Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources) Share this | Hansard source

Can I just say, before I start my remarks, that I am not the minister summing up; I am merely a senator making a contribution to the debate.

After listening to the previous contribution, I am really quite astounded to hear this kind of thing in this place from a member of a party that has traded their votes on numerous things when they were part of the government. It is quite extraordinary, when the boot is on the other foot, that Senator Leyonhjelm, Senator Xenophon and a number of others seeking to get good outcomes for their states by suggesting that some other legislation might be looked at are somehow seen as doing something that is outrageous and never been done before. If you have a look at the track record of people in this place, apart from the two major parties, you will see this is an age-old tradition that has been going on since any parliament ever started. So I will just put that little piece of hypocrisy on the record before I start my contribution on the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Bill 2013 and a related bill.

The reality is that this bill was brought in in 2013. It was one of the things that the coalition government said that they were intending to pursue when they were first elected to government in September 2013. It was to reinstate the Australian Building and Construction Commission because we believed that the Fair Work Building and Construction commission was a weaker regulator and that we needed to get back to a position where we had strengthened this particular industry.

It seems really quite extraordinary that in much of the comment that has gone before us you can have one side of parliament saying one thing and the other saying something completely different. If you research and have a look at the statistics, it seems quite bizarre. But the other side seem to be able to rummage around and come up with a whole heap of weird and wondrous numbers.

But there is nothing weird and wondrous in the numbers. As of October 2016, there were 113 CFMEU officials before the courts for more than 1,100 suspected contraventions in relation to building laws. It does strike me that that statistic is a matter of fact. If anybody can go out and find evidence to suggest that that is not the case then please do. But it is very hard to move away from something that is quite clearly available in the public domain. Yes, 113 CFMEU officials were before the courts last month. In recent years more than $8 million in fines have been imposed for breaches of those laws. Once again, these are matters of fact. They are not matters of supposition. We did not just makes them up; they are on the public record. The reality is that we need to do something about that. No business, no union and no individual should be allowed to continue to break the law at the kind of rate that we have seen the law being broken on construction sites and to get away with it.

Probably the most distressing thing about this is the cost to our economy. We in this country are trying very hard to deal with the debt and deficit problem to ensure that we are going to have a prosperous economy so that our children into the future are going to be able to live the lives that we expect for them and that we are living at the moment. But unless we do something about the productivity of this nation we are not going to achieve that. We really have two choices in dealing with our debt and deficit. We either increase the productivity within Australia or we focus on our export market. This government would like to do both so that we can move to a more prosperous nation where we can afford all those wonderful things that we would like our children to have without continuing to go deeper and deeper into debt.

It is really quite disturbing when you find that the rate of industrial action in the construction sector is now nine times higher than the average across all other industries. That is a pretty serious statistic. Currently two out of three working days lost to industrial disputes are in the construction industry. We in this place all sit and debate time and time again about absolutely essential infrastructure for education and health care. Our schools and our hospitals costs 30 per cent more than they need to because of the number of days that are lost due to industrial action and other activities that occur on building sites. So it does not take terribly long to start painting a picture about why it is so important that we put these reforms in place.

I must admit that I have always been a great believer that if you are doing the right thing you should never fear anybody having a look at what you are doing. It is a little bit like complaining about getting a speeding fine if you were speeding. If you are not speeding then you are not going to get a speeding fine. If you are not doing anything wrong on a construction site, the ABCC is not likely to interfere in any way with what you are doing.

To once again reinforce the importance of this particular piece of legislation, the construction sector is the third largest industry in Australia and it contributes eight per cent to our GDP. It employs nearly 1.1 million Australians, and there are more than 300,000 small businesses that rely on this sector for their very existence. You would have to say that it is a tremendously important industry.

One of the things that we have heard time and time again in the contributions that have been made in this place since the debate commenced is about the issue of safety. I would just like to put on the record that I find it quite extraordinary that anybody would use safety as an issue to try to scaremonger, because there can be nothing more important than the safety of Australian workers. I do not think there is any deviation between any of the parties in this chamber or in the other chamber on the importance of safety. But we have to be real and we have to tell the truth about safety. The ABCC bill does not amend any workplace safety laws. I think that is extraordinarily important to mention.

We saw the same kind of hysteria occur prior to the election over the debate about owner-drivers and the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal. We saw the TWU trying to prosecute the issue that the changes they were proposing would deliver safety. One of the most despicable things I saw occur during that particular debate actually occurred in my home state and Senator Hanson-Young's home state of South Australia when the TWU wheeled out a lady who had lost somebody due to trucking accident. She was particularly upset, as you would imagine, having lost a very close member of her family in a trucking accident. The union was yelling and screaming that their owner-driver changes would have assisted this particular lady's loved one to not be involved in an accident. But it was not an owner-driver accident that caused that death. So I think when we start talking about the very important issue of safety we need to make sure that we back it up with the truth and do not just use scaremongering. I can assure you that the distress that was occurring because of this particular instance is something that I never want to witness again.

The ABCC legislation will not prevent legitimate safety issues being raised or addressed by employees, unions or health and safety officers. The rate of construction industry deaths has been trending down for the past decade, and we should all be very proud of that fact. It really does strike me as somewhat mischievous, to say the least, to use the safety of workers as a method or tool by which to try and wedge a particular situation. The reality is, if you look at some of the comments that have been made before, that it does not seem an unreasonable thing for a government to be seeking to legislate to stamp out thuggery, lawlessness and bad behaviour in any industry. I cannot understand why anyone in this place would not see the desire to do that, together with the desire to return productivity to an industry sector, which has so much capacity to have a positive benefit on the Australian economy, as a positive thing. Even the royal commission suggested that it was absolutely essential that we combat an industry that was characterised as experiencing lawlessness. What other industry in Australia would believe that lawlessness, thuggery, bad behaviour, physical abuse, discrimination and the like were acceptable ways to conduct yourself in any work environment? It does a disservice to every other industry sector which abides by the law and the rules to think that there could be as sector which thinks that because of their might and their power that they can behave beyond the law and do not have to meet the same requirements as every other worker and industry in Australia.

The reality is there is a toxic culture in the CFMEU, and it causes big problems. We intend to fix it. The ABCC, in its previous existence, had a proven track record of dealing with many of these issues. It tackled the lawlessness and thuggery in our building industry. It was the tough cop that enforced the law. As I said, if you are not breaking the law, you do not need to have the law enforced. If everybody is out there doing the right thing and not being lawless, then nobody should be even remotely concerned about any watchdog on the beat. By ensuring unlawful action could be appropriately investigated, dealt with and penalised, the ABCC got the results and the productivity that the building industry so desperately needed in this country.

Before the ABCC was introduced by the Howard government, the rate of industrial disputes was about five times the average across all industries. During the reign of the ABCC's operations, disputes fell to just twice the national average. On average, since the ABCC's abolition, disputes have gone back to five times the average. It does not take a rocket scientist to realise that the very presence of the ABCC created a much better culture on building sites and, commensurate with that, an increase in productivity, which benefited all Australians—and not just those people who were the beneficiaries of building site activities. We all benefit when the productivity of any industry rises, and especially one as important as the construction industry. Since the ABCC was abolished in 2012 by Mr Shorten, the rates of dispute in the construction sector have increased by 40 per cent. This is against a trend in all other industries, where the rate of industrial dispute has declined by 33 per cent. It makes it that much worse when you consider that not only is it going up but it is going up against a downward trend in every other sector.

When the ABCC was in force, the productivity in the construction sector grew by 20 per cent; since the ABCC was abolished productivity has flat lined. There are some pretty significant statistics on the public record; they are not something that can be disputed or made up; and they point to the need to restore a level of lawfulness to our building sites to ensure that we deliver the kind of productivity to the construction sector that is expected from such a major sector in our economy. If any other sector of the economy was not lifting its weight to the same degree that this one was, I am sure there would be an absolute outcry.

I am sure there are many others in this place who would like to make a contribution on this bill, but suffice to say I, along with my coalition colleagues, commend this bill to the Senate. We see it as such a fundamentally important reform to enable all the businesses associated with the construction sector to feel that they are playing in fair and reasonable environment but most particularly so that we can return productivity to a sector that is so tremendously important to the future of Australia.