Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks, Minister, for that answer, but it really did not go to the question that I asked. I will just make a couple of points. The CFMEU does not have members in the lift and escalator industry so it is not about standing up to them. The sorts of companies that would be tendering for the work that the Commonwealth is involved in are not small- and medium-sized companies. It is quite a unique industry. They are not little companies. Otis elevator, for instance, is part of United Technologies, which is probably one of the biggest global entities in the world and which has enormous resources in their human resources department. You have Kone elevators, which again is one of the largest construction companies in the world. You have Thyssenkrupp. These are not small companies that are at anyone's mercy. The question I am really going to is that this is quite a niche industry, but it is crucial in the building and construction industry. I am just trying to confirm with the department, because they should know. This is not a lot of companies to check whether they have agreements or not. My advice is that none of them have compliant agreements. Not one.

So when we get to the stage of whether these companies want to bother tendering for jobs, if they do not have a compliant agreement in the short space of nine months in which they are going to be allowed to tender, they are just not going to bother. How is any construction project going to proceed? I suppose there will be some construction projects that do not involve escalators, but it is hard to imagine what they would be. The government is rarely involved in construction that will not have lifts or escalators, even if it is a matter of disabled lifts. So we are going to have a situation where potentially none of those companies are able to change their agreement in this short time frame. It is not as easy as simply saying that people will agree to change it. There is a process by law which people have to go through to get a change. I will ask more questions about the timing of that again, but I hope that in the small period of time that I have been speaking the department has been able to give you some advice about how many companies in the lift and escalator industry, which is nothing to do with the CFMEU, will have code-compliant agreements.