Melissa Price (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Defence Industry representing the Minister for Employment. Will the minister outline to the House why it's important that leaders of unions and employer organisations always act in the best interests of their members and disclose to their members any potential or actual conflicts of interest? Is the minister aware of any alternative approaches?

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Durack for her question. It is critical that union members have confidence that their leaders are always beyond reproach, are acting in the interests of union members and are making sure that the rules are being followed. It's always funny how the Leader of the Opposition spins around and shows me his back. It's one of those shifty tactics that shifty people would use. But it's very important that union members be able to have confidence in their leaders, that the rules are being followed and that they're not having their money used for the personal purposes of their union leaders

So it very much surprises this side of the House that, in 2005, the Leader of the Opposition, when he was the national secretary of the Australian Workers' Union, gave $100,000 to the organisation GetUp! in spite of also being on the board of GetUp!. He was on the board of GetUp!, he was also the national secretary and he gave $100,000 to GetUp!. One wonders why he won't show us the minutes which indicate whether this was agreed to by the national executive and whether he declared his conflict of interest. A couple of years later, in 2007, AustralianSuper donated $27,000 to the Australian Workers' Union, when the Leader of the Opposition, again, was on the board of AustralianSuper and was the national secretary of the Australian Workers' Union. But we get the trifecta because he was also the Labor candidate for Maribyrnong at the time. Coincidently, the Australian Workers' Union then employed a campaign worker in Maribyrnong, who was paid $26,000 for her work, which seems a very similar number.

The piece de resistance also came in 2007. At the moment the Leader of the Opposition is very interested in what the member for Sydney is talking about. They're probably trying to decide the capital of Africa or talking about African languages. We discover that in 2007, when the Leader of the Opposition was the national secretary of the Australian Workers' Union, that union gave $25,000 to his Maribyrnong campaign. He didn't even bother with a third party. He cut out the middleman—he cut out the middleman and gave the $25,000 straight to the Maribyrnong campaign when he was the national secretary of the AWU.

He has been asked lots of questions about this. Today he said that he was not going to go through the ins and outs of every issue. We don't want him to go into the ins and outs of every issue; we just want him to answer the question he was asked—did he authorise a $25,000 union donation when he was the secretary of the AWU? (Time expired)