Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes—its agenda. It is an agenda that appears to the community to be unclear and confused, a legislative program that simply has no direction at all. This government is lurching from a piece of legislation to a new piece of legislation. In this instance it is bringing forward its failed bill for the third time. But one thing is clear about this government: this bill is an illustration of the inordinate amount of time that this government is spending talking about and targeting organisations that represent the interests of workers and their families. Why is it doing that? You might say that Senator Back has a keen interest in unions and that is why he is talking about it. I suspect it wants to talk about anything other than the current issues that face this country.

They want to ensure that they are talking about something they are familiar with and that is union bashing. That is what they enjoy and that is what they like. That is what they feel most confident about, because they do not want to deal with the hard reality of the economy and they do not want to deal with the hard reality of marriage equality. They do not want to deal with a whole range of issues that they could be getting on with, with good governance.

Officers of trade unions work hard every day. In difficult times they simply want to get on with the job of representing working people. However, they continue to be attacked by this government.

We are all aware that this is the third time the bill has come before the Senate. The question before the Senate today in relation to this bill is not whether employer bodies and trade unions should be held more accountable to their members and the community. I think that is a given. Everybody agrees on that.

Labor's position on this matter is clear. We are committed to ensuring financial accountability of unions and employer organisations. We support appropriate and fair regulation for registered organisations. We support tough laws and tough regulations for those who break them. That is why in 2012 the Labor government, and indeed the now Leader of the Opposition, then Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, toughened the laws to improve financial transparency and disclosure by registered organisations to their members. As a result of that, trade unions in Australia have never been stronger, more accountable and, in terms of their accountability, have never been higher. And the power of the Fair Work Commission to investigate and prosecute for breaches has also never been more apt.

In this instance we have tripled the penalties, which means that those laws have never been tougher; however, in this bill the government have gone well beyond the pale. They have gone too far, with no proportionality.

It is a disproportionate response against the trade union movements but it is not surprising that they would do that. Unsurprisingly they have departed from even the Prime Minister's commitment to shift the industrial relations debate towards the sensible centre. This is not sensible centre. This is the extreme ideologues within the Liberal Party and the National Party that want to attack the trade union base. That is what this is all about. Let us not be confused by Senator Back's newfound love of trade unions.

But let us also remember that this is a government that has gone to great lengths to proclaim and pretend that it is reducing red tape and regulation. The government had an omnibus bill about reducing red tape and regulation. We will not find this bill in that report; however, this bill does the complete opposite. It increases red tape and duplication by establishing a new regulator. If one was not already enough, this government wants to add a new regulator while retaining the existing one. The bill establishes the Registered Organisations Commission, which has coercive powers that are defined as 'do all things necessary or convenient for its purpose'. If there was ever one reason why Labor and even those opposite should not support this bill, it is that one phrase. What this government is attempting to do is give an unfettered power to a regulator to travel across unions, employers and employees. So if they think that this is not a double-edged sword, you might want to think again about how this bill will operate should it pass.

For any member of the community, this would be a considerable expansion, far too expansive for any regulatory body to have. In comparison to the powers given to the Registered Organisations Commission, they are far greater than those for regulated companies. The government makes much in the debate about moving trade union accountability and transparency to an equivalent of corporations similar to powers that are provided under ASIC. In this instance, this bill goes way further. If this government was serious about that, why would it not give the same powers to ASIC? Why would it not give the same powers to ensure that those financial charlatans out there are also held to book as well? But, no, it is simply picking on trade unions and ought to be pinged for it, when you look at the way the coercive power will extend to any person who the commission believes on reasonable grounds has information or a document relevant to an investigation. It is a wide power.

Furthermore, the commissioner can require a person to provide reasonable assistance in connection with an investigation. These provisions pose serious questions about the accountability and transparency of proposed unconstrained investigations which may require any member of the union to answer questions. This is an excessive power, far in excess of what you would expect if you were legitimately trying to improve accountability and transparency on top of Labor's 2012 legislation.

Yes, everybody stands against fraud, everybody stands against maladministration but what the government has not been able to do is tie this legislation to how it will actually remedy the circumstances that it describes so well. I think those opposite take a little delight out of describing it, but this bill does not fix those problems and they have not linked those two arguments together. The Registered Organisations Commission, which this bill establishes, is completely in excess of what companies are subject to under the Corporations Act. If this government was fair dinkum, it would pass these simple laws for companies and let us see what the companies might say about that.

The most revealing proposal of what the government is trying to do with this bill is its effect on volunteers. The compliance obligation of this bill applies to every branch of every union, to every part of every registered organisation irrespective of its size. So the Australian Council of Trade Unions has stated it is like saying that the rules which apply to the board of Woolworths also apply to the management committee in each individual store. Let us reflect on that from the ACTU perspective. A good example is the Australian Industry Group, which is an employer body and a not-for-profit organisation. It has 78 democratically elected councillors that comprise its governing and review body. They are unpaid and working in their own time. But under this bill, they would be subject to the new compliance requirements which require disclosure of interests and of those of their relatives. This exceeds the requirement placed upon directors under the Corporations Act, who are only required to disclose their fellow directors.

In contrast to the Australian Industry Group Council, we have the Woolworths board of directors, with 12 people appointed by shareholders being paid in excess of $200,000 per director per year, supervising, monitoring and governing the financial interests of shareholders in excess of $6 billion. We can obviously see that there is a significant proportionality problem with this bill. As this bill chooses to regulate individuals who choose, often on a voluntary basis, to dedicate their time to an employer body or union in the same ways executives and non-executive directors of corporations, there is a clear disproportionality that is expressed in this bill. But we should not be surprised about this. This is a government that likes to bash trade unions, likes to ensure that it is talking about trade unions more than it is talking about the economy. Its obligations on officers of trade unions and employer associations is very wide and creates an undue administrative burden on many registered organisations which are less than one per cent of the financial size—

Debate interrupted.