Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is what Senator Rhiannon and said:

This is ugly legislation … Attacking the union movement to drive down wages and conditions as set out in this bill is integral to how the Liberals and Nationals operate.

Returning the union movement, a corrupt union movement, to the rule of law is apparently against Senator Rhiannon's commitment. I say to Senator Rhiannon: if one fails to support this bill, then what one in fact wants is a bunch of union bosses free to spend union members' money on prostitutes, Labor Party campaigning, jewellery and home renovations. But then I also remember that the CFMEU donates heftily to the Greens party. If they are free to wantonly spend this money, then they are free to jack up union fees and cause more financial pain to working families.

In fact, no-one who is not wearing a shabby koala suit and clutching a dog-eared copy of Das Kapital could possibly fail to see that this legislation is simply about honesty and decency. Holding union bosses to a fiduciary standard—which, if they were honest representatives of their members, they would already be upholding—is a very basic and long overdue requirement. It is certainly nothing to do with driving down wages and conditions, as the extremist Left rather hysterically screams.

Far from being an attack on unions, this legislation is about defending honest, hardworking union members from immoral and criminal union bosses who abuse their positions of trust and responsibility to steal from their own members. That is what this legislation is really about. Yet, for all their sanctimonious cant, the range of arguments by the opposition, by the opponents of this bill, are simply a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing. Far from attacking unions, this legislation actually protects ordinary, everyday, rank-and-file unionists by ensuring that their leaders act in their interests' rather than simply in the leaders' bosses' interests.

This legislation protects ordinary union members, everyday Aussies, from having their funds stolen by corrupt union bosses. So it is astonishing that the Labor Party would be so vehemently opposed to it. In truth, as Paul Howes, Martin Ferguson, Robert McClelland and Bill Kelty have recognised, if the Labor Party actually represented everyday working people, this would be their legislation, not the government's.

Let me take up something that Senator Dastyari mentioned about volunteers. This will encourage volunteers to join boards, because volunteers will now be able to hold people accountable, and, if they do not like the corrupt dealings of a board, they can either change it or get off.

But the tragic reality is that the party of the working man and woman, the party of Chifley and Curtin, has ceased to exist. This legislation has simply exposed the modern Shorten-led Labor Party for what it is: a party whose original ideology—promoting the interests of workers—has been perverted and subverted to simply doing whatever works to promote the interests of Labor and union bosses.

Mr Shorten's and Labor's hysterical opposition to this legislation only goes to illustrate how utterly debased, cynical and hypocritical the opposition to this legislation has become on his watch. The most profound truth that opposition to the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment Bill has revealed is that, while Labor began as a movement, it now ends as a gang—a movement to control people. Instead, on this side, in Pauline Hanson's One Nation we support freedom and rule of law—two fundamental tenets for human progress.