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

I rise to oppose the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Bill 2013 on behalf of the Labor Party. This is just another element of this government's antiworker agenda. It is another element of their anti-union agenda. This bill is a significant attack on Australia's working class. The bill is the product of the coalition's ideological hatred for collective bargaining and workplace rights. Decent bargaining rights, the capacity to increase wages and conditions, the right to be treated with dignity and respect when you clock on at work are threatened by this government and by this legislation. Even the International Monetary Fund has recognised that unions are the bulwark—the barrier—against increased inequality. Yet this mob do not care. They simply want to see the destruction of collective bargaining and union rights in this country.

The coalition has used a royal commission with politically generated terms of reference and a compliant royal commissioner to deliver recommendations that weaken collective bargaining and working people's rights. The royal commissioner, Dyson Heydon, was biased and demonstrated his determination to deliver the coalition government's agenda during the conduct of the commission. It is a sad and disappointing end to Royal Commissioner Heydon's public career.

The party which gave us John Howard, Tony Abbott, Peter Reith and Work Choices can never be trusted. The party which gave us the 2014 budget, hacking away at welfare in this country, hacking away at support for families, hacking away at pensions—this is a government that cannot be trusted. The party which supported workers being unfairly dismissed cannot be trusted. This is the party which said: 'If you are a small company, you can unfairly dismiss someone. Unfair dismissal is okay.' This mob cannot be trusted on any of these issues. The party which wants to destroy penalty rates and annual leave loading cannot be trusted.

The party who lost 10 MPs as a result of a New South Wales ICAC inquiry—Liberal MPs were systematically breaking the law by accepting donations from developers—cannot be trusted. You never hear them talking about upholding the law anywhere else except in the building and construction industry. They are a law-free zone when it comes to every other area. The Liberal Party, whose MP was busted accepting illegal cash payments in a brown paper bag in the back seat of a building developer's Bentley in Newcastle, surely cannot be trusted.

The Turnbull government are a divided disgrace. They are a rabble who are disunited and at war with each other. The only things that bring them together are attacks on minority groups and the workers of this country. The only time you see them getting excited about anything is when they are attacking workers, attacking pensioners, attacking multiculturalism and attacking the rights of working people in this country. That is when they get excited. That is when they start jumping up and down. They do not get excited about anything else. They are certainly not excited about the current Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. They are not very excited about him at all, and why would they be? What a disappointment that guy is.

The Turnbull government has ignored one of the biggest problems in the building and construction industry—that is, the non-payment of contractors, subcontractors and employees for work that they carry out. The recent Labor initiated inquiry into security of payments in the building and construction industry has been ignored by this government, even though the recommendations brought forward by Labor would commence a process to resolve the non-payment of $3 billion a year to hardworking Australians in the industry. The evidence before the committee was compelling that the non-payment for work carried out by workers, contractors and small businesses in the building and construction industry—not being paid for the work they had done—creates industrial disputes, under-resourced companies, declining productivity, unsafe workplaces, bankruptcies and suicides. We heard evidence of a Perth builder committing suicide. He had a successful business. One of the tier 1 contractors would not pay what they owed him and he committed suicide because of the stress. It was an outrageous proposition.

The coalition have had this report in their hands for months and they have done nothing about it. If you could solve that one problem in the industry, you would solve much of the industrial disputation as unions try to make sure that their members get paid and are not ripped off by pyramid contracting and by phoenix companies closing down one day and rebirthing the next day. They do nothing about it—absolutely nothing. All they want to do is hammer the trade union movement and try to diminish collective bargaining in the industry.

The bills do nothing for what is recognised by the Labor Party and participants in the industry as a fundamental fault in the building and construction industry that needs to be resolved. It would be far more productive and it would be in the interests of the industry and its workforce if we were discussing legislation that provided security of payments in the industry rather than an ideological attack on workers through the proposed ABCC.

These bills and their predecessors have been discussed ad nauseam in the last few years. I have been involved in a number of inquiries that have exposed the lies being perpetrated by the coalition that these bills will increase productivity, reduce industrial disputation and usher in a new era of industrial calm in the industry. You only have to read some of the comments that have been made publicly in the last few weeks about the attacks on collective bargaining through the implementation of what is called the Building Industry Code.

A fundamental part of this bill is a code that has been established to determine how Australian workers are allowed to bargain with their employer, and how employers are allowed to bargain with their employees. I do not know of anything else like it anywhere in the world, yet in Australia under the coalition government, as an attack on collective bargaining, they are prepared to put in charge of determining whether companies and unions have been bargaining effectively a person who has never bargained in his life. He is an ex-Federal Police officer who worked with the Royal Ulster Constabulary and has been involved in all sorts of issues, but not bargaining. He knows nothing about it, and he has been given, under this bill, the opportunity to determine bargaining outcomes for workers. There has been lots of analysis done on the code, but the key findings in relation to the issues in the code are that it is highly objectionable as it contains restrictions on legitimate industrial relations practices that are lawful in every other country. No other country has a code like this in place. There is a booming construction industry out there, and that certainly undermines the government's justification for what is happening. The industry is booming, and that is under the laws without any changes. There is no need for this act that they would have.

The code adversely impacts the number of apprentices. Over 27 years as a full-time union official, I have negotiated many, many agreements over many years, and one of the things that my union, the metalworkers union, used to do was say, 'Let's negotiate with the boss to try and get some more apprentices on the job to give young kids a chance in the industry and an opportunity for an apprenticeship and a trade.' We wrote that into agreements all over the country, and we wrote into those agreements decent wages and decent conditions for the apprentices, because not only was that an investment in the future for the company but it actually increased the productivity and skill base for the industry in the future. Any of the crossbenchers that are here at the moment or listening in should understand that, if you back this in, you are denying unions and workers collectively the ability to negotiate to get more apprentices on the job and give young Australian workers an opportunity to get an apprenticeship and a trade. That is a key part of this legislation through the code, and you should understand what you are going to do if you back this in. You are taking opportunities away from young Australians, and that would be an absolute disgrace.

The code impacts more businesses and more workers in more harsh ways than ever before. It places more bureaucracy on businesses large and small, and it will dampen growth; there is no doubt about that. The code disproportionately impacts women, older workers and unions. Some of the commentary that has been out there recently is that, if this code comes in and the agreements that are out there—thousands of agreements across the industry—become noncompliant then what you are actually achieving is a bargaining round of a size you have never seen before for many years in this industry, because the unions will be entitled to go out, if the code and this bill determine that their agreements are no longer lawful, and bargain for new agreements. So there will be disruption across the industry, and that would be a disaster. That would be absolute stupidity from this government, and that is another reason why we should not put this bill in.

I spoke earlier about the head of the fair work building commission—the person who will probably head up the ABCC and the hero of the extreme Right in industrial relations—Mr Nigel Hadgkiss. This is a man who has never negotiated an industrial agreement in his life, but who will have control of the code under this government's proposal to dismantle collective bargaining in the industry. This is a man who has treated the Senate with absolute contempt. This is a man who is simply a puppet of the coalition. He was an appointee of Senator Abetz when Senator Abetz was the IR minister. Senator Abetz appointed this man because of his right-wing views. He has set about trying to ensure that he is not subject to accountability, as are other public servants and other heads of government business organisations. He has continually defied the estimates process and the call from this Senate itself to provide details of what he is doing and what he is spending money on.

This guy is really unfit for the job. If you agree with this bill, you will be putting in charge of this ABCC, with more powers than ever, someone who is entirely unsuited to the job of applying a fair, reasonable and unbiased approach to working people in the industry. The agency that he heads up has great power over working people. I just think it is terrible that he would not advise the Senate estimates committee on the issues that every other head of department and every other head of an agency do as a matter of course at estimates.

He reported in one of his annual reports that he had visited 50 companies and gone to 50 boardroom meetings. He expended public money to go to those boardroom meetings. When I asked in the estimates process, 'Who did you meet and what did you do?' he basically said, 'None of your business.' Well, it is the Senate's business. This guy has no understanding of his obligations as a public servant or of his obligations to the Parliament of Australia. He treats it with absolute contempt.

He said, 'I don't have a diary.' He could sit down and write a report and remember that he had met 50 companies in 50 boardrooms, but he could not tell us who they were, he could not tell us when he went there and he could not tell us who he met with because he claimed he does not keep a diary. It is just unbelievable for a senior officer of a government agency not to have a diary. In fact, I think it breaches a lot of Public Service requirements.

So this is the guy who sets about telling the Senate, 'I'm not telling you what I am spending money on.' We asked him, 'Who are you employing?' He employs a lot of former Federal Police officers and New South Wales and Victorian police officers in the agency, but he will not tell us what the make-up is so that the public, who pay the bills, can understand what is going on.

The worst part about this guy is that he sets about denying right of entry for union officials to sites to deal with health and safety issues. It was clear recently. On 25 November 2015 two Irish backpackers were employed on the Jaxon site in Bennett Street, East Perth: Gerry Bradley and Joe McDermott. They were out here on working holiday visas. They were sitting, having their morning tea, and they were crushed to death under a concrete block. I met the parents, the brother and sisters, and the partner, and it was tragic. Part of the problem was the union could not get on that site to deal with proper health and safety issues because of the fair work building commission bill. It will be even harder under the bill that is being proposed.

In Senate estimates they would not answer up-front; they took questions on notice. We finally got some facts back from them. What came out in Senate Estimates was that there were six Jaxon jobs in Perth at the time and the union had raised serious safety issues about Jaxon. It was confirmed that fair work building commission inspectors had visited three times the site where Gerry and Joe were killed. That was about keeping the unions off the job. There were 11 requests to the WorkSafe commission to attend Jaxon sites over two years. But what we do know is, if you are a construction worker in Perth and you have serious safety failures and you want them fixed, you are more likely to get a visit from a fair work building commission inspector helping the boss to keep the union off the job than you are to get a visit from the safety regulator.

The other day a 27-year-old German backpacker working on a Western Australian construction site fell 13 floors to her death. The site is run by notorious anti-union company Hanssen, whose managing director, Gerry Hanssen, is well known for his anti-union position. So it is absolutely essential that unions get access to look after the safety of workers on the site, whether they are backpackers, 457 visa workers, Australian workers or apprentice. There should be access to those sites. The systematic approach of keeping the unions off the site through Nigel Hadgkiss and his biased approach at Fair Work Building and Construction should be stopped.

But it is not just the Labor Party that is seeing that there are problems with this new bill. The Senate Standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Bills, which has the job to oversight these bills, said that there are a number of examples where human rights are diminished under this bill, such as allowing officers into residential premises without a warrant. The fair work building commission has greater rights than the police force in terms of entering properties. The police force needs a warrant—not the fair work building commission. They do not need a warrant to enter residential premises. The bill trespasses on personal rights and liberties and reverses the onus of proof. This is a bad bill. This is bad legislation. It is based on a government wanting to reduce the rights and capacity of ordinary workers to get a decent living in this country, and it is all on the basis of looking after the big end of town and big business. You should reject this bill as bad legislation. It is a bad bill. (Time expired)