Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to begin today by actually agreeing with Senator Doug Cameron on one point. He said that trying to undermine democracy is one of the most reprehensible things you can do. I absolutely agree with him on that point. Our point with this legislation is to improve and enhance democracy by improving transparency and accountability. There was no argument about whether there needed to be reform in this area because, in fact, the initial bills to reform the area were put through by Mr Shorten when he was in government last year. The only problem, of course, was that they followed the usual pattern of Labor legislation, which is that the bills were ineptly drafted, hastily developed and, mostly, completely incompetently implemented. So most of the changes we are talking about this morning relate to trying to fix some of the problems that were so evident in the legislation that Mr Shorten put through.

It is probably worth just making a point about what we are looking at in the amendment bill today. It limits the obligation of officers in registered organisations to disclose material personal interests when they do not relate in any way to their duties. It removes the express obligation on officers and organisations to disclose details of any material personal interests in a matter that relates to the affairs of an organisation that an officer's relative has or acquires. It requires officers to make disclosures of material personal interests to the committee of management and for such disclosures to be recorded in the minutes of the meeting and be available upon request to members. It provides for a civil penalty for organisations or branches that fail to provide minutes of the committee of management meetings to their members. It aligns the obligations on officers to disclose material personal interests with the Corporations Act by putting in exclusions about what obligations and material personal interests are applicable and which are not. It provides that an officer is not restricted from taking part in a decision where they have a material interest if that interest is not such that it needs to be disclosed. It expands the exclusions that apply to the disclosure of payments made where they are less than the prescribed amount or where member approval for that transaction is not necessary under the current Corporations Act.

It enables the Registered Organisations Commissioner to grant exemptions from training requirements if an organisation can demonstrate that an officer has a proper understanding of their financial duties within the organisation or branch. It is a bit bizarre when you consider that the legislation as the former Minister Shorten had it drafted, given the way it read, would have required qualified accountants to go and do a one-day financial training course so that they knew how to behave when they were on the board. These are common-sense amendments to give better transparency and better accountability for registered organisations.

Certainly the coalition welcomed in principle the fact that then Minister Shorten did recognise that there was something very, very wrong within the union movement when he put his initial legislation up, but of course we had the situation where a former union boss was relying on the goodwill of other unionists for that legislation to go through. I am somewhat bemused by some of the arguments around how poor little unions run by volunteers should have the same sorts of requirements put on them as you might put on a kindergarten committee or such and that they should not face the same requirements as a corporation. I am afraid that that is not a view that works on this side of the House, and it was not a view that worked with the Australian people. We made it very clear at the last election that it was our intention that people who ran unions should have the same qualifications and the same responsibilities as people who ran corporations because, after all, it is not their money that they are playing with. It is someone else's. It is their members' money. You only have to go back to the major problems that caused then Minister Shorten to put his flawed legislation through last year—that is, the Health Services Union's problems and the resulting court cases out of that—to see one aspect of the problems that need to be so significantly addressed in this area.

One of the key components of that legislation and what happened with the Health Services Union was the inordinate delay—in fact, it was later described as such by PricewaterhouseCoopers when they reviewed it—in the hearing of that case by Fair Work Australia. It is not impossible—and certainly many people have suggested it—that the fact that the government required the vote of the alleged 'Independent' Labor member, Mr Thomson, could explain part of the reason for why that delay happened, although many other apparently cogent reasons were put up by Fair Work Australia as to why it took them years and years to go through material, which of course has since led to both civil and criminal charges. If we were looking at the Health Services Union as a one-off issue, there would not be the same need for legislation as has been required. But it is clear that there has grown up in some elements of the union movement a systemic corruption, a systemic sense of being entitled to do what they damn well like with members' fees. Certainly in some areas there was a view that the political support of the then Labor government was so much more important than meeting the needs of members.

I would like to add there that the vast majority of executives of unions are people trying to do their best for their membership and working hard at that. But to suggest that they are poor little volunteers akin to someone on a kinder committee is nonsense; it has always been nonsense. As we will now discover, many of these union executives are paid the sorts of money that would, in other circumstances, lead Labor members to talk about 'rich fat cats'. They receive the sorts of payments that senior executives receive; they receive larger pay packets in fact than members of parliament receive.