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

I am well aware we did not win the election, Senator Edwards. The reality is that you are going to have to be patient before you use this chamber to ram through whatever you feel like. We are going to a references committee. In that references committee some of the dissenting report from the legislation committee will probably get a bit more discussion.

The bill is unnecessary and political in nature. Clearly those on the other side have no interest in anything other than denigrating the cause of working people represented by unions. They have seized on every opportunity to cast in a bad light the whole union movement, using the prism of one particular area of issue. They have used that area of issue and spread it like manure as widely as they could in order to impugn working people, members of trade unions and those who are, as I think Paul Keating said, on the side of the 'angels'—the 95 per cent of people who need a bit of a lift up in the economy, not the five per cent who are already there seeking to get away with the rest of their ill-gotten gains. We are on the side of working people who simply want a fair hearing.

Is it really necessary to put really severe penalties on the activities of unpaid honorary officials of trade unions? I have no problem whatsoever with taking responsibility for my actions as a paid official of a union. I would be appropriately cautioned, I would be appropriately trained and challenged. This legislation will affect people who volunteer their time not only for trade unions; I do not think this will apply only to trade unions. There will be other not-for-profit organisations that might face much more severe penalties than currently exist, and there is no proven evidence of any wrongdoing.

The fact that there are no criminal sanctions against not-for-profit and registered organisations is probably indicative of the history and the fact that there has not been a long history of transgressions—unlike in corporate Australia, where there is a very genuine need for severe sanctions for people who do the wrong thing. But I am not sure that the opposition has made the case that there is a demonstrated need for their bill to apply to registered organisations and not-for-profits. I am not sure that they have made that case at all. We say the bill is unnecessary. Show us the evidence. Okay, you have taken the HSU and you have spread that all across the papers, you have repeated that like a dog returning to vomit. Every time you have had the opportunity you have repeated that. But really, where is the history of it? A hundred years of history for registered organisations and not-for-profits and you cannot come up with too many occasions where there are improprieties.

Trade unions are not corporations. I am happy to get to the stage where trade unions are corporations, I suppose, but at the moment they are not. So why should they be regulated in the same way as corporations are? They comprise a number of people who are paid, elected by the membership. There are honorary people in that mix who are elected by the membership. For those on the other side who do not know, you generally have a president, a vice-president, two trustees, between three and 11 branch committee members, and a secretary/treasurer. They are all elected.