Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Social Services and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Indeed. It was Mr Shorten who sold out the workers. I do apologise. Mr Shorten sold out the workers for a pittance, it must be said. It was a very low price to get Mr Shorten to sell out workers. Clean Event saved tens of millions of dollars. Clean Event, as I understand it, normally worked almost exclusively on weekends and after hours. That was the work that Clean Event did. So they would have been expecting to pay some penalty rates for those unsociable hours, but they came up to Mr Shorten, and Mr Shorten was happy to help. He was happy to help save them tens of millions of dollars, and it did not take much. It took $75,000 to AWU Victoria to maintain the enterprise agreement, which saw the workers stripped of penalty rates, overtime and shift loadings. How many workers lost perhaps thousands of dollars a year? They would have lost thousands and thousands of dollars a year for Mr Shorten's union to get $75,000. They are not just corrupting; they are dirty deals done dirt cheap if I have ever seen them. Absolute dirty deals done dirt cheap—$75,000.

Unibilt paid Mr Shorten $30,000 for his 2007 election campaign manager—$32,000 while the company was negotiating an enterprise agreement with the AWU, for which Mr Shorten was national secretary. Of course, that was what helped him get into parliament. His first tilt at parliament was paid for, in part, by this kind of dodgy payment going back and forth: 'Don't worry; we'll sell the workers down the river. Don't worry about penalty rates. We'll get rid of all those.' But 32 grand for a campaign officer, who they called a research officer or something—they came up with some descriptor. He was on his campaign, so Mr Shorten's campaign was paid for and funded, in part, because of some of these deals.

It goes on. Chiquita Mushrooms paid AWU Victoria $25,000 whilst casualising its mushroom-picking workforce. Again the guilty mind of the AWU: they falsely invoiced the payments as 'paid education leave' and never disclosed the payments to the Chiquita employees.

Winslow Constructors paid AWU Victoria around $200,000. They had to pay a little more. It was a little bit of a higher bill when it came to Winslow for the sellout. They provided the union lists of employee names who were secretly signed up to the union. The AWU hid the payments again behind false invoices for OHS training, workplace inspections and similar. If you wanted motivation, there are half-a-dozen examples of the kind of motivation that leads some union leaders to sell out their workers.

Let us be crystal clear when it comes to the Labor Party talking about the rights of workers: they do not care about the rights of workers. If they cared about the rights of workers, they would not be taking money from the SDA, which has consistently sold out these workers. They would not be taking money from the AWU, which has consistently sold out these workers whilst receiving payments from some of those very big businesses. They would not care. They do not care if businesses pay employees less as long as the unions get their cut. As long as the unions can get a piece of the action and keep their inflated membership numbers and the money coming in, they do not give a stuff about workers. Anytime you hear Mr Shorten claiming to care about workers, remember who he is and what he did. It is all there in black and white in the royal commission, and Mr Shorten should be condemned for it. (Time expired)