Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

There are many before the courts, as I understand it—some on criminal charges.

So here's what it means: there would be some set of dues for everyday union members—the people that the union bosses are quite often stealing from. Then, to get around these corrupt payments, it would simply be a matter of creating an executive membership grade, which could be, for example, $10,000. And that would be the way companies would be paying off the union. Or it could be $100,000. Or it could be, as we have seen in the examples that I read yesterday and today, $1 million. Is that a reasonable membership due? I say not. Maybe the senator was sleeping through my speech yesterday. So I will read what I said when I described this. Corrupt union bosses and employers create loopholes. What this does is it closes a loophole:

… where a union may charge executives of a business, for example, unreasonably large union membership fees in lieu of no longer being able to obtain cash through other nefarious means as prevented by this bill …

It must be similar, in other words, to ordinary membership dues.

I want to go on with something Senator Cameron said. This bill is about protecting union members from the sorts of corrupt payments that they have stolen from union members through the union bosses. The union bosses have stolen from the union members. That's what we need to protect. The employers are in cahoots with some union bosses to steal from union members and deny them their rights. This is about restoring workers' rights and union members' rights. And that is reasonable.