Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Employment) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent me moving a motion to provide for the consideration of a matter, namely a motion to give precedence to a motion relating to the consideration of legislation.

I intend, at the end of the debate on the preceding motion, to move the following motion:

That a motion relating to the consideration of legislation may be moved immediately and have precedence over all other business today until determined.

At the last election the coalition sought a clear mandate from the Australian people to reinstitute the Australian Building and Construction Commission and to establish the Registered Organisations Commission. So urgent did we consider these reforms that we promised to introduce the relevant legislation in the first week the parliament sat. We did so. Today Labor and the Greens are still frustrating the will of the Australian people by having sent our legislation not to the Senate legislation committees but to a reference committee.

The revelations of recent times—from the Thomson trial to the plea of guilty by the former national ALP president Mr Williamson and the revelations by the ABC and Fairfax Media, along with whistleblowers from the union movement itself, of systemic and sophisticated slush funds dealing in hundreds of thousands of dollars—have provided absolute and unassailable vindication of the coalition's policy positions. These positions have been upheld and supported by people such as Ian Cambridge, who was a Fair Work commissioner; Kathy Jackson, Ralph Blewitt; Mr Giles QC; a former Labor Attorney-General, Rob McClelland—and so the list goes on.

The Labor Party say that we do not need a royal commission and that instead we simply need a task force. But we did have a task force. It was called the Australian Building and Construction Commission. Guess who dismantled it! It was the Labor Party, who are now claiming that we need a police task force to deal with corruption in the building sector. In New South Wales there was a police task force dealing with corruption; and then Labor won government. I will give you one guess as to what happened to that task force. It was abolished. The same thing happened in Western Australia. The Labor Party's actions on such matters speak so much louder than their words.

In moving this motion today, the coalition is seeking to provide an opportunity to Labor and Greens senators to reconsider their attitude to the bills which would reinstate the building and Construction Commission and establish the Registered Organisations Commission. Their attitude seems to be more motivated by their resentment of the decision of the Australian people on 7 September than by the requirements of good governance of our nation.

We all know that, when the Australian Building and Construction Commission existed, industry multifactor productivity rose by 16.8 per cent, that Australian consumers were better off by $7.5 billion per annum and that there was a significant reduction in days lost through industrial action. Labor got rid of the Australian Building and Construction Commission, and within weeks there was violence on the streets at the Myer Emporium site, which is run by Grocon and where workers who are members of the union had to take out a paid advertisement asking the CFMEU leadership to desist from thuggery, violence and intimidation. We saw the pictures beamed into living rooms right around the nation of the ugliness of police horses being hit by so-called demonstrators. We know what happens when task forces such as the ABCC are got rid of.

Today we seek to give Labor and the Greens the opportunity to reconsider their attitude. We are seeking as a government to implement a policy position which we set out to the Australian people not only before the 2013 election but also before the 2010 election. We want to restore the rule of law to the construction sector and integrity to the registered organisations movement in this country. The Labor Party and the Greens have a choice: they can be part of the solution, or they can continue to be part of a problem that the Australian people want fixed—and fixed urgently.