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

I seek leave to move a motion to vary the hours of meeting and routine of business for today.

Leave not granted.

Pursuant to contingent notice of motion standing in my name, I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent me moving a motion to provide for the consideration of a matter, namely a motion to provide that a motion relating to the hours of meeting and routine of business for today may be moved immediately and determined without amendment.

The purpose of this hours motion, as it is commonly called, is to enable the Senate to progress the business which has detained us until midnight last night and until after midnight on Monday night or early Tuesday morning, in particular the package of legislation described colloquially as the ABCC bills—the government's bills to bring the rule of law to the construction industry.

Here we are on the second-last day of the parliamentary year, and the Australian Labor Party, in cahoots with the Greens, have resisted, every step of the way, the government's attempts to pass this legislation, whose only purpose is to bring legality and the rule of law to the building industry—an industry which is the third-largest employer in Australia, an industry which is absolutely at the heart of our economy, an industry which has been bedevilled and disgraced by the behaviour of one union in particular, the CFMEU, and those who govern it.

Why is it, you might ask, that the Labor Party and the Greens are so determined to fight to the very last breath any attempt to reform the Australian building industry? It is pretty transparent, and it must be transparent to all who have followed this debate. It is because the Labor Party and the Greens are owned lock, stock and barrel by the trade union movement and by militant unions in particular, including the CFMEU. The opposition, of course, has been led by Senator Penny Wong, who was herself an official of the CFMEU, who owes her place in this chamber and her position in the Labor caucus to the patronage of the CFMEU. So, we know why the Labor Party is fighting so fiercely to resist this reform.

But the one thing, I am sorry to say, that never ever features in the Labor Party's thinking is the national interest. How can you mount a credible, intellectually-honest argument against the proposition that the rule of law should govern the construction industry?

And how can you deny for a moment, without turning a blind eye to the damning findings of the Heydon royal commission, the fact that a culture of unlawfulness, a culture of bullying and thuggery and sexism and homophobia and every other form of socially unacceptable and violent behaviour is a feature of that industry?

We have heard in question time after question time through the course of this year my colleague Senator Michaelia Cash—who has done an heroic job in reforming the Australian workplace during the course of the year in so many ways—citing chapter and verse the instances of unacceptable conduct by union officials to which the Australian Labor Party and the surrogates whom the union movement places into this Senate as place men turn a blind eye. They even make excuses and apologies for the sort of behaviour that is manifest in the workplace, particularly in the construction industry.

But we are going to persist, and we hope to persuade the crossbench to come with us to make an historic and long-needed reform to industrial law in this country by passing the ABCC bills and getting on with other business of the Senate as well. The Australian people elect us to this chamber to get on to do the people's business, to legislate, not to obfuscate, and to pass laws, not to filibuster debate. That is what the government has been trying to do—to legislate the bills that we took to a double dissolution election on 2 July, to secure their passage through the Senate, as we undertook to the Australian people to do, and they backed us. The last remaining redoubt of resistance to what the government is trying to do, with the support of the Australian people behind us, is the place men and surrogates and puppets and slaves on the Labor and Greens benches who are defending an interest that not only ought not to be defended but ought to be exposed.