Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection. A secretary/treasury would be paid, the branch committee of management would not be paid and there would be elected organisers. I used to run a small organisation. Five people were paid and 17 were in the mix. Twelve people came in off the job, to run the union as a branch committee of management, look at the accounts and approve the accounts and they were unpaid. The trustees—genuine long-term union members, not normally paid officials—would donate their time to scrutinise the accounts and to sign cheques.

You are trying to regulate organisations which are fundamentally democratic. You go to an election every four years. All of the positions are vacant every four years. There is appropriate scrutiny and independent elections and you win or lose on the vote. That is how they are structured. If those people have transgressed and not complied with their reporting requirements, they would quite quickly face sanction, including the removal of their positions.

We have this position where the coalition has seized an opportunity to keep on smashing the aspirations of working-class people and their unions. Senator Macdonald asked why the number of people in trade unions is so low. It is a democracy. You can choose either to join or not to join. He would well remember, I would imagine, the Howard government's expenditure of taxpayers' funds, some $3 million per annum, on a mantra which said: 'You don't have to join a union because you'll get everything that you are entitled to even if you're not a member.' I think that mantra was fairly successful. People could take the benefits negotiated by unions without being members. That is one reason why membership is low.

The local bowls club struggles for members and, if this legislation gets up, they might struggle for a treasurer. The local tennis association might struggle for an unpaid trustee to supervise the accounts if criminal sanctions are imposed on not-for-profit and registered organisations. The fact that people could be up for criminal sanctions could impact on the wherewithal of a vast number of not-for-profit organisations, which could be caught up in the scope of this attempt to further the coalition's vested political interest in destroying the aspirations of working people and their representatives.

The fact that we are now going to have a more complete examination of this bill is a very good thing. I do not think that those opposite have too much to fear from letting appropriate organisations come in and make submissions. Let there be a couple of hearings and let the evidence get on the table. They attempted to ram through what they saw was a political advantage. But let us face it, they were basically a one-trick pony in opposition. They simply rose at every opportunity. One would have imagined that the whole trade union movement was afflicted by what has transpired at the HSU. What has transpired at the HSU is appalling and I think the ACTU has made enough comment on that. Those things are in train and being resolved. We just do not think that you need to get a sledgehammer and crack the rest of the place open, looking for things that are not there.