Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak against these bills, the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Bill 2013 [No. 2] and the Building and Construction Industry (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2013 [No. 2].

These are bills that rest on a foundation of lies, half-truths and deception—and we have just seen that being paraded here by the minister. These are bills that rob construction workers of basic civil rights. These are bills through which the government thumbs its nose at the basic right to the presumption of innocence. These are bills that pose life-threatening dangers to construction workers. These are bills that give a civil regulator the power to compel construction workers to attend compulsory interrogations for something as innocuous as attending a union meeting. These are bills that provide for searches of construction workers' homes without a warrant. These are bills that deny construction workers the right to legal representation by a lawyer of their choice. These are bills that reverse the onus of proof for construction workers refusing to undertake unsafe work. And these are bills that will leave a million construction workers with fewer rights than an ice dealer—regardless of what the minister says. These Stasi-like powers will be exercised by an unaccountable agency headed up by a zealous commissioner with a track record of contempt for accountability.

The parliament has been prorogued, and we are debating these bills because we have an 'Incredible Shrinking Prime Minister': a Prime Minister whose standing diminishes as each day goes by; a Prime Minister who simply talks and talks and talks; and a Prime Minister who only stands up for the things that he does not believe in. This Prime Minister does not believe in equal marriage or an equal marriage plebiscite—he thinks it will be divisive and unnecessary—but he is supporting it anyway. This Prime Minister does not believe in the coalition's Direct Action policy, but he is standing up for handing billions of taxpayers' dollars to the nation's worst polluters. This Prime Minister does not believe that the Queen of England should be our head of state, but he is standing up against moves toward an Australian republic.

This Prime Minister is a conviction-free zone. He is a Prime Minister soft on corporate tax dodgers but tough on Australian families. This Prime Minister wants to hike the GST, but he lacks the conviction to take it to an election. This Prime Minister wants to cut company tax, but he lacks the conviction to take it to an election because the voters are on to the big end of town. This Prime Minister wants the states and territories to raise income tax, but he lacks the conviction to stand up for his thought bubble. This Prime Minister wants the federal government to fund well-heeled private schools but does not believe that the federal government should fund public schools.

This Prime Minister waffles on about agility and innovation while he watches highly-skilled, well-paid jobs disappear from shipbuilding, car manufacturing, steel making and metal manufacturing. This Prime Minister waffles on about transition, while at the same time presiding over the gutting of the education and training systems that are essential to the transition he waffles on about. This Prime Minister indicated he supported every aspect of the 2014-15 horror budget—remember the cuts to pensions, the unemployed with no funding and no income for six months, the cuts to family support, the cuts to education and the cuts to health? This is a Prime Minister who said last September, when he announced his challenge to Mr Abbott:

What we have not succeeded in doing is translating those values into the policies and the ideas that will excite the Australian people and encourage them to believe and understand that we have a vision for their future.

This Prime Minister has failed just as miserably as his predecessor. Nobody is excited. Nobody is encouraged. No-one has a clue what the Prime Minister stands for or what his vision might be. The word on everyone's lips is 'disappointment'. How often do you hear, 'I am very disappointed in Malcolm Turnbull'? Those opposite have heard it as well. You have heard it. You hear it every day. You hear it in the pubs. You hear it in the clubs. You hear it in the shops. You hear it in taxis. I have lost count of the people who have said it to me.

What has been the point of the Abbott and Turnbull governments? Absolutely nothing. Nothing but their ideological obsessions. Nothing but their forays into the cultural obsessions of the political fringe. That is why we are here today debating this bill. That is why the parliament has been prorogued. We are debating this bill because the incredible shrinking Prime Minister has nothing left. Six months in the job and there is nothing left in his locker—maybe only the stale stench of Tony Abbott's policies that he cannot rid himself of. We are debating this bill because the Prime Minister misled the Governor-General. In his letter to the Governor-General advising him of the need to prorogued the parliament the Prime Minister said this:

The Government regards this legislation as of great importance for promoting jobs and growth, improving productivity, and also promoting workplace safety through taking strong measures to deal with widespread and systemic criminality in the building and construction industry.

I want to deal with some of the reasons the Prime Minister gave the Governor-General to persuade him of the great importance of this bill. The Prime Minister's claim to the Governor-General that the ABCC will lead to improved productivity is a complete untruth. The Prime Minister's untruths are based on discredited research done for cash-for-comment consultancies. These claims are contradicted by the government's own agencies such as the productivity and top-tier consulting firms.

Productivity data from the ABS proves that there has been continuous improvement in productivity in the construction industry since data began being systematically collected in the 1980s. Furthermore, productivity grew faster in the seven years before the introduction of the ABCC than it did after the ABCC was established by the Howard government, and productivity has been higher every year since the ABCC was abolished in 2012. Data produced by Austrade for international investors show that the Australian construction sector is 19 per cent more productive than global competitors and, measured against global competitors, is relatively more productive than other industry sectors including banking, media and retail. It is more productive than the banking sector—the banking sector that this government wants to protect. Analysis by the Parliamentary Library shows that when the ABCC was last in operation the cost of non-residential building grew faster than CPI. That is the exact opposite of what the Prime Minister claims.

The government, on the other hand, gets its figures from a discredited report published by a discredited band of big business cronies. The government continues to parrot a series of reports prepared for the former ABCC and the Master Builders Australia by consulting firm Independent Economics, or Econtech as it was formerly known. They had to change their name because they were so discredited by this crazy report. The report purports to have found that under the ABCC consumers were better off by $7.5 billion annually, that productivity grew and that fewer working days were lost through industrial action. What the government will not say is that this consulting firm has the rare distinction of producing modelling so inaccurate that it was described by the former Federal Court judge Murray Wilcox as 'deeply flawed' and that it 'ought to be totally disregarded'. That is what Senator Cash has been standing up here defending this morning.

Another analysis of the Econtech report, authored by Professor David Peetz, Cameron Allan and Andrew Dungan, concluded:

The great gains for construction industry arising, it was said, from the near equalisation of costs in the commercial and domestic residential sectors that was attributed to the ABCC have disappeared, like a mirage on the horizon.

They were a mirage. They were simply propaganda from those opposite in terms of the building and construction sector. The picture they paint of the building and construction sector is not the picture that is the reality for those hundreds of thousands of workers that go into the building industry every day of the week. It is not like that at all. Further, the report from Peetz went on to say:

This close analysis of the Econtech data raises serious questions about the nature of regulation in the building and construction industry. Alleged economic benefits, used to justify denial of basic rights to employees in the industry—rights which everybody else is, at least at present, entitled to enjoy—are based on discredited cost data. In short, there do not appear to be any significant economic benefits that warrant the loss of rights involved in recent arrangements.

And it goes on. A further report by PricewaterhouseCoopers in October 2013 described the reports that this government is relying on as 'found wanting on a number of methodological grounds', and found that no discernible contribution was made by the ABCC to productivity in the construction industry. So, the Productivity Commission, PricewaterhouseCoopers and independent experts say what you have just heard is an absolute load of nonsense—absolute propaganda from the government. The government's determination to revive the discredited ABCC is based entirely on equally discredited reports and figures that are contradicted by every independently minded person who has examined them.

It is quite shocking that the Prime Minister would advise the Governor-General that this bill is necessary to promote safety in the industry when it is clear the former ABCC and the zealotry of Fair Work Building and Construction under its present director are associated with increased workplace deaths. During the period of the former ABCC under the Howard government, the annual rate of fatalities in the construction industry increased from 2.5 deaths per 100,000 workers to almost five deaths per 100,000 workers. During the period in which the former ABCC's hardline ideologues were in charge of the regulator, workplace deaths on construction sites reached a 10-year high, with 51 workers killed in 2007. Following the ABCC's replacement with the less zealous and ideological Fair Work Building & Construction, workplace deaths in the industry fell by 60 percent.

Recently, I met with the family of a young Irishman, Gerry Bradley, who, along with another young Irishman, Joe McDermott, was killed on a Perth construction site last November. It was heartbreaking to see the pain of loss on the faces of Gerry's partner Shelly, his uncle Eamon and his father Gerald. These two young men were full of the joys of life and the hopes of the future. They worked on a site run by JAXON Construction in Western Australia. In the months leading up to the deaths of these young men, the CFMEU had repeatedly raised concerns over serious safety breaches on a number of JAXON jobs around Perth. The company's response to these concerns was to collude with Fair Work Building & Construction to keep the union off the job.

File notes obtained through budget estimates reveal the extent to which Fair Work Building & Construction under the regime of Nigel Hadgkiss aided and abetted the company's hindrance and obstruction of attempts by workers and their unions to rectify safety breaches. JAXON management told Fair Work Building & Construction inspectors in their Perth office that the union's attempts to carry out safety inspections 'are becoming a nuisance and wasting his time'—that is, the site manager's time. So the site manager's time, according to Fair Work Building & Construction, was being wasted. The site manager told Fair Work Building & Construction that he was talking to the police and getting their help to keep the union off the job. The file notes reveal that Fair Work Building & Construction inspectors would also be seeking to talk to the police to stop these safety inspections—not because of any alleged criminal activity; only because the boss thought the union was a nuisance! In February, August and October 2015, Fair Work Building & Construction visited the Bennett Street site where Gerry Bradley and Joe McDermott would be killed in November. The file note says Fair Work Building & Construction would closely monitor the site because of 'the level of activity the builder has recently received' about safety concerns and the 'receptive nature of site management'.

Gerry Bradley and Joe McDermott died in November 2015 because JAXON Construction had not set up an exclusion zone when lifting concrete blocks from a truck onto the site. This was precisely one of the many safety complaints made by the CFMEU about the operation of JAXON sites. In my view, if Fair Work Building & Construction inspectors had advised JAXON to fix the safety problems on its sites instead of colluding with JAXON in hindering and obstructing proper safety inspections, then Gerry Bradley and Joe Mc Dermott would probably be alive today. The hindering and obstructing of investigations of suspected occupational health and safety breaches on JAXON sites in Perth is a matter before the Federal Court in Perth. I am advised there will be a coroner's inquest into the deaths. It is my hope that Fair Work Building & Construction's role in contributing to the circumstances that led to the deaths of Gerry Bradley and Joe McDermott will be fully investigated. In all, JAXON sites around Perth received 15 visits from Fair Work Building & Construction inspectors in 2015. It is clear that, under the Turnbull government, if you complain about safety on a construction site you are more likely to get a visit from Fair Work Building & Construction inspectors than a health and safety inspector.

The Prime Minster advised the Governor-General that this bill is necessary to 'deal with widespread systemic criminality in the building and construction industry'. The Prime Minister misled the Governor-General and he knows it. The ABCC never will and cannot investigate criminal matters. Fair Work Building & Construction does not deal with the corporate criminals who engage in phoenixing, sham contracting and standover tactics directed at subcontractors. The routine abuse of market power, the exploitation and abuse of temporary overseas workers and the multitude of other sins that plague the industry are not issues dealt with by FWBC. I do not suppose we should expect this Prime Minister to deal with any of the rip-offs, irregularities and standover tactics of his business mates. Every year, this industry is plagued by $3 billion in unpaid debts. The construction industry is one of the highest financial risk industries in the country. When I went around the country during the Economics Committee inquiry into insolvency in the construction industry, I spoke to dozens of subcontractors—small and not so small. In just about every case they were completely perplexed by the government's obsession with the ABCC. They said that the only people in the industry who share the government's obsession with the ABCC are Master Builders Australia, who represent the big end of town. I found the hostility of subcontractors towards MBA surprising and concerning. Subbies feel completely abandoned by MBA.

These are the big issues. The big issues involve being able to go on the job and be safe, to go on the job and get paid, to go on the job and be able to get advice from your union about health and safety issues. These bills take those rights away. They look after the big end of town and they place workers in this industry in danger. (Time expired)