Kimberley Kitching (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will get to some of the comments that have been made in response, but I do want to make a comparison between Senator Cash's rather unsophisticated manner, indeed her rant, about unions, and her statement in relation to Mr Hadgkiss. In her answers, she said that no-one on this side of the chamber has ever worried or condemned a union or union officials who break the law. She is wrong. She is so wrong that we on this side of the chamber always laugh at her when she says it. Of course we condemn unlawful behaviour. We know better than anyone on the other side of the chamber the cost to members of unions, and to those who aren't union members but who benefit from the terms and conditions that unions negotiate on work sites, when unions do not act in accordance with the law. Of course we know that that is wrong. I'm going to come to the moral question of having clients, knowing people who act immorally. I'm going to come to that later in relation to Senator Cash and the foreign minister.

Senator Hume had some factual inaccuracies in her speech taking note. For many months Senator Cash has kept on the head of the ABCC while knowing—she actively had knowledge, so it wasn't constructive knowledge; it was active knowledge—for 11 months, Mr Hadgkiss had breached the very act, the very piece of legislation he was supposed to be upholding and the regulations he was supposed to be enforcing. Senator Hume said, 'We only knew on Tuesday night.' That is factually inaccurate. There was an agreed statement of facts that was tendered to the Federal Court earlier this week. An agreed statement of facts does not just happen in one day. So for some time Senator Cash must have known that the head of her agency had acted improperly and was in fact prepared to admit it in the Federal Court this week.

This isn't the first part of the time line. In fact, it was in December 2013 that Mr Hadgkiss acted improperly. That's some time ago. Then what happened was that in October 2016 the minister became aware of it. Then this week she gave a statement saying, 'We wish Mr Hadgkiss all the very best for his future.' What kind of minister does something like that? Mr Hadgkiss acted improperly. He was head of an agency. It is really quite unbelievable. What was her response when she learnt about it? This is three years after the improper actions, by the way. After that, even then she doesn't act. Does she ever get briefed by the department? Does she ever meet the agency heads or agency senior staff? Because of course it wasn't just Mr Hadgkiss who was aware of this: she decided to ignore the warnings of the senior staff at the ABCC who also knew that Mr Hadgkiss was acting improperly.

In her answer she also asserted that Senator Wong was somehow a questionable lawyer because she had union clients. That would be like my saying, for example, about that the member for Curtin—who is also a former lawyer—that she is a former lawyer, albeit one who acted for CSR, a criminal asbestos company who knowingly poisoned workers with their toxic products. When the foreign minister was one of the lawyers for CSR, she decided that the best tactic there was to delay, delay and delay the trial in the Barrow and Heys case, so that those people dying of mesothelioma would not receive full compensation. What a totally immoral way of behaving—tick-tock, tick-tock, waiting for the victims of asbestos poisoning to die so that her client did not have to pay the full compensation. But it seems that Senator Cash and the member for Curtin are perhaps peas in a pod. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.