening of the legislation, to encourage and reward companies who comply with the new building code. They remove any unfair advantage that may have been paid to construction companies unable to hold out against the standover tactics of the CFMEU. They create a level playing field across the building industry.
In supporting this bill, I, unlike the member for Gorton, would like to commend Senator Hinch for listening to the construction industry in Victoria, for being responsive and for his appreciation of what the government is trying to achieve through the ABCC. As Senator Hinch said:
… the legislation was killing them—
the building and construction companies, he meant. It doesn't get much clearer than that.
The re-establishment of the Australian Building and Construction Commission last year was a signature achievement of the coalition. Despite the best efforts of unions and the Labor Party, the ABCC is back. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, nearly half, 42 per cent, of all working days lost to industrial disputes are in the construction industry. In September 2016, the rate of industrial disputes in the construction industry was nearly six times the Australian average. These disputes are estimated to add 30 per cent to the cost of infrastructure. As of 30 January 2017, there were 110 CFMEU officials before the courts, which in recent years have imposed fines of more than $8 million on the union. When the previous ABCC existed, the performance of the building and construction industry improved. Productivity improved by 30 per cent. Disputes fell from five times the all-industries average to double the average. Under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government, the ABCC was abolished by the then employment minister, Bill Shorten, at the behest of the CFMEU. Standards of behaviour in the building industry deteriorated markedly. Violent disputes became more common. Thuggery and disregard for the law became commonplace. Productivity flatlined.
The re-establishment of the ABCC last year put back in place a regulator with strong and effective powers. It established a commission with the power to monitor compliance with the law by the building and construction industry. The ABCC will be able to take enforcement action and promote appropriate standards of conduct across the industry. The commission will have the power to eliminate coercion and discrimination in the industry. It will take action against standover tactics and the strongarming of builders and workers who are trying to do the right thing. It will enforce better levels of governance across the industry by making it an offence to intentionally hinder or obstruct an authorised officer seeking information or documents.
There is no question of the need for the ABCC. Just like the Cole royal commission laid bare the truth of the building and construction industry in the early 2000s, leading to the original establishment of the ABCC, the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption, the Heydon royal commission, showed just how low Australia's unions had sunk, and the CFMEU and the AWU were among the worst of the lot.
The report of the 2015 Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption is a great read. It is a real page-turner. Just when you think it cannot get worse, just when you think that you must have reached the peak of union corruption and failure of governance, there is another example that is even more outrageous or unbelievable.
Commissioner Heydon did a fantastic job in very difficult circumstances, and I commend him for his patience, his fortitude and his significant efforts in putting together a comprehensive report. Commissioner Heydon is one of the outstanding lawyers of his generation. The personal attacks from those opposite and from the trade union movement were unprecedented and outrageous, particularly for someone who, like his celebrated father, Sir Peter Heydon—the public servant who was most responsible for the ending of the White Australia policy—has given so much service to his country.
The report is not an insignificant achievement when you consider what he was up against. There was perjury—much perjury. Some union officials brazenly admitted to it and said they would plead guilty to charges of perjury. A huge amount of the testimony given in hearings was false to the knowledge of the witnesses. There was destruction of documents, most blatantly by the CFMEU. The CFMEU in Queensland caused a number of tonnes—tonnes—of documents to be removed from the CFMEU's Brisbane office and disposed of on the same day that the CFMEU received a notice to produce from the royal commission. Despite this obstructionist behaviour, the commission found plenty of evidence of trade union corruption and the complete failure of anything approaching governance.
Commissioner Heydon found widespread misconduct by six unions across every state and territory in Australia, except for the Northern Territory. He found financial misconduct. He found breaches of legal duty. He found misuse of union funds for personal gain and purposes. He found misrepresentation of membership numbers. He found misconduct on building sites. He found abuse of process. He found blackmail. He found death threats and bribery. Commissioner Heydon found:
This conduct has taken place among a wide variety of unions and industries. Those responsible have ranged in seniority from the most junior levels to the most senior ... Of course what has been described is not universal. It may not even be typical. But you can look at any area of Australia. You can look at any unionised industry. You can look at any type of industrial union. You can select any period of time. You can take any rank of officeholder … You can search for any type of misbehaviour. You will find rich examples over the last 23 years in the Australian … union movement.
Again, he said:
The misconduct exhibits great variety. It is widespread. It is deep-seated.
The Labor Party argues that the ABCC is an unfair and unwarranted imposition on trade unions. In a civilised society, you should not need a watchdog. But, given the findings of Heydon royal commission, how can you possibly consider the building and construction industry to be civilised? How can you possibly let these trade unions continue to act without oversight?
As I said before, the report of the royal commission makes for gripping reading. Here are some examples:
At a blockade of a Grocon site by the CFMEU a driver of a minibus, who happened to be suffering from cancer, attempted to drive out of the blockaded area. He described how CFMEU members surrounded his van, yelling abuse and punching the windscreen. One of them was John Setka, then Assistant State Secretary, who was found by Tracey J to have used foul and abusive language, to have punched the windscreen, and to have shouted: ‘I hope you die of … cancer’.
This is not civilised behaviour.
Last April, a CFMEU official was found guilty of attempting to intimidate a government official on the Barangaroo site in Sydney. While blockading the site, he was alleged to have abused workers attempting to go to work, calling them 'scum' and 'dogs'. He was found to have called a government inspector a 'grub' and abused him with language too foul to use in this place. The same CFMEU official was found guilty on two charges of threatening and intimidating two government inspectors on the Sunshine Coast and intimidating a further inspector at the Queensland University of Technology, including by attempting to punch him. These are not civilised people. Perhaps the most well-known instance was in Queensland. When told he was trespassing on a Grocon building site, a CFMEU official threatened a Grocon safety adviser, saying, 'You know what, I know your phone number. I know where you live.' I want to be clear that these are not idle threats. The royal commission heard evidence from one project manager at a licensed builder that he was beaten up by two CFMEU officials when he refused to pull money out of the business to make unauthorised payments to the union. They beat him so badly that they perforated both his eardrums. He required hospital treatment. This is not an acceptable work environment. This is not acceptable in Australia in 2017.
I return to the Royal Commission. Numerous officials were found to have misused trade union funds for their personal gain. Remember, these are people who are supposedly representing the otherwise unrepresented workers and who are meant to be delivering a public good in terms of getting the best outcome for their workers; but, instead, what did they do? They took membership dues and spent them on themselves. A former lead organiser for the CFMEU in the Australian Capital Territory conceded during hearings in Canberra that he had personally received $100,000 in secret payments from employers. A former president of the CFMEU in Queensland received around $150,000 worth of free work on his home, arranged by a senior employee of a major building company, with the knowledge of his superior. Both the incoming and the outgoing secretary of the Western Australian branch of the TWU depleted union funds by over $600,000 to spend on the unauthorised purchase of two luxury four-wheel drive vehicles and an unauthorised, generous redundancy payment for the outgoing secretary. In the notorious Health Services Union, Kathy Jackson, Michael Williamson and Craig Thomson used union funds for their own purposes, and both Williamson and Thomson have been convicted in relation to their crimes.
But, as we all know, personal use of union funds was not where it stopped. Unions negotiated sweetheart payments from employers, trashing the interests of their members for paltry financial gain into undisclosed fighting funds. An organiser in the CFMEU in New South Wales received $2,500 per week in secret and possibly unlawful cash payments. A company operating a mushroom farm in Victoria agreed to pay the AWU $4,000 a month for a number of months in exchange for industrial peace. The AWU in Victoria entered into an agreement with Thiess John Holland, where the AWU received $110,000 per year for three years, disguised by a series of false invoices. The AWU in Victoria and a large cleaning company, Cleanevent, agreed to extend their enterprise agreement without any consultation with workers. This saved the company $2 million a year. And what did the AWU get in return? It got $25,000 per year and 100 bogus union members. What a deal! What a complete perversion of the role of a trade union. What a paltry price for such a sell-out. And who was the hard-headed, genius negotiator of this deal? The Leader of the Opposition! Who knows where he would take our country with that kind of capability behind him.
It is no wonder that Senator Hinch has been approached by building and construction companies in his home state of Victoria, keen to see compliance with the new code of conduct come into force as soon as possible. Victoria has borne witness to some of the very worst behaviour of the CFMEU. Last June, the Herald Sun identified a paid CFMEU official attending a bikie protest, which was led by a union representative in Rebels colours. That union representative was using a megaphone covered in CFMEU stickers. The relationship between the CFMEU and bikie gangs was there for all to see.
In his statement to the Royal Commission on Trade Union Governance and Corruption, Victoria Police Assistant Commissioner, Stephen Fontana, confirmed: 'Victoria Police intelligence indicates that criminal activity is undertaken by trade union officials directly, and by organised crime figures or groups on behalf of trade union officials.' He went on to say, 'The criminal activity of which Victoria Police is concerned is generally comprised of corruption, drug trade, blackmail and extortion. Corruption takes the form of secret commissions and preferential tendering.' And that's not all. He went on to say, 'Intelligence indicates that trade union officials use Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs to engage in activity on their behalf and that [these gangs] often commit serious crime to execute these activities. Specifically, trade unions use [gang] members as "hired muscle" for debt collection, with "standover tactics used to intimidate victims".' This kind of behaviour is outrageous. It is holding our building and construction industry to ransom. We cannot have trade unions working hand in glove with outlawed criminal gangs to put a halt to legitimate business. We cannot have the jobs of everyday Australians put at risk so that groups of criminals might profit from illegal activities. We cannot have a lawless trade union running rampant over an industry.
In conclusion, the protections offered by the ABCC are real and the need for those protections is real. The Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption proved just how badly the trade union movement can fail its members—hard working men and women who rely on unions to represent them and deliver reasonable and fair working conditions. The unions involved in the building and construction industry, the CFMEU in particular, are among the worst of the lot. There is a distinct pattern of behaviour where the union operates to its own advantage and to the personal advantage of its office bearers and representatives. As Commissioner Heydon reported: 'It is a picture of the union concerned not with its role as the instrument through which to protect the public interest of its members but with self-interest. Its primary interest is in leading the group of its officials as a self-perpetuating institution. It is an institution more concerned with gathering members than servicing them.'
The ABCC will bring standards back to Australia's building sites. It will increase productivity, improve the safety of workers and hold the CFMEU to account. The amendment put forward in this bill today will expedite these standards, making them operational by the end of the year. For that reason, I commend the bill to this House.
4:46 pm
Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
This bill, the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Amendment Bill 2017, tells you about everything that is wrong with this place. It tells you that if the parliament legislates and strikes what it thinks is an appropriate balance but big business do not like it, they will get you while you are lying on the beach over the summer holidays and get the parliament to change its position. We will talk a bit more about that in the moment.
The previous speaker and all of the other government speakers who came before him spent a huge amount of their time talking in support of this bill by talking about claims of criminal behaviour that apparently go on on building sites. They may not know this but the bill does not deal with criminal behaviour. The ABCC has no power to investigate criminal behaviour. That is left up to a quaint organisation called 'the police'. The police investigate claims of criminal behaviour. The police prosecute them. And we have in this country a thing called 'the rule of law' where a judge decides whether you have broken the law or not.
But because they have absolutely no justification for this bill, other than for delivering for their corporate masters, they come in here and dress up this bill as if it has something to do with crime. If one single member on the government benches could point me to a provision in the building construction industry legislation or in the ABCCs remit that deals with crime, maybe some of the things they have said would be relevant. But they are not relevant. All the backbenchers trot in here and trot out their repeated lines about claims of criminal activity without realising, because they have not read the bill, that this organisation has nothing to do with claims of criminal activity. That is left up to the police. If you have claims of criminal activity, refer them to the police. The union has done that from time to time. And I am sure that any government members who have claims about that could leave it up to existing law enforcement agencies. And the rule of law could follow its usual course, as it does in a democracy.
But no, this party gets up here and says, 'We can never have any regulation of commercial activity. We have to let people negotiate their own contracts. Far be it from the government to step in and tell business what to do. We've got to get rid of red tape.' Apparently that all falls down when it comes to the workplace, because what this legislation does is say that if you negotiate an agreement in your workplace for certain wages, conditions and protections the government is going to come in and tell you whether you have got it right or wrong.
Under this bill and its accompanying code, which the government now wants to bring into force much more quickly, the government sits down at the negotiating table of every workplace in the country in the construction industry and rewrites their agreement for them. This government is all for market forces except when you negotiate an outcome they do not like. Then they come in and say, 'We're going to rewrite it.' What utter hypocrisy. When this government is prepared to sit down and rewrite the wages and conditions of everyone in this country, just because of the industry that they happen to work in, they no longer have any credibility. They no longer have any credibility when it comes to saying that somehow in their mind the market is different. They do not care about the market. They care about delivering for big business. Nowhere is that more apparent than when you look at the chronology of this bill.
The government went to the election saying, 'We want to introduce legislation around the ABCC.' It was an election issue. It was a double dissolution trigger. We then had months of discussion about it after that. During a late night sitting of the Senate—after hearing all of the evidence, after many committee inquiries and after the government agitating for it in the public realm—we had the Senate agree on a package of amendments to the bill. I did not agree with that package of amendments. I did not agree with the bill. But after hearing everything that is what the Senate resolved. That is the way things sometime happen in this place. Government says, 'We want to do all of these things.' The Senate says, 'Hang on, we want some protections built in.' So what ends up passing into law is sometimes what could be called a compromise package that allows the government to do what it wants but contains some protections or some compromises.
What happened after the Senate had done all of that, exercised its role as a house of review and managed to enshrine some minimal protections for people who happen to work in the construction industry? What happened after that? Big business came up to certain senators and the government and said, 'We don't like the deal that you've struck. We know that you've struck a deal that says, "You can have your law. You can have your code. You can have your Building and Construction Commission, but we need time to get the industry in order so that we don't have people on two sets of agreements—some of which might be code compliant and some of which won't. We will have a grace period to work out whether or not our agreements are compliant with the new code."' Big business came and said, 'We don’t like that, sorry. I know democracy was at work in the Senate when you agreed on that but let me tell you why it's wrong. It's wrong because it is going to cost us a bit of money and we want this in right now.'
So what happened? Senator Xenophon and his team and Senator Hinch came out in a blaze of glory in the papers and said, 'We've changed our mind. We heard from big business over summer and, sorry, those protections that we negotiated, we don't want them anymore.' The government stands up, applauds the conservative crossbench and says: 'Thank you for doing the right thing. Thank you for doing the right thing by big business. Thank you for doing the right thing by us. Thank you for making our donors happy, because that will increase our coffers again come election time, and thank you for doing the work of taking away people's rights at work just because they happen to work in the construction industry.'
And what is going to be the result of this? There are going to be a couple of things that will happen. One is that there is a very clear message that is sent to the whole of the community that this government does not believe in people negotiating their own contracts or their own agreements. If you negotiate something this government does not like, it will come in and take away the rights and protections that you have negotiated. So, as a result, forget about seeing agreements that contain protections in them that might increase the number of apprentices or that might increase other people's participation in the workforce or that, heaven forbid, might increase safety in the workplace. All of those things are now out of bounds.
Secondly, what I think the government probably understands but does not care about, but the crossbenchers certainly do not understand, is the chaos that this bill is going to introduce. Where I think the penny has not dropped for the government and for a number of the crossbenchers is that you now have an industry where a lot of people are on agreements that were struck before the code, and now you have a number of people who are going to be on agreements struck after the code, and you have the government saying with this bill: 'Well, you might have struck what was a lawful agreement and complied with the law at the time, but, effectively retrospectively, we're going to say that, if you have one of those things, you're not going to get any Commonwealth work. If you have one of those things, even if it's not on a Commonwealth job, forget about getting Commonwealth work.'
What do you think is going to happen in response to that? Every one of those agreements in the country is going to be opened up for renegotiation. That is why the grace period was inserted in the first place: to give people time to work this through. So when you see now, on building sites around the country, people saying, 'Well, we thought we had a lawful agreement, but the government was quite happy to legislate retrospectively to say it's no longer a lawful agreement and I can't get any government work because I happen to have this even on an unrelated site,' people are going to come up and say, 'Well, if you're going to take those conditions away from me, I want something for it in return.' So this government has just basically reopened negotiations on almost every building site around the country. That, I think, has not dawned on Senator Hinch—that he has been sold a pup, and Senator Xenophon has been sold a pup as well. When it happens, it can be laid squarely at their feet.
But the last and perhaps the most significant consequence of this legislation is that it sends a message that the Senate may be a house of review but there are certain senators in there who do not take that obligation seriously and who are prepared to trade away whatever they negotiate one day if someone taps them on the shoulder overnight and says, 'Listen, you haven't got the right deal for us in big business; we want you to change your mind.' I will tell you what: after watching this performance and after seeing how Senator Xenophon and his team in the Senate behaved and how Senator Hinch behaved, I would not trust them to walk in, negotiate on my behalf, get protections and even tell me it was worth something because they put them into law, because what I now know, and what everyone in the country knows—and especially what people in South Australia ought to know—is that, when Senator Nick Xenophon tells you he has negotiated a protection and that it is going to go into law, he is quite happy to vote against it the next week if someone in big business taps him on the shoulder and tells him to remove it, because he is more concerned about currying favour with the government and with big business than with standing up to protect people's rights at work. That is the lesson that ought to be brought home to everyone in South Australia and to everyone in Victoria: now there are people in the Senate who will trade away people's rights if someone from big business gets them while they are lying on their towel on the beach over their summer holidays or at any other point in time.
This will set an incredible precedent in this place, because we have legislation coming up about paid parental leave, about child care and about cutting the big business tax rate, and we have senators now who, by their own admission, are prepared to vote one way one day and say, 'Oh, but it's all right; we've given the government something they want but we've got this for you over here on the side,' but then will take away that side deal the next day. So not only are we left in the dark at the moment about what negotiations are going on around cutting paid parental leave, child care and so on from Senator Nick Xenophon's team in the Senate or any of the other senators—we do not really know about that and will find out what deal they do to facilitate the company tax cut for big business or to help the government rip hundreds of millions of dollars out of welfare—but we also know now that if they try to say to people in South Australia, 'It's okay because we've negotiated a quid pro quo; we're about to give the government a big tax cut for big business, but it's okay because I'm getting this over here on the side, and we're about to help the government with their welfare payments, but it's okay because I've got this for you over here,' that promise is not worth the paper it is written on, because even if the government puts side deals with Senator Xenophon or Senator Hinch into law we now know they will trade them off a few weeks later if they think it is in their interest to do so.
I do not know what Senator Hinch and Senator Xenophon are getting for this grubby deal. I do not know what they are getting in return for backflipping on something that only a few weeks ago in the parliamentary sitting calendar they thought was a good deal to enshrine some minimal protection for people's rights at work. Perhaps when they make their contributions to the Senate they might enlighten us as to what quid pro quo they are getting for this. But they now need to know that, if they vote for this bill and this bill passes the Senate, their credibility as defenders of people's rights is shot forever, because we now know not only that they are prepared to trade and do side deals but that those side deals will get repealed the very next day.
I say this: if this legislation passes, the whole of the country ought to know that the parliament is a wholly owned subsidiary of big business in this country, because certain senators have failed to stand up and do their job. The reason that we have a house of review, the Senate, is to provide a check and balance on the government and to say to the government, 'If you're just doing this because it's in the interests of big business, we will stop you and make you act in the public interest.' That is partly what they did last year. They did not get it completely right, in my opinion, but at least they reined in some of the government excesses. But now even that is thrown like confetti in the wind. When this bill comes before the Senate, if it passes this place, it will be incumbent on those senators who have changed their position in a very, very short period of time to explain to the public what they got for it but also to explain to the public why they should ever be trusted again. Why trust any of those senators ever again if they will tell you that they will put your protections into law one day and then, a couple of weeks later, they come around and take them out again?
I will be opposing this bill, and the Greens will be opposing this bill, just as we opposed it in the Senate last time, because there is something to be said for standing up for your principles and there is something to be said for standing up for them even when you have to have a difficult conversation with someone from big business. Unfortunately it seems we cannot rely on the others to do that.
5:01 pm
Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I was enjoying the soliloquy from the member for Melbourne about the conservative crossbench in the Senate. I thought to myself, 'Geez, this is a good speech. It's a cracker of a speech. I might even steal some of his themes and lines about the conservative crossbench.' And then I thought to myself, 'Why isn't Ricky Muir in the Senate anymore? And why has the Senate got this complexion?' I scratched my head and then I remembered—'Oh, that's right! The Greens party did a deal with the Liberal Party which facilitated the election of the very Senate that he just railed against, facilitated the power of the Nick Xenophon Team—that personality cult—and facilitated the rancid influence of One Nation in this parliament.' And now we have this mock outrage about this conservative crossbench, about the influence it is having on this nation.
But the member for Melbourne is right: the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Amendment Bill 2017 is a bad bill. It was a bad bill when it was presented years ago; it was a bad bill when it was presented last year. We had many speeches in this House about it. We had thorough examination of this bill in the House and in the Senate and it was made—can you make a bad bill better? I do not know. You can improve its operation perhaps. So amendments were made to this bill, with its pernicious civil regime that outlaws workers standing up for their safety, standing up against people who would push them into unsafe working conditions often.
This bill gives plumbers, electricians, building labourers and other tradesmen fewer rights than drug dealers. What kind of nation is this government presiding over when that happens? A sparky or a plumber simply wants to go to work in the day and earn a decent wage in a safe workplace. We all know what the building trades are like. They are tough, they are unforgiving and the companies that operate in them are cutthroat and tough and unforgiving. There is a culture of phoenixing. There is a culture of cutting corners, often, with some of those companies, and they push their workers into unsafe work environments. That is why there is death after death in this industry—sometimes of very young workers.
This is a bad bill and there was a poor process applied to it by the government, who first presented it as a double dissolution bill and then had to wobble into the House here in their normal fashion and try the best they could to make it somewhat workable and then wobble into the Senate, into the other place, to that conservative crossbench—poor process. And now they roll into the next year.
Most governments improve over the summer months because they disappear from view. We know Senator Xenophon and Senator Hinch—two senators who have no lives, apparently—kept working over the summer. They were on TV every second day, scurrying about corporate back rooms—I nearly said 'bedrooms' there!—being influenced on perfectly sensible amendments that they made in this bill. Then they scurried back here in the New Year to make these bills more unworkable. The member for Melbourne is right. No-one has thought through the practical consequences of these bills, which will be to throw up 3,000 industrial agreements, 3,000 workplace agreements, for renegotiation. Think about that. Even if you believe that this is a good idea, the Fair Work Commission could not possibly, even by agreement, process that many agreements in the time.
What will be the consequence? Good companies who try to do the right thing and obey the law will be forbidden to tender for Commonwealth contracts. That can only do one thing: force contract prices up, because there will be less competition. And what is this? It is the big hand of government. For all of this government's rhetoric, this is the big hand of government reaching into the private sector and the free market and meddling in a completely ridiculous fashion—
Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Using procurement to force—
Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
using procurement to force its ideological predisposition on business. We are about to see the mother of all logjams in the Fair Work Commission. There will be companies out there who are desperate to renegotiate their agreements. We have seen some consequences of that in South Australia. We have heard a lot about power from those opposite—I do not want to go through the power debate in this place on this bill; maybe another time—but SA Power Networks is one company which has been caught up in the red tape of this government. The big hand of government is meddling with a company which has had 12 years of industrial stability and peace in South Australia. It has been 12 years since there has been disputation in SA Power Networks—a fully unionised workforce, unionised because they know the union protects their interests. But they have been informed that SAPN will be a code-covered entity. By virtue of its work in the NBN, it will now become subject to the Building Code, which means that its single enterprise agreement—which is agreed, is in place and gives workers, management and the company a fair set of conditions and stable workplace relations, which is important in the industry—will be split into three different agreements.
It is so serious because workers will face losing guarantees about the use of contractors and guarantees about the use of apprentices. They have a very good apprenticeship scheme running at SAPN, which they should be praised for. Craigmore High School, in my electorate, participates in that. They have a Stobie pole in the school—for those opposite, in South Australia a Stobie pole is an electricity pole—and kids train on it with proper safety harnesses, preparing them for an apprenticeship program. So it is a company that is doing the right thing in many ways. We can have other debates about some of the corporate taxation arrangements and all the rest of it, but in industrial relations, its apprenticeship programs and its relationship with South Australian schools, it is doing a good job. It has had a decade or more of industrial peace, something that those opposite claim they want, and yet they are now going to drag this company, which has industrial peace, into a situation where it has to negotiate three different agreements, disrupt its workforce and disrupt the stable agreements it has around apprenticeships and contractors. That is why the South Australian Treasurer has written to the Minister for Employment requesting an exemption for SAPN.
That is just one little cameo of the damage this bill will do. It is damage done by a government who are, frankly, completely out of control. They have had a leadership change. It has been good for ministers at the table because they have had a promotion, but the disruption and unpredictability that has been caused is a serious problem. We have all heard the Prime Minister's speeches and seen 'bad Malcolm'. We have had the Jack Nicholson from The Shining version of Malcolm come out—'Here's Malcolm!' We have seen him come out and the backbench get all excited, but we know that the government are completely out of control and completely unpredictable. This is pretty much the antithesis of the way you market yourselves to the community. You are supposed to be the force of stability and rationality. That is your market. That is the Menzies pitch: boring but predictable.
Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
And here we are, overturning contracts.
Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
And here we are, reaching into private entities. Forget the unionised workforce, who have done the right thing here. This is a private company that has a stable agreement and has done the right thing. It is not a building company; it is a power company. By virtue of its involvement in the NBN, which is a government program, it has been dragged into this ridiculous, pernicious code, which at its heart is actually a representation, just as Work Choices was, of big government getting involved in the private market. You are getting involved and sticking your noses in where they do not belong. That is what this is. You just shake your head. We kind of expect it from the government, given their leadership worries and the constantly changing ministerial line-up. How can anybody really predict what they will do? They want both sides of every argument, a sure sign of a government in trouble. I see the member for Corio in the chamber. Is that right—the member for Corio?
Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Corangamite—that is right. Corio is on our side. He is a good bloke. What I love about Corangamite is that everybody in the country has seen you in your little tank helmet, out there pitching for a bid that was taken out of the running by the government. That is pretty embarrassing, I would have thought. Maybe you can explain that for me. I thought you were supposed to be an up-and-comer and a clever backbencher, but backing in a bid that the government skewers is a bad look, isn't it? I was talking a bit before—
Ms Henderson interjecting—
I wait to be informed by you in the next speech! But here is the thing: I was thinking about Ricky Muir. What a good bloke Ricky Muir was. You could talk cars with him and he seemed to be a pretty sensible fellow. He took a long time before he spoke in the parliament. That perhaps was a sign of good judgement. He got a bit of stick about it, but it might have been a sign of good judgement, because what we have now on the conservative crossbench is this kaleidoscope of colour and movement that you get with Senator Xenophon's party, which is named after him. I note that he is committed to changing its title sometime soon. I doubt that will happen, really. It is a personality cult. Its representations are ciphers for his opinions. We know with Senator Xenophon that he can change his mind at a moment's notice—just like that, with a snap of the fingers. He stood up in the Senate and backed in the TWU's Safe Rates campaign. He quoted a widow in his speech supporting it. Then, of course, a different section of the community, business, got to him and he changed his mind straight back and voted completely the opposite way—and he has done the same thing here. We have to hear about how he is the great hero of workers, backing apprenticeships, opposing overseas workers, promoting Australian made goods and against asbestos. Yet, in this bill, he removes every single mechanism for workers to defend themselves and campaign on those issues or do something about those issues. He removes every single legal facility for them to have safe workplaces, make sure there are apprenticeship ratios, make sure there is consultation on 457 visas and make sure they do not have to work with asbestos. For all of his talk, what do we see from Senator Xenophon's party? We see a cipher for big business.
We see the same thing with Senator Hinch. It is impossible not to like Senator Hinch's persona on the TV. We all remember him from our youth. I am not saying he has done everything wrong, but he is wandering around the Senate in a dazed and confused fashion and no-one really knows which way he will go. Now he has voted one way before Christmas and another way after Christmas. We have One Nation rolling around this country, you know, talking to the workers.
Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Doing preference deals with the Libs.
Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Doing preference deals with the Libs. What they are really seeking to do is to replace the Liberal and National parties. Senator Ron Boswell, who was a good man, regarded defeating One Nation as his finest achievement. That is the way he described it: 'Defeating One Nation was my finest achievement'. And what do we find over here? Preference deals and the mainstreaming of One Nation—gutlessness.
Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Order! Member for Corangamite, you have a point of order?
Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Just to ask you to remind the member to speak on the bill. He is speaking outside the content of the bill, so could you ask the member to bring his contribution back to the contents of the bill?
Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
The member for Wakefield has the call.
Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
The passage of the bill is facilitated by the conservative crossbench and they are being stroked. One Nation is been stoked by this Prime Minister and by this government, and it will be to your shame and to your detriment.
5:15 pm
Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
It is always a great pleasure to follow the member for Wakefield because he always comes up with some sort of wacky line in his contribution, and I note that he is confused about whether the member for Corio is actually a member on his side. Yes, he is the Labor member for Corio, but you would not know about that. The member for Wakefield did mention the Land 400 defence contract, and I have to say that I am very pleased that he did because, when it comes to fighting for jobs, I am incredibly proud of what we are doing on this side of the House, in contrast to the member for Corio, a shadow defence minister, who has absolutely shamed the people of Geelong because he has not been prepared to stand up and fight for jobs. I draw on the member for Wakefield's contribution on this bill. This is all about jobs, and our bill before the House today—
Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I rise on a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. The member for Corangamite pulled me up for not talking about the bill and now she has wandered off into her own justifications.
Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
This is wide-ranging and I will allow the member to continue.
Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
There is a little bit of hypocrisy there from the member for Wakefield, given he actually spoke about the Land 400 defence contract in his contribution. I just want to put on the record that the Victorian government is trying to push that contract into central Melbourne by putting to the defence primes that Fishermans Bend be the preferred location—very disappointing. The member for Corio has been absolutely pathetic in the way he has stood up for our city in our region and not fighting for our region to make sure that we land some of those jobs in Geelong, in Corangamite and in our wonderful region. Shame on Daniel Andrews, shame on local Labor MPs and shame on Labor's shadow defence minister, the member for Corio, who has absolutely and fundamentally failed the people of Geelong.
I want to correct the record when it comes to the member for Wakefield's contribution: this is actually a decision of the defence primes; it is not a decision of the Department of Defence and nor is it a decision for the Victorian government. The incentive packages, however, are every important, and what a disappointment it is that the Victorian government, in a secret plan, is trying to push all of those jobs into Fishermans Bend and is not standing up for regional Victoria, including my region.
This bill before the House today, the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Amendment Bill, is a very important part of our focus on driving jobs in the building and construction sector, which employs one million Australians. That is why our government, last year, re-established the Australian Building and Construction Commission. This is crucial to driving reform and boosting productivity. The building code is fundamental to our objective to make sure that we can start seeing a construction sector which is thriving, and we have not seen that under the previous Labor government.
This bill amends the expiry of the transitional grace period from 28 November 2018 to 31 August 2017 for enterprise agreements made before the building code commenced on 2 December 2016. So, while new enterprise agreements made after 2 December 2016 must comply with the code, building industry participants covered by existing enterprise agreements will now have until 31 August 2017 to ensure their agreements are code compliant. This is very reasonable period of time. Building companies have been on notice for a very significant period of time—
Opposition members interjecting—
Mr Deputy Speaker, I would ask that members opposite stop interjecting. The members are being quite rude and, frankly, it is absolutely inappropriate.
Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
The member for Corangamite has the call.
Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
The bill also limits the exemption to building industry participants submitting expressions of interest and tendering for Commonwealth-funded building work. This means enterprise agreements will need to comply with the building code before contracts are awarded and work gets underway.
We are very proud to be putting this bill before the House because what this amendment does is create a level playing field for those in the industry. There are some building companies who did not enter into a new enterprise agreement because they knew that they were obliged to incorporate into the enterprise agreement the building code. I include in those companies Kane Constructions, which is doing wonderful work in the city of Geelong in a $74 million construction of stage 4 of Simonds Stadium. There are other companies that rushed their agreements through and thought that they would have two years to move to the building code, which, frankly, was far too long.
I do want to commend Senator Hinch. Initially, of course, he opposed this particular component of the ABCC legislation. I spoke to Senator Hinch today and I congratulated him, and he said, 'You know, Sarah, in politics when you make the wrong call, when you make the wrong decision, you have to be man enough or woman enough to change your mind and to set things right.' That is exactly what Senator Hinch has done in putting to the Prime Minister that two years is too long.
As we all knew on this side of the House, the reason Senator Hinch took that approach was because over the summer he was approached by many building companies that said to him: 'This is absolutely unfair. You are forcing us to comply with the code, yet other companies have two years to move to a building code. That creates a very unlevel playing field and puts us at an enormous disadvantage. It hurts us. We won't be able to tender for the same work because we have much higher obligations.'
In the end, Senator Hinch recognised that this was going to hurt companies and it was going to hurt workers. That is why Senator Hinch, after speaking to many people, recognised the inequity of Labor's position and put to the Prime Minister that a nine-month transition period is appropriate. So building companies now have a reasonable period of time to renegotiate their enterprise agreements so that all companies are on a level playing field.
In his contribution earlier in the day, the member for O'Connor said: 'I don't know what this is going to do to improve productivity. How is this going to fix business? What is the problem with an enterprise agreement including a broad scope of terms?' Well, clearly, the member for O'Connor—
Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
The member for Gorton or the member for O'Connor?
Sarah Henderson (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Yes, I am sorry—the member for Gorton. The member for Gorton has not done his homework because enterprise agreements in the building and construction industry have included a broad range of restrictive work practices, discriminatory provisions and provisions which hurt building companies and which hurt workers. Some examples are enterprise agreements which have required contractors to employ a nonworking shop steward or job delegate. There have been clauses where there is a one-in all-in clause, where if one person is offered overtime, all other workers must be offered overtime whether or not there is enough work. So let's just pay workers for work that they do not do! That was a requirement in some enterprise agreements.
Some enterprise agreements include jump-up provisions, which prevent engaging subcontractors unless they provide certain union dictated terms and conditions to workers, despite their existing lawful industrial arrangements. In other words, some enterprise agreements make it impossible for building companies to lawfully engage subcontractors because they are so restrictive.
There are also provisions which require contractors to obtain the approval of the union over the number and types of employees that a contractor may engage on a project. In Queensland, there is one enterprise agreement which allows the union to call a two-hour stop-work meeting every single day. Members opposite say: 'What's wrong with that? What's the problem? How is that hurting productivity?' That is unacceptable and we, as a government, are proud to have a code which says: 'We do expect some minimum standards. We do expect workers when they go to work to actually work through the day.' Frankly, most people who go to work want that too.
This has been driven by the uncomfortable and cosy relationship between members opposite and the likes of the CFMEU, and that is exactly why the ABCC has been introduced. Regrettably, corruption, lawlessness, standover tactics, bullying and intimidation have been commonplace in the Australian construction industry. Boy oh boy, did we see that in play in Geelong in December on the very first day that the commission came into effect. While Kane had a proper exemption in place for the Simonds Stadium redevelopment, and there were proper provisions under the Fair Work agreement where they could go out on strike lawfully, that did not cover subcontractors. Union bosses with the CFMEU stood at the gate on one day in December of last year and said to subcontractors who were not covered by the lawful provisions with the Fair Work Commission that they were not to work that day. That is unlawful conduct. The CFMEU had no right to ask subcontractors not to attend work to work on the stadium. That is a $74 million development for our city. It is incredibly important for jobs. It is incredibly important for our own region's prosperity. It is an example of how the CFMEU operate.
That particular action was not protected action; it was unprotected. A few weeks before Christmas, 135 workers missed out on a day's pay because they were told by the CFMEU bosses, and they were supported by a number of other unions, not to attend work. I say to members opposite: we seek your support for this amendment. We seek your support for a level playing field so that when there is a building company tendering for Commonwealth work that everyone operates on the same playing field. That is only fair. We cannot give some companies an advantage and not others.
We have seen a terrible history, frankly, in the lead-up to the introduction of the commission where the likes of the CFMEU have run devastating campaigns against Grocon and against Boral, which have really brought some companies to their knees. We must have lawful conduct on Australian building and construction sites, and that is absolutely fundamental. I do want to reflect on the evidence before the royal commission of the Boral CEO, Mike Kane, who made it very clear that the CFMEU were engaging in cartel tactics, blackmail and intimidation because of Boral's work on the Regional Rail Link—again, a very important project for our region which was brought to a standstill. Members opposite said nothing about that. Mr Kane actually said in evidence before the royal commission that Boral had lost $8 million in the past 19 months because of the conduct of the CFMEU.
We need to make sure that everyone working on Australian building and construction sites is working legally, is playing fair and is not engaging in the sorts of tactics that we have seen. It is incredibly regrettable, when you look at the scope and the seriousness of the conduct, Mr Deputy Speaker, that it has taken this amount of effort to reintroduce the Australian Building and Construction Commission. I reflect back on the conduct that occurred at Simonds Stadium on the very first day that the commission came into effect. I do know that members of the ABCC attended the construction site and that they are investigating the conduct of certain union members. I am very pleased to know that that is proceeding.
Thank you very much. I commend this bill to the House.
5:31 pm
Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
It will not surprise anybody in this House that I rise to speak against this ridiculous bill that is before us. It is ridiculous for a number of reasons. It also shows how hypocritical this government is. This is a government that is saying that 3,000 agreements that have been struck need to be renegotiated within nine months. Agreements struck and signed off by Fair Work—3,000 of them—need to be renegotiated by August this year.
The same government have failed to enter into collective agreements and renegotiate with their own workforce. Tens of thousands of public servants have not had an agreement in place for over three years, yet they are saying to the construction industry, who have gotten on with their job and struck employer and employee agreements in their workplaces: 'Sorry, we don't like some of your clauses, so go back and do it again and do it within nine months. If you don't, you cannot get federal government work.' This is a government that is so heavy-handed with the construction industry it is trying to restrict any possible collective bargaining or freedom that exists. Those opposite who are throwing stones at the construction industry should really look at their efforts in enterprise bargaining and reflect on that for a moment before forcing the construction industry down this chaotic path.
The bill that is before us today is to amend their own act by basically saying companies who have collective agreements that are not code compliant have to be renegotiated in the next nine months. Whilst they can tender for work they cannot enter into contracts. What kind of ridiculous clause is that? Put the hard work in, do the paperwork and tender, but then if you get it they say you cannot sign the contract until you have renegotiated the agreement. You opposite are bullying the construction industry by doing that, you are bullying the workers by doing that and you are bullying the construction companies. Some of these companies are not big companies. Some of these companies are small-to-medium companies that are doing work in regional areas. There are companies like Fairbrother in Tasmania, who have been doing work on the UTAS housing project. They have clauses in their agreement with their workers which would now be restricted because of this code.
There are clauses about apprenticeship ratios. What kind of government wants to strike out apprenticeship ratio agreements in their agreements? What kind of government wants to discriminate and exclude apprenticeships? We have some companies in this country that have sat down with their existing workforce and said, 'Let's work together to ensure that we have another generation of workers in the construction industry' and they have agreed to apprenticeship ratios. They exist in agreements and the construction industry is one of the only industries that we have left in this country with successful apprenticeship programs. Yet this government is saying that there is now something wrong with having that and they are restricting that from being in agreements.
It is not the only clause that this government is saying is now noncompliant and needs to be struck out and renegotiated. This government also has a problem with having within agreements words around making sure every person who works on a site has the right visa and that there are compliance checks. We have heard time and time again in the media about problems with visa workers in the construction industry. People are being employed on construction sites—some of the most dangerous workplaces in Australia—who do not have the right training, do not have the proper safety standards and do not have the proper visas. Yet this government is saying that when a workforce and the employer want to be proactive about it and put it into their agreement it is now not allowed.
Let us just reflect for a moment on some of the quite tragic cases we have had of temporary visa workers working on Australian construction sites and what happens when we do not have an agreement like this in place to do the double-checking and the due diligence to make sure that these workers are safe. We have had the deaths of backpackers in Perth. Two Irish backpackers were crushed, and then a woman—a German backpacker—quite tragically fell to her death because she had taken her harness off. This government do not care about that. They do not care about workplace health and safety, they do not care about workers' safety and they do not care about the migrant temporary workers in these workplaces. They want to make it really hard for an employer who has put a clause in their agreement that says there will be compulsory visa checks.
This is another clause they have a problem with: visas workers redundancies and making sure that local workers have priority. This government, through all their rhetoric and bravado in question time, says: 'We are going to stand up for Australian workers and Australian jobs. We want to see Australians employed.' Yet when a construction agreement has a clause that says that locals will be retained and that casual workers and visa workers are off first, this government is now saying that that should be prohibited. It is now barred under this government if an employer and employees sit down and say, 'If there's a downturn in work we will take away the labour hire and the overseas visa workers first so that the local workers keep their jobs.' That is a clause that every Australian worker would love to have in their agreement. That is a clause that meat workers would like to have, that Parmalat workers would like to have, that food processing workers would like to have, that cleaners would like to have. I cannot think of an industry that would not want to see that kind of clause in their agreement, but, because the construction industry has been sensible and wants to retain a skilled local workforce, the government seek to punish it for getting on with the job of negotiating an agreement so we can continue the construction boom.
The government have a serious problem when it comes to respecting the people who work in the construction industry. As I have mentioned, the government say they will prohibit any clause in relation to apprenticeships and ratios. Why would you target young people in that way? The government also say that another prohibited clause under their code is the opportunity for local manufacturing. Again, that completely flies in the face of all of their rhetoric. They say that clauses which prioritise protective clothing that, wherever possible, is made in Australia are prohibited content and should not be allowed in an agreement. So, when you have construction workers saying to their employer, 'It's not just about us having good secure jobs; we want you to maximise buying equipment and clothing from Australian manufacturers to support another industry,' the government is saying, 'No, that's prohibited content. You can't have that in an agreement and, if you do, you cannot tender for government work.' For all of their ranting and rhetoric about standing up for Australian manufacturing, what they are doing in the ABCC and in this bill by bringing forward the code is saying to a whole bunch of workers, when they have done the right thing to support workers in another industry, 'No, you cannot have a clause in an agreement that talks about prioritising Australian manufactured goods and, in particular, uniforms.'
Another problem that the government have in another restrictive clause under this agreement is asbestos awareness training. We have already had case after case coming up about asbestos being found in Australian workplaces and, because safety officers and workers have spoken out and said there is asbestos, we have been able to catch it in some cases. Where we have non-union workplaces or where we do not have skilled up safety reps, I fear how much asbestos may be in building sites and workplaces. I fear that because we know it is coming in. The government is lax on borders and they are letting asbestos product come in to be used on our building sites—they have not stopped it at the borders—and, when we say we will have asbestos awareness training so that workers can identify it, speak up about it and stop it from being put into a building, they say it is not allowed to be in an agreement between employers and employees. They are so restrictive. They are the new mother state, forcing upon an industry their own ideological obsession about breaking any ability for workers and employers to have a mature relationship.
The government also have a problem when employers, like Lend Lease, and their employees include in their agreement suicide awareness training. The industry acknowledges that there is a problem amongst their youth. They acknowledge and they recognise that they have lost too many of their own to suicide. By being proactive about it and sitting down with Lend Lease, they included suicide awareness training within their agreement, yet the government says, 'No, that's not allowed in the code.' Lend Lease is one of our biggest construction companies. If they want to build another Bendigo hospital, if they want to tender for a federal government contract or if they want to build the Hobart hospital, they have to strike out that clause in their agreement.
The government also have a problem with any clauses that look at long hours of work. The government also have a problem with casualisation. This is another clause that I know Australians would want to see in workplaces. In this particular agreement, if you work for an employer for more than six weeks, you are able to apply for permanency. That is something that used to exist many decades ago and many workers want to see it reintroduced.
The government—and this is the corker—also have a problem with heat policies in agreements. After a week and a half of question time and ranting about how people need to be able to put on their air conditioners in 40-degree heat and ranting about how people need to be in cool climates on really hot days, they want to exclude any form of heat policy in collective agreements, possibly forcing construction workers who are outdoors and exposed to work in climates that are unsafe. This is a government that is targeting the construction industry because it is an industry where they have been able to get on with the job in a mature way and work out an agreement.
This is a government, with the fact that they have brought in this rushed legislation, that want noncomplying companies to renegotiate their agreements from two years down to nine months. That will create chaos in the industry. Big companies will basically not tender for federal government work. This will put them at odds with state agreements that prioritise making sure that they have companies with apprenticeship ratios. In the state of Victoria there is a rule at a state government level. To tender for state government work, one in 10 of the people on the job must be apprentices. If Lend Lease had that in their contract, my question to the government is: does that exclude them from federal government work? The chaos that this government are creating in the construction industry to pursue their own ideology is just disgraceful. We know that the last time the ABCC was in, productivity crashed. We know that the last time the ABCC was in, workplace death and industry increased.
Weakening the employees' ability to negotiate with their employers does nothing for productivity. It creates division and it creates chaos. Let us just be reminded that this is one of the hardest industries to work in. They are working in very dangerous workplaces. So the fact that we have a government that wants to exclude so many safety provisions from collective agreements demonstrates just how out of touch the government is with blue-collar construction workers.
I call on the government to withdraw this amendment. I call on them to engage with the employers and listen to what they are saying. Go out on those construction sites and hear what those foremen and forewomen have to say about the ABCC and about the heavy-handed tactics of the ABCC. Go out there and talk to apprentices who are enjoying the fact that they are going to have a career in construction. But, if the government have their way, all we will see is an increase in 457 visas, an increase in backpackers and temporary workers on construction sites and a crash in apprenticeships, giving the next generation no opportunity. This is a bad bill amending another bad bill, and it demonstrates everything that is wrong with this government, who are driven by their hatred for the unions and their ideology to break workers.
5:46 pm
Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I note that there are no further government speakers who are willing to get up and defend the legislation that has been put forward in their name, and I can understand full well why. The innocuously named bill, the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Amendment Bill 2017, is designed to induce or coerce employers to break an agreement that was made with them in good faith. I will say that again, because it is absolutely true and it is important that every member on the other side understands this. This is a bill designed to coerce or induce employers to break an agreement which has been made with their workforce in good faith. If an ordinary business, a union or a private individual did that, we would call it a crime or we would call it a tort. But when the government does it we call it lawmaking. It is no less a crime or a tort because it is brought forward in the name of the government.
Let us put this into context. This is a government that came back from a near-death experience in the August election with a grand plan to reshape the structure of Australia and to remodel the economy. We were promised great big new plans, but when we looked for the detail it amounted to nothing more than a $50 billion tax cut for the richest individuals in this country; a benefit cut for pensioners; a series of threatening show-cause and 'you are in debt' letters from the Minister for Human Services; and a proposition to amend the Australian building and construction industry bill. So there you have it: their great big bold plan for Australia.
This is a man who has strived his entire life—and I am talking about the member for Wentworth—to get to the position where he had the words 'Prime Minister of Australia' on his business card. He gets that opportunity, and his big plan for Australia is a tax cut for the richest, a benefit cut for pensioners and a bill to have a go at unions, just because he does not like them. It is not an agenda; it is farce. As I said, if this proposition was brought forward in the name of an ordinary individual, a business or a union, it would be called a crime, because, make no mistake, this bill is about inducing or coercing employers to break, breach or renege on agreement. That is its singular purpose.
The pillars of liberal philosophy, those talismans that thrust every one of those conservative members of parliament to stand for public office and come to this place revolve around a few things. There is the idea of freedom of contract, the idea that it is not the place of third parties and certainly not the place of governments to interfere in the rights of individuals to freely contract with each other and reach agreements and, once an agreement is struck, it should stick, and it should not be the role of other individuals to attempt to come in there and set that agreement aside. There is the idea that we remove government and unwanted third parties from the business affairs of employers, as between employers and employees and employers and unions; that we do not need third parties and we do not need governments getting in and tying them up in red tape and ensuring that they cannot get on with the work that they need to do to grow their profitability and to employ people. And, finally, there is the idea that, if government must legislate, it should not do so retrospectively. That is what ostensibly animates all those on the other side.
This bill which is before the House today offends each and every one of those propositions. Let me explain why. This bill attempts to put the Australian building and construction industry commissioner in a position where he can second-guess, vet and set aside—or certainly ensure that people who are employed under such an agreement never get a job on certain worksites in this country. Think about this for a moment. Two weeks ago the Leader of the Opposition gave a speech in the National Press Club of Australia.
Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
It was a good speech.
Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
It was a good speech, as the member for Griffith points out. He committed Labor to three core objectives. There were three things we were going to be advocating for over the course of the next 12 months, and those three things were jobs, jobs and jobs.
Deputy Speaker, I want you to think for a moment about the purpose of this bill, a bill which, if it does not achieve its first objective, which is to coerce employers to set aside an agreement, will certainly achieve its second objective. And that second objective is to prevent workers from getting jobs in certain places in Australia. I want you to contrast that proposition with a proposition of the Leader of the Opposition, and the Labor challenge for the year, and that is: to put our shoulder to the wheel, to create more jobs and to make it easier for workers to get jobs in this country. Contrast that with the single purpose of this bill, which is coercion and preventing workers from getting jobs on certain building sites in this country. Have you ever heard of this proposition—where a government, which talks about creating jobs, says: 'But we are going to create a piece of legislation whose purpose is to stop certain workers getting a job'? That is what it is about—to prevent certain workers who are employed by certain businesses, employed by certain agreements which the government takes offence to, from getting a job on a worksite.
Let us have a look at this. I want to take us through it, because the member for Gorton has gone through, in some detail, the provisions of the bill. For the benefit of those members from the government who have not read the bill that they are about to vote for, I want to take them through some of the provisions of the bill, in the hope that they will change their mind, because I have already explained how it offends against everything that they purport to stand for—every Liberal principle that they purport to stand for. But I also want to spell out why it offends against just good common sense.
The capacity of the bill to do its work arises from section 34 of the building and construction industry act. This is the provision of the act which enables the minister to make a code. And indeed, he has made such a code, and I have a copy of that code in my hand. It is this code which is enlivened and will be given further force by the bill before the House today. I want to take you to a couple of provisions within the code which I rather warrant that the overwhelming majority of members of the coalition have not even read. They will not have even read this, because if they had read it they certainly would not be voting for it. I will quote from clause 11 of the relevant code, headed 'Content of agreements and prohibited conduct, arrangements and practices'. Take note of the heading, Deputy Speaker, because that is what it is all about. It says:
A code covered entity must not be covered by an enterprise agreement in respect of building work which includes clauses that:
(a) impose or purport to impose limits on the right of the code covered entity—
that being a business—
to manage its business or to improve productivity …
Just think about that for a moment. This is what we are giving force to. I ask members opposite to consider this. They are prohibiting a clause within an enterprise agreement which imposes, or purports to impose, limits on the right of the code covered entity to manage its business or to improve productivity. Well, that could be just about anything—perhaps a provision which will be in every enterprise agreement in the country which says that ordinary hours of work shall be within a 12-hour bandwidth and they shall be between the hours of 7 am and 7 pm. Pick up just about any enterprise agreement in the country, and you will have a provision within it that has that—a provision which is imposing or purporting to impose a limit on the right of the employer to manage their business. That is exactly what it does. In fact, that is exactly what most enterprise agreements do—they seek to enshrine rights which provide benefits to employees, albeit benefits which may restrict the right of an employer to do absolutely everything that they would otherwise want to do or to manage the business in ways which best suit their interests, because that is what enterprise agreements do. That is what contracts do: they settle rights as between employers and employees in a way which restricts the abilities of both to do what they might otherwise want to do willy-nilly.
So you might say, 'Well, that can't be a sensible reading of the code or the act; that's not what is intended by the legislation.' But I put to you, Deputy Speaker: that is exactly what it says. So if that is not a sensible reading of it, surely there has to be some adjudication of this. I can only say to you: I wish I were still on the lawyering tools! I would be making a fortune out of this, because what this does is to put every building and construction agreement in the country into contest. And it will be the Australian Building and Construction Industry Commissioner who ultimately will be the arbiter, to see which of those common provisions which are in every single enterprise agreement in the country are offensive to the code and therefore are going to restrict or stop employees getting a job on a particular worksite. Have you ever seen a more ridiculous piece of legislation?
There are certain industrial activists on that side of the House who have been working their entire lives to see that sort of legislation entered onto the statute books. They are not in the majority, and I am absolutely certain that you, Mr Deputy Speaker Buchholz, are not within their number. But this is the provision which they will be voting to extend if this bill passes before this House.
We have heard a lot of talk over the last three or four months about the importance of creating jobs, particularly creating jobs for young people. I happen to believe it is the obligation of every member of this House to be doing everything within their power to be looking for opportunities to create skills, training and employment opportunities, for young Australians to get an apprenticeship, to get a start in life. It is quite common that unions, when they are advocating for agreements, whether they are industry, enterprise-wide or site agreements, to seek to strike up an arrangement with the employer that says that there shall be a certain number of apprentices or trainees that are employed on a worksite—a very sensible arrangement, and one which is in the interests of all Australians. Anybody who has ever tried to get a plumber out to their place on a weekend would understand the shortage we have of plumbers, and of sparkies, chippies and many other trades. The way we are going to fix that is not by importing them from overseas but by training up our young people to do that work.
I am absolutely certain that no member on that side, apart from the industrial activists, has read this provision, because otherwise they would not vote for it, because the provision within the code that they are voting to extend will prohibit agreements on building sites which attempt to put in place provisions which require ratios or agreements around trainee numbers, apprenticeship numbers and the types of employers on the worksite. I could list a whole range of other provisions which members of the government are voting to extend. I have just picked a few, to point out the absolute ludicrousness of the provisions contained within this bill and to ram home the point that it is unprecedented in this country that members would ignorantly walk into this House and stick their hand up to vote for a provision which is going to stop people getting a job. They may do that by accident, but they should never do it on purpose. The single purpose of this bill is to stop certain Australians—who, before the passage of the bill, would be quite entitled to get a job—getting a job on a certain building site in this country. As I said, members on that side should be informed about what they are going to vote for. This is certainly not in the interests of their constituents.
6:01 pm
Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I am pleased to stand to speak on the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Amendment Bill 2017. I do not have a union background. I was a small-business owner and, immediately before coming to parliament, I ran a national trade association, so I was well and truly on the employer and business side. And yet I am standing in this House today speaking on a bill that I think, at the very best, is incompetent and will not achieve what this government sets out to achieve.
I do not think that what they are trying to achieve is a good idea, but I want to assess this bill against the criteria that they set for themselves and have a look at what they say they are trying to achieve and whether or not this bill will do that—because it will not. It breaches the very purpose of the code that it seeks to impose. If we were in this House talking about a Building and Construction Commission that actually looked at the construction industry and codes that handled those things—that actually looked at the fact that this is an industry that makes up eight per cent to 10 per cent of GDP and it has between 20 per cent and 25 per cent of insolvencies, that it regularly sells debt to some very unsavoury characters, that it has unacceptably high levels of injury—I would have something else to say, but we are not. We are looking at a structure that has been set in place specifically to wind back the power of unions in an industry which, in many areas, is totally out of control. But now I will leave that and I will go to the bill itself.
Let us look at what the bill says it is going to do. Back in December, when the construction industry bills were passed, a code was established which defined what enterprise agreements could contain if a company was going to tender and be awarded a tender for a government contract. Because most industrial awards are negotiated years ahead, sometimes three years, the Independents got together and, with Labor's support, managed to get an amendment through which allowed businesses a two-year transition period. The code would apply but not until 29 November 2018. So businesses that had already entered into an agreement had time to renegotiate.
What this bill does, just three months later, is wind that back and allow just a nine-month transition period instead. It says that you must now be code compliant by 1 September 2017. You can submit a tender before that, but you cannot be awarded the tender unless you are code compliant, even in that nine-month transition period. That means that, from the time this bill passes, no company that has an enterprise agreement which they negotiated in good faith under the law will be able to tender for a government contract and be awarded that contract, unless they can renegotiate that agreement outside of its term—in other words, start again. That is an extraordinary shift in three months.
What we heard from the member for Corangamite, which was quite extraordinary, was that Senator Hinch agreed to this amendment because various building companies went to him and said that the companies that were not compliant had an advantage over those that were. In other words, the companies that had enterprise agreements that were in breach of this code—because the unions asked for too much—had an advantage over the companies that were code compliant. In other words, it was cheaper to contract a company that was not code compliant than one that was. Excuse me, but that makes no sense. If the purpose of this is to push down prices for the government and get value for the taxpayer, how can it be that we are actually making this amendment because a senator believes that it is more expensive if you are code compliant than if you are not? If the member for Corangamite got this wrong and Senator Hinch is saying, 'No; actually it is the other way around,' then why on earth would we be forcing companies to renegotiate contracts which they did of their own free will when they deliberately entered into contracts that made them supposedly less competitive? It makes zero sense. It makes no sense whatsoever. It does bell the cat that this is not about the things that this government claims it is about, which is driving down prices for the taxpayer. It is about union busting and union busting alone.
Let us look a little bit further at what this code actually is. I am reading from the explanatory statement. The purpose of the code is to:
… promote an improved workplace relations framework for building work and promote compliance with this code of practice, the Act and designated building laws and encourage the development of safe, healthy, fair, lawful and productive building sites for the benefit of all building industry participants …
So the purpose of the code is to make our workplaces better for the workers and safer. That is one of its objectives.
It is hard to imagine, then, why the code would prevent workers from negotiating that they should, for example, have asbestos safety training, because that is prohibited under the code; they cannot do that. It is hard to imagine why that would be the case. Given the level of suicide by construction workers on construction sites, it is hard to imagine that the code would prohibit the provision of training that assists management and leaders on worksites to recognise the symptoms of a person who may be at risk. Given the objective of the code, it is hard to imagine why the code would prohibit workers who stand out in the sun in 40 and 45 degrees from insisting that their clothing be made of a material that is suitable for that. It is hard to imagine why the code would preclude those things, if that is the objective of the code.
For the benefit of all building industry participants—including workers, clearly—the purpose of the code is to 'encourage the development of safe, healthy, fair, lawful and productive building sites'. And it is not just about workers. For example, asbestos safety is not just about workers. When a worker handles asbestos badly and contracts the dreadful cancers that it can cause, the whole community pays for that. Workplace safety is not just about the worker; it is also about the company and the business itself. Workplace safety is something that both sides of the industrial field should care about, and I know that in most cases they do, which is why so many companies have these clauses in their enterprise agreements. They agree with them. They put them in there because it is actually good for everybody if workers are safe. It is good to have workers as well as managers caring about safety. It is a good thing.
The second paragraph says that the purpose of the code is to:
… assist industry stakeholders to understand the Commonwealth's expectations of, and requirements for, entities that choose to tender for Commonwealth funded building work …
If the purpose of the code is to assist stakeholders to understand the Commonwealth's expectations, three months ago they thought they knew, and now they do not. As bad as it was, three months ago they knew what it was: they had two years to renegotiate their contracts. Now they do not. As the previous speaker outlined, the code itself is so broad that virtually any clause in an enterprise agreement dealing with the conditions that workers work in could be precluded under this code. So when the fair work umpire makes a decision about one clause, does every other building company have to renegotiate in order to conform to the code? This does not introduce certainty; it introduces extraordinary uncertainty. It does exactly the opposite to what the explanatory statement says the code is all about.
I would also like to point out that when the government made these changes in secret over Christmas there was no negotiation. There was no consultation with the industry. There was negotiation with the Independents behind closed doors, but there was no consultation—to the extent that the government did not know how many businesses would be precluded from being awarded a tender under the new code because they were in enterprise agreements that were not new code compliant. They did not know; they did it anyway.
It turns out that there are at least 3,300 companies that would be precluded from being awarded a tender under this bill because they have entered into an enterprise agreement in good faith within the law with the union and those agreements will now not be code compliant. At least 3,300 companies will find themselves in this position. Master Builders Australia have said, 'That's okay, there'll be enough companies out there that are code compliant to fulfil the government's requirements for its building.' That is not the point. This is not about the government and whether it can let contracts. This is about fairness in the sector. This is about fairness in contracting. This is about companies who negotiated in good faith but who will now have seven months to renegotiate an agreement within its term.
I put to you: if these unions are so terrible and such bullies, who is going to benefit from the fact that the construction company has to renegotiate within that time frame in order to win a tender? That actually gives the power to the union and not to the construction company. That seven-month process does not empower the construction company to completely put the screws into the union. It does completely the opposite. It says to the construction company, 'You'd better find a way to get the union to give you an agreement you can both sign. And you've got to do it within seven months or you can't tender from this contract.' And do not believe that the unions cannot find things to put in enterprise agreements that will be code compliant. They will. They will find a way to do it. Then the fair work umpire will say, 'That's a new one. I haven't seen that one before. You can't have that one,' and everyone will have to renegotiate their agreements again, and then the unions will come up with something else.
This is a nightmare for construction companies. It does completely the opposite to what the government said it would do, particularly when we have a government that keeps telling us over and over again what nasty people the CFMEU are and how they are always trying to bully these huge construction companies, which make billions of dollars, into doing their bidding. This is quite a nightmare. It will not do what the government thinks it will do. It will bring incredible uncertainty into the sector.
If the government's purpose is to keep costs down, the best way to do that is to have an open tender process, which it does. This means that the government, even without these codes, can look at a company that has an enterprise agreement that they do not like and a company that has an enterprise agreement that they quite approve of and see which one is cheaper. If it is cheaper to have those code-compliant enterprise agreements, then those companies will win the tenders anyway. If companies are going too far in their enterprise agreements and that is driving up costs, they will be more expensive. The tender process itself is sufficient to weed out those companies whose enterprise agreements are not appropriate for the taxpayer spend. Tendering alone does that.
Why is it that the government is suddenly going nanny state when it comes to the construction industry and deciding what an employer and a worker can agree with each other? Where the hell does that come from? This supposed small government, this conservative government, suddenly decides that it has to decide whether or not a group of workers and their employer can make an agreement on the quality of their clothing. No, they cannot, because this government says that it is not right and it is not fair. It also says in its own arguments for doing this that those companies that do that would actually be cheaper, and give an unfair advantage to those that are not code compliant. This is a nonsense. It is a total, absolute nonsense.
If the government really did care about trying to lift the standards in the construction industry and ensure that taxpayers got a good deal, and that those wonderful objectives of the code were met—more safety et cetera—then perhaps they could target a few other things. They could, for example, target, as I said in my opening remarks, the incredibly high insolvencies which do put businesses out of business. When a big company goes insolvent—and the insolvency rate is between 20 and 25 per cent on eight per cent GDP—then many hundreds of workers, small contractors and small businesses go to the wall because of that.
When workplace safety is not met over and over again by a company, how are they treated in the code? Where is their banning from government contracts when people actually die in their workplaces and their accident levels are too high? Where is that? Where is the code that actually makes a difference?
6:16 pm
Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I rise to speak on the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Amendment Bill 2017—so-called 'improving productivity'. This legislation is anti-union, antidemocratic and anti-market. It is bad legislation for many reasons, and I will point that out through the prism of a couple of things.
Firstly, the construction industry is a dangerous industry. Many people die or are injured in that industry, unlike many other jobs. Secondly, as the member for Parramatta mentioned in her speech, around 25 per cent of companies involved in the construction industry, particularly smaller ones, end up going insolvent and that means workers miss out on being paid and that small businesses miss out on getting paid and go to the wall. They end up owing millions and millions of dollars in wages and superannuation.
My third point is that despite all said by those opposite this legislation is talking about a civil enforcement regime not a criminal enforcement regime. They are dressing it up as if it were a criminal process but that is not the case. That was never the intent of this legislation. So I point that out.
It is, however, remarkable that we are debating this amendment bill in the second sitting week of 2017. The Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Bill 2013 only passed the parliament in the final sitting week of 2016. The ink is barely dry on that piece of legislation, but already this hopeless Turnbull government is trying to patch up problems with their own legislation—the legislation that, in fact, they took almost three years to get passed through this parliament. You would think that when it was finally passed that it would have been a well-considered and fit-for-its-purpose bill. But now we have the Turnbull government trying to trash its own laws just weeks after enacting them.
So what is this all about? Well, it is all about existing negotiated and agreed legal enterprise-bargaining agreements that are not compliant with the new code. Companies with these settled, noncompliant agreements are not able to submit expressions of interest and tenders for Commonwealth work, and they are significant companies—big players in the Australian construction industry. The legislation that passed last year allowed for companies whose current agreements are not code compliant to still be able to submit expressions of interest and tenders up until November 2018. This bill attempts to wind back that exemption to September this year, just seven months away. So this will put these hardworking companies and their hardworking employees in the difficult position of either not tendering for Commonwealth building work and missing out on work at a time when construction is a little flat, or having to renegotiate their complicated agreements very quickly.
This is a complete botch up by the Turnbull government. They do not even know how many of these agreements will be affected, and it has been reported that there may be up to 3,000 of these agreements—3,000 agreements that were negotiated in good faith. The code has been rejected time and time again by parliament, and was not law at the time these legal agreements were made—negotiated in the marketplace. I remember when the Liberal Party used to believe in markets. So this retrospective legislation, you could say, is more Turnbull government chaos in the extreme.
When the ABCC bill passed last year, although Labor did not support the bill—and still does not agree with the legislation or the need for it—we believed, as did the industry, including employers, that once passed, the building industry could go about its business at least knowing what the law was. When you are talking about big projects you need certainty. So, welcome to the Turnbull government, where the goalposts shift as the polls sink!
To put this all in perspective, we need to cast our minds back to early last year when the Prime Minister's popularity was well and truly beginning to slide. The honeymoon was well and truly over, and he thought it was a good idea to call a double dissolution election. We then had the extraordinary act of the proroguing of parliament—do you remember that, Deputy Speaker? Prime Minister Turnbull advised the Governor-General to call a double dissolution election, saying that the ABCC bill was—and I quote from his letter to the Governor-General:
… important elements of the Government's economic plan for jobs and growth, …
There is that term: jobs and growth. You have not heard that for a while, Deputy Speaker! 'Jobs and growth,' it went missing after July 2nd!
But during the eight long weeks of the election campaign there was hardly a murmur about this so-called important piece of legislation that the Prime Minister told us was one of the two main reasons he called a double dissolution election. And hasn't that worked out well, that double dissolution election!
It is great to have One Nation and the Liberal Party getting into bed together in Western Australia and four One Nation senators—or 3½ or whatever it is when Western Australia sorts out its mess. We have four One Nation senators—the party that John Howard rejected is now getting into bed with the Liberal Party, and we have had a Liberal Prime Minister not able to say to boo about it. It is disgraceful!
Anyway, this legislation was introduced to the House by the government in order to thrust back on Australians the draconian Australian Building and Construction Commission. The legislation finally passed, albeit heavily amended and compromised, in the last sitting week of 2016. The ABCC was back in business. The ABCC was originally introduced in 2005. Labor opposed its introduction then and opposed it again last year. Originally implemented by the Howard government, the ABCC was said to be a response to the recommendations of the $60 million Cole royal commission. The Cole commission was established by the Howard government to investigate the building and construction industry, supposedly a 'hotbed of intimidation, lawlessness, thuggery and violence' at the time. Curiously, not one criminal prosecution, not even a finding of guilt, resulted from that entire royal commission. As a point of difference, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has made almost 1,900 referrals to authorities so far. That is a fair dinkum royal commission.
Let us revisit the period after the ABCC was introduced in 2005. Building industry fatalities jumped 95 per cent between 2006 and 2008. In 2007, 51 workers were killed on construction sites, the highest number in 10 years. During the time the ABCC was in operation, cases were brought against the CFMEU and other unions, resulting in over $5 million in fines and millions more in court costs. That may be good for lawyers but not the building industry. The ABCC was condemned eight times by the International Labour Organization for bias and for breaching conventions that Australia had signed. It was found to have unlawfully interviewed 203 people. When a Labor government removed the majority of the ABCC's powers and implemented the Fair Work Australia model, we saw industrial disputes go down and fatalities go down. Most importantly for the economists out there, productivity increased. The government's argument that the ABCC will increase productivity is not borne out by their own data, their own facts. According to the ABS, construction industry productivity increased more in the seven years before the introduction of the ABCC than it did in the seven years the ABCC existed. And productivity has been higher every year since the abolition of the ABCC in 2012.
Labor will always abhor corruption and criminal activity in any industry, including the building and construction industry, and we will always fight for doing the right thing with union members' money, not just when it is politically expedient to do so. I particularly hate union officials who misuse union membership fees—I think they are grubs—and I will always fight hard against that. However, the ABCC is not designed to deal with breaches of the criminal law or corruption of any kind. It was set up by the Howard government to enforce civil laws and industrial relations legislation. It is not a 'tough cop on the beat', as those opposite keep saying. Despite LNP protestations, it is actually, as I said at the start of my contribution, a civil jurisdiction.
During the period the ABCC was in place, there were 330 deaths on construction sites. The number of investigations set in motion by the ABCC into those deaths? The answer is not hard: zero. Not one investigation was thought warranted after 330 deaths of ordinary Australians going about their jobs in the construction industry. These were hardworking Australians who went to their jobs and never came home.
The ABCC was reinstated by the Turnbull government late last year, and already this hapless government is scrambling to make changes to the legislation that it trumpeted. There has been zero consultation with anybody about these amendments: not the employers, the hardworking construction companies; not the unions; not the hardworking employees; not anyone. The government has no way of knowing how the industry will be impacted by these changes. This is not good government; this is chaos.
What do we know? We know that some clauses in current enterprise agreements cannot be continued under the code, such as support places for apprentices on building sites, which are mandated by a ratio of apprentices to tradespeople—investing in the future. Other clauses to go? How about mandatory consultation before temporary overseas workers are used? How about the provision of nationally accredited asbestos awareness training for workers? How about the requirement that employers buy Australian made protective clothing for their workers instead of inferior imported clothing—a little bit of economic nationalism? How about local workers having priority over temporary foreign workers when redundancies are contemplated—again a little bit of economic nationalism? How about employees being provided with both awareness training to recognise potentially suicidal behaviour and basic skills to help keep employees safe? I note that last clause in particular because apprentices in the construction industry are 2½ times more likely to suicide than other young people their age. These clauses currently exist in some enterprise agreements but will not be allowed under the code. These are clauses that protect Australian workers and Australian businesses.
I have never worked in the building industry, but my three brothers do. In fact, one of my brothers worked on the construction of Parliament House when the flagpole fell over. He worked for a crane company that had to come and try to fix it. My younger brother also works in the building industry. He was working on a Twin Towns building site when a crane collapsed and landed right beside him. His back was injured significantly, and the two workers standing alongside him at the cement pour were killed. The kibble nearly hit my brother; it just missed him. The pond weights actually did hit him and did significant damage to his back. Obviously, having been inches away from being killed, he will forever carry that trauma with him.
Seeing the building and construction industry through the prism of my three brothers has given me some insight into how tough this business is. They have told me many stories about workers and the danger of businesses going belly up. It is an industry that is tough on workers: physically demanding and obviously not necessarily a job that you can do until you are 70. It can be dangerous, and the more that costs are cut to improve the bottom line, the more dangerous it becomes for workers. Whenever safe practices are abandoned we end up losing lives on worksites. These are the very workers whom the government should be working to protect. Sadly, I do not think the Turnbull government cares about hardworking Australian construction workers. It has been left to Labor and the union movement to stand up for these workers.
With all the ideological union bashing coming from the opposite side of the House, it is easy to forget the great work that unions do for their workers—and employers, for that matter. There is no better evidence than when it comes to talking about asbestos. It has been a banned substance since 2003, but building materials containing asbestos are being illegally imported into Australia from other parts of the world, especially from China.
I recently spoke about asbestos with Andrew Ramsay, a very experienced and well respected workplace health and safety coordinator for the CFMEU. He told me about getting a phone call on the weekend, when they were working at 1 William Street, the new Queensland government building, where they thought there might be asbestos. They then did some investigations, and the piece of material that they had been cutting with saws to make fit, because they are innovative and industrious, was found to contain 60 per cent asbestos. The old fibro sheets that you might know contain about 10 to 15 per cent asbestos. This was a piece in 2016 that contained 60 per cent asbestos—and, remember, one asbestos fibre is basically enough to kill you. It had been imported to Australia. But for the CFMEU and the training that the workplace official had, who knows who could have been affected by that asbestos? We need asbestos awareness training for workers. It is sensible.
There are at least 69 job sites, from Perth to Brisbane and everywhere in between, that have had asbestos delivered to them. Sadly, what was Minister Dutton's response? He actually blamed the CFMEU for driving developers to use illegal and dangerous products on their building sites. That is what the minister for safer borders said in response to this bizarre situation. That is just one example being told by Andrew Ramsay of what can happen if you do not have regulated and appropriately credentialed union officials being able to access building sites.
This is just one of the many reasons why Labor opposes the reintroduction of the draconian ABCC legislation, and why it opposes this retrospective amendment that will only cause chaos in the construction industry. Labor will always protect hardworking Australians. Labor stands up for ordinary families working hard to make ends meet. This bill is just more evidence of a desperate Prime Minister protecting his own job at the expense of Australian workers. These are ordinary, hardworking Australians doing their job in a dangerous industry. They have the right to be protected at their workplace, to be safe and to go home at the end of the day.
Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I thank the honourable member, and perhaps the honourable member for Moreton could pass on my best to Mr Ramsay.
6:32 pm
Tim Hammond (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I am delighted to rise to address this place in support of the speech made by our shadow minister for employment and workplace relations, the member for Gorton. I join him and all the others on this side in vigorously opposing the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Amendment Bill 2017. This bill is a terrific example of how you do not necessarily need legislation—or proposed legislation—that is War and Peace in order for it to have a potentially devastating effect upon the workplace.
I have not been in this place for terribly long and would never pretend to have been, but I am quite astounded that such an innocuous-looking proposal as is contained in this bill could actually have such a profound effect upon stability and certainty in workplaces throughout the country. The devil is in the detail in this bill, both in the extent to which it seeks to wind back the exemption period for non-code compliant companies from two years to nine months and in the impact on the ground as to what will happen for stability and certainty in harmonious industrial relations, insofar as the enforceability of thousands and thousands of enterprise agreements that have been struck all over the country in good faith between employees, employee representatives in trade unions and employers, and the extent to which those enterprise agreements are almost certainly going to be struck down on the basis of their incompatibility with what is required in order to comply with the code.
I listened with great interest to all of my colleagues' speeches in relation to this bill and I think they are all to be commended for their eloquence, their accuracy and the manner in which they have spelt out the impact that passing this bill will have in workplaces around the country. I think it is a blight and it is an incredible shame that we have so few speakers from the government who are prepared to go in to bat for this bill. It speaks volumes that there is a dearth of advocates on the other side to say anything positive about this bill at all. They parade in here, constantly espousing sanctimonious notions about how the conservative side of the fence is the one which promotes stability, minimises sovereign risk and is all about productivity—ironically, the name of this bill—whereas even a cursory glance shows that this bill, if enacted, will produce anything but those outcomes. My colleague and good friend the member for Whitlam, for the benefit of the members on the other side, took this place through the various provisions insofar as they are likely to impact upon the workplace. I would also like to do this for those who are playing at home. It does not take long to see just how disastrous the implementation of these amendments will be in relation to the workplace.
The first port of call is the code itself. The code makes very clear, at section 11, the manner in which the contents of existing enterprise agreements are likely to be struck down to the extent they are inconsistent with the code:
(1) A code covered entity must not be covered by an enterprise agreement in respect of building work which includes clauses that:
Not both, but potentially just to manage its business. If I may, not professing to have any significant expertise in parliamentary drafting, I can tell you from a cursory glance that that is wider than this continent when you consider what within an enterprise agreement purports to impose limits on an entity to manage its business. Shortly I will come particularly to an application of that clause in relation to asbestos and exposure to asbestos in the workplace and discuss what a disastrous effect it may have insofar as protecting workers from unnecessary exposure to asbestos is concerned. That is clause 11.
We need to then marry that with what is actually proposed. The current act is already deplorable in limiting the rights of workers in the workplace to a safe environment, amongst a litany of other egregious clauses restricting the rights of workers and trade unions in relation to protecting the workplace environment. I draw attention to section 34(2E), which relates to when an employer can enter into a contract pursuant to the code on a worksite. The section states:
If a document issued under subsection (1) includes requirements in relation to the content of building enterprise agreements, a building industry participant may, before 29 November 2018 …
Strike that out to read '1 September 2017' if the government gets its way, not to mention the crossbenchers. Do not think for one minute the crossbenchers are to escape any of the wrath here. As a matter of fact, quite frankly, they deserve an equal apportionment of wrath as the conservatives. The section states a building industry participant may:
… submit expressions of interest, tender for and be awarded building work funded … by the Commonwealth …
The trick to this is focusing on not only tendering for but being awarded the building work. What is so controversial about that, I hear you ask? What is really sneaky and devious about the proposed amendment is that section 34(2E) is due to be amended to delete the provision upon which an entity can be awarded the contract. If we go forward in time seven months to 1 September 2017, which creates a level of uncertainty as it is, there is simply no point in an employer trying to get the work when it considers the prospect that it will not be awarded that work if it maintains a devotion to what has previously been agreed or negotiated in its enterprise agreement. The absence of the word 'awarded' completely changes the utility of the enterprise agreement formally negotiated in good faith.
When one then applies the fact that an employer may tender for the work but not get it, according to a literal reading of the bill, to how it chooses to manage its business, we ask ourselves the question: how different is life going to be on a worksite insofar as the enforceability of the Building Code is required in such a short period of time? The fact of the matter is that, in relation to workplace safety, it may be incredibly different. One does not need to go any further than an industrial agreement that is publicly available, a Brookfield Multiplex enterprise agreement approved by the Fair Work Commission. It sets out at clause 26.4:
The Employer agrees that it will, within three months of the commencement of this Agreement, schedule a nationally accredited asbestos awareness training course, for each employee covered by this Agreement.
Further, the Employer agrees that it will, within three months of the each new Employee commencing employment, ensure that the Employee successfully completes a nationally accredited asbestos awareness training course.
It provides that the employer will cover all costs associated with the training. That is a fundamentally important right. It is a complete travesty that such a clause is even required in enterprise agreements at all in this day and age, when you consider what we know about governments being aware of the dangers of exposing workers to asbestos, which goes back to the turn of the century—but that provision is in the agreement. The problem is that the application of this bill would render a clause like that inconsistent insofar that it will be struck down and there will be no obligation whatsoever on an employer to honour that clause of the agreement. What will that do? It is very clear. If this bill is passed, it will go one step further to create a culture on the worksite that says it is okay to expose workers to asbestos in the course of their employment in 2017.
It says so much about the attitude of this government and those crossbenchers, team Xenophon included. The role which Senator Xenophon and his party have played in approving these amendments is, quite frankly, shameful. The senator pretends to be a friend and supporter of victims of asbestos disease and yet he is allowed to get away with such an amendment, which will have the effect of serving precisely the contrary purpose and causing workers to be exposed to asbestos. In this day and age, very tragically, we know due to the actuarial evidence that over 700 people this year will die of an asbestos related disease as a result of exposure to asbestos in the past. How is that likely to track in the future? The answer does not get any cheerier at all. As things currently go, that number will continue to increase or stay at about the same rate all the way through to about 2020. By 2040, 23 years in the future—due the lag time in relation to terminal diseases—there will be 350 deaths per year as a result of exposure to asbestos. That is the evidence according to the modelling, and what does this government do? It sits on its hands and promotes a culture where it is okay to be exposed to asbestos on worksites. The list is so long that, with the little time I have left, I will not even scratch the surface.
Considering the fact that imported asbestos was banned from 31 December 2003, we ask ourselves the question: how is this mob's monitoring of exposure to asbestos on worksites working out? It is working out diabolically. It is working out criminally. We need look no further than exposure to workers as a result of the Great Wall of China motor vehicles in 2012, and in relation to children's crayons in 2015. Late in 2016, Australian Border Force tested 3,700 children's crayons, confirming that all of them contained traces of asbestos.
Perhaps the biggest scourge in relation to worksites and exposure to workers of asbestos dust and fibre, relates to the importation of products for Yuanda, Australia. But we have seen that all over the country. In my home town of Perth, the children's hospital construction ground to a halt for litany of reasons, but one of them, in particular, was that, in July last year, asbestos was found in roof panels installed throughout the building. Tests confirmed the presence of asbestos in 200 roofing panels, with hundreds of workers exposed to asbestos dust and fibre. It also occurs on the other side of the country in relation to the presence of asbestos in worksites in Brisbane. We have seen exposure to asbestos as a result of Australian Portable Camps in 2010 onwards, and also exposure to asbestos in Melbourne as a result of exposure at Robert Johnson Engineering.
What we see here in this bill—and this is really only the start—is yet another example about the culture on the other side, and the culture of these crossbenchers, particularly in the Senate, in that they are saying that this is okay. It is not just in direct examples; it is woven throughout their conduct in relation to workers in this country. This mob on the other side, the Prime Minister and those who are sanctimonious and stand up and talk about jobs, are not fair dinkum when it comes to protecting Australian workers and protecting their right to a safe work environment. This bill will do quite the opposite and it should be opposed every step of the way.
6:47 pm
Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I join the member for Perth—and I commend him for his contribution—and all of my other Labor colleagues who have spoken on this bill in opposing this legislation, the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Amendment Bill 2017. The last time that legislation relating to the ABCC came before this parliament, in both October and December of last year, the debate was gagged. The government did not want to talk about the ABCC legislation. They did not want to talk about it because they knew full well that it would not stand up to public scrutiny when they did. The legislation did not withstand the fairness test and it did not withstand the common sense test. Indeed, this was the legislation that the government used in order to call a double dissolution election on 2 July last year, and yet we saw in the whole campaign for that election, that the government refused to even talk about the very legislation that they called the election upon. Again, they did so because they knew that out there in the community people did not accept the justification for this legislation that the government continuously tried to spin.
This legislation—the same as the original ABCC legislation—does not pass the fairness test, nor do the amendments that we are dealing with right here and now. It simply delivers on the self-interest of big construction companies and their pressure on the government, and also on the government's anti-union ideology. That is what it is all about. The Turnbull government is prepared to trade away the workers' rights in order to bolster the profits of large construction companies, in the same way that we have seen them try to do this week with legislation that will trade away social payments to some of Australia's lowest paid workers and individuals, people on the lowest incomes, people that are some of the most needy in the country, in order to give a $50 billion tax break to big business. The similarity is right there and very stark: trading away workers' rights in order to bolster the profits of big companies.
I would expect that from this government because it has a track record of doing that, but I have to say I am both disappointed and surprised to see the same approach to this legislation from the Nick Xenophon Team, from Senator Hinch and from Pauline Hanson's One Nation party. Those minor parties were all elected and came into this place as champions of the Aussie battler, champions of Australian jobs, champions of common sense and champions of fairness and common decency. Yet this legislation shows that their true values have been exposed. They will have a lot of explaining to do to the wider community as a result of their support for this legislation.
This legislation weakens or deletes provisions in the current law that favour Australian workers over temporary foreign workers and support Australian apprenticeships. We have an ageing workforce. Everybody talks about that consistently. If we do not 'trade up' young people into those trades we will ultimately end up with not enough tradespeople to meet the demands of this country. Then the government can justifiably do what it has always wanted to do, and that is bring tradespeople and workers from overseas, because it can justifiably say, 'We simply don't have those skills here in Australia.' And when it does that, again, its prime and only motive for doing it will be to bring down and lower the wages and working conditions of other Australians.
This legislation also does away with measures that support Australian manufacturers, as others of my colleagues have pointed out. And it waters down important work safety matters, including the long work hours that construction workers are often obliged to work. I can say that with absolute confidence because I speak to, and I know, many construction workers. Indeed, I am quite surprised to hear how often they tell me about the long hours that they are working.
But I want to touch for a moment on the matter that the member for Perth eloquently put to the House only a few moments ago, and that is the condition in this legislation which deals with asbestos awareness training and how that is also going to be phased out as a result of this legislation. This is an industry sector where asbestos products pose a constant risk. Again, the member for Perth alluded to a number of examples in recent times after asbestos was meant to have been banned in this country but is still being used.
In South Australia, we have the Asbestos Victims Association of SA. Senator Xenophon is a co-patron of the Asbestos Victims Association of SA. It is an organisation that for the last 12 years has been campaigning about the dangers of asbestos and running education programs to make the community and industry more aware of the dangers of this product. Each year, there is a service held in Salisbury to commemorate those people who have died—and will probably die in the years to come in greater numbers, as a result of the research that has been carried out—because in the course of their work, they have had to deal with asbestos. Senator Xenophon, of all people, should know better. By supporting these provisions, Senator Xenophon betrays the organisation that he lends his name to as a patron.
This legislation does not deal with criminal behaviour, as members opposite would have you believe—at least the two members who had the courage to come into this chamber and speak on it. I am not surprised that only two members have spoken on it, but the two who did essentially focused and concentrated their remarks on criminal behaviour within the construction sector. This legislation, as other members have quite rightly pointed out, does not deal with criminal behaviour. There are other agencies that are well-resourced and quite capable of doing that and, indeed, have done that where and when it has occurred.
The government's spin about the Heydon royal commission and the need for this legislation, again, simply does not withstand scrutiny. Indeed, to my knowledge, and I think the member for Moreton made this point as well, no criminal prosecutions have resulted from the Heydon royal commission. That says it all. The commission was nothing more than a witch-hunt. Again, if one thinks back, the Australian Building and Construction Commission was brought in as legislation before any of that commission took place. It was always an intent of the coalition government to attack the construction workers of this country.
Every construction project is unique—unique in scope, unique in the construction risks associated with it and the risks that the project presents to the surrounding neighbourhood and unique in the project's proponents, be they locals, overseas builders, reputable firms or unreputable firms. Every project is unique and, therefore, quite rightly, the workers who are going to work on those projects and the unions that represent them have every right to enter into individual agreements with the proponent and the builders of those projects to ensure that all the matters that need to be covered with respect to that project are, indeed, covered. That is what has happened in the past, and that is why we have some 3,000 agreements in place.
It is not a case where each project is the same as the other and, therefore, there is one template that can be used across all of them. We know—
Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
The minister on a point of order.
Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
In spite of the fact that I have a high regard for the member for Makin and I have enjoyed his speech so far, and in spite of the fact that it is very similar to his last one, I move:
That the question be put.
Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
The question is that the question be put.
Bill read a second time.
Is leave granted for the third reading to be moved immediately?
7:10 pm
Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
Leave is not granted. This is an important bill. There are members of this House who want to speak on this bill, including the member for Kennedy who wants to get on his feet and speak on this bill. The member for Scullin still wants to speak on this bill.
Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source
I move:
That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent the motion for the third reading being moved without delay.