George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much indeed, Mr President. The purpose of this motion is to enable proper consideration, without further delay, of the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment Bill 2014. Those of us who have been listening to the second reading debate on this bill throughout the course of the day know that the Australian Labor Party will do whatever they can to stop this bill being passed and to stop this bill being put, because what this bill seeks to achieve is to restore accountability, transparency and integrity to registered organisations, both trade unions and defined industrial organisations, and that is something that the Labor Party is determined to resist.

We have had a long second-reading debate. All of the arguments for or against this bill have been canvassed from both points of view, and the crossbench have had their opportunity to make their contribution as well. It is time now, frankly, that the Senate got on with it.

This is one of the bills that, as we all know, were a double dissolution trigger. It is one of the bills that we took to the people, and we were re-elected. We undertook at the election that, if we were to be re-elected, we would re-present this bill to the parliament, and that is what we are doing. If the bill is carried, as the government hopes that it will be, that will be a very, very significant reform for the Australian industrial relations landscape.

We have heard for years now the mounting evidence of unlawfulness and illegality by trade union officials—not all, not most, but enough to be of concern. It was one of the themes of the Gillard government in particular that scandal after scandal within the trade union movement—in trade unions such as the Health Services Union, the Australian Workers Union, the Transport Workers Union and of course, infamously, the CFMEU—was exposed. What did the former, Labor government do to address those abuses of power, those decisions by crooked union officials to enrich themselves at the expense of their members? The sad truth is they did nothing—nothing.

So, when the coalition were elected, we established a royal commission, the Heydon royal commission, whose findings were absolutely damning and made the case in language too powerful to admit of argument that the need to reform industrial relations in Australia was both urgent and significant.

We introduced this bill. We also introduced other legislation to reform the construction industry, but that is a matter for another debate. All the registered organisations bill will do is ensure that officers of registered organisations are subject to the accountability, transparency and integrity standards of officers and directors of public companies, and yet that is too much for the Australian Labor Party to swallow. When you have legislation that merely seeks to ensure that some important entities with power in the economy are subject to the same transparency, accountability and integrity regime as other powerful elements in the economy, and one side of politics resists it tooth and nail, it cannot be because they have a policy based argument. It cannot be because they have a principled argument or an intellectual argument against what the government is seeking to do—and they do not. This is an absolutely shameless attempt by the Labor Party, led by Senator Wong and the CFMEU, to prevent reform, because every man and woman of them—every single one of them—owes their place in this chamber to the patronage of a trade union movement that has decided to do everything it can to prevent reform.