Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection. 'Nothing', said Senator Hinch—nothing. I do not presume that Senator Xenophon will have got nothing, because he is a wheeler and dealer, but for Senator Hinch to roll over and get nothing for selling out construction workers in this country says a lot more about him than it does about anyone else in this chamber. If Senator Xenophon, his colleagues and Senator Hinch vote for this bill and it passes the Senate, they need to know that their credibility as defenders of workers rights in this country is completely shot—it is gone forever—because we now know that they are prepared to trade and do side deals and that those side deals will be up for appeal effectively the very next day, if they have the chance. The Greens opposed the original legislation, the ABCC bill, in this Senate and we will be opposing this amendment legislation in the Senate today.

I have to say that there ought to be something in political life for standing up for your principles. I also have to say that one of the reasons that we are all collectively on the nose in Australia is that far too many of us do something or say something before an election and then fail to follow through and show consistency with the issues we campaigned on, once we have been elected to this place. There is also something to be said for standing up for your principles, even if you have to have a few difficult conversations from time to time. I have no doubt big business were knocking the doors down on Senator Hinch's office and Senator Xenophon's office. Well, there comes a time in public life, there comes a time in politics, when you have to stand up for your principles and stand up for what you believe in, and this is one of those times. The Greens are going to stand up for our principles. We are going to stand up for what we believe in because, in doing so, we are standing up for ordinary Australians who work in the construction sector.

Make no mistake, this legislation is not only going to be bad for ordinary Australian workers who work in the construction industry; it is going to be bad, as many speakers have pointed out already in this debate, for productivity in this country—and productivity, I would have thought, is something the Liberals could get behind. But evidence and history has shown in previous iterations of the ABCC that, unfortunately, the workplace safety record got worse and productivity went down. That is a lose-lose situation. Australian workers, whether they work in the construction sector or the forestry sector, whether they are public servants or any other type of worker, have a right to have a legitimate expectation that when they go to work in the morning everything that can be done will be done to ensure that they can go home at night to their families or to their accommodation and still be fit and still be healthy and not have their health and physical capacity impacted unduly by the work that they do. Unfortunately, we are going to see—I predict quite confidently now—that the same things will happen this time as happened last time, and that is a decrease in productivity and an increase in workplace injuries.

Let's be clear about the changes to the grace period that are contained in this legislation. Remember, this came from an amendment moved by Senator Hinch, which provided for a grace period of two years before the code came into force. That was intended to give everyone time to negotiate or renegotiate new agreements. It is worth pointing out that there was no division in the Senate—no division—when that was put. It was passed on the voices and therefore we are entitled to assume that it was passed with the support of every single person in this place. Now we are debating a bill that is being rushed through the parliament—a gaged debate in the House of Representatives—and a triflingly short one-week inquiry that gives effect to the human backflip from Senator Hinch. The Greens will not be supporting this legislation. We will not be supporting it for a range of reasons; but, ultimately, we are not going to support it because we are going to stand up for our principles here. We are going to stay consistent to what we have always said about the ABCC, and that is that it is unnecessary, it is draconian and it is an attack on the rights of ordinary Australian workers who work in the construction sector and, more broadly, it is clearly designed to pull down a union, the CFMEU, acknowledged as one of the largest and most powerful unions in this country. For a union to be attacked in such a way when their only crime in this context is standing up for the people who are their members and the people who work in the construction sector is actually an attack driven by political ideology, not by a desire to make life any better for people at work and their families.

We stand firmly where we have always stood on this issue: firmly behind the rights of working Australians, firmly behind the rights workers in the construction sector. And we stand against the sorts of grubby political backflips that we have seen manifesting over the summer and in this place last week and this week, delivered in a synchronised diving exercise by Senator Hinch and Senator Xenophon. When you see the synchronised diving at the Olympics, you wonder at the miraculous way that they can stay so in line all the way from the platform down into the pool. We are seeing the political equivalent of that here today, where they have left the platform at the same time, they have gone up and done the big, fully extended backflip on the way down and they have hit the pool in here today at exactly the same time. Senator Xenophon and Senator Hinch are the synchronised backflippers of Australian politics.