Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for that protection, Mr President. If this government were serious about integrity, then you'd be doing something about the integrity of one of your own ministers, but instead you're picking on workers and their organisations.

When John Howard lost the 2007 election, Tony Abbott said that Work Choices was 'dead, buried and cremated'. But it's not. It's not. It has roared back into this parliament, and it has roared back in the form of this misnamed integrity bill. It has come back in two parts. Part No. 1, Senator Payne, is this bill we're going to be debating this afternoon. What does that bill do? It ties unions up in knots filling out paperwork, not letting them do the work that they need to do in this country, which is to boost wages and conditions. That's step No. 1, part No. 1, of this legislation: to tie them up. Then there's part No. 2. Part No. 2 is coming. Part No. 2 is on its way. Having weakened the unions by passing this legislation, what do they do next? Well, they come after the workers; they come after their entitlements. I have to say that Prime Minister Morrison has in fact been smarter than Prime Minister Howard. I've got to admit that. He's far more cunning. Rather than going after the workers directly, he's going after the unions first—and then he'll go after the workers.

What are the problems that we've got in this country at the moment? Ensuring integrity? No. What's happening in this country at the moment? We've got a series of serious economic problems. Wages have stagnated in this country, and they continue to stagnate. Unemployment is rising, particularly in my own state. Retail sales are either flatlining or falling. These are serious problems that ordinary Australians are facing. What is this government doing about them? Well, it is attacking the one set of organisations that might be able to turn this situation around. It's attacking the unions, and limiting their ability to do the job that they need to be doing, which is to raise wages and conditions. This government should be supporting unions to do the job that they need to do, to get real wage rises going in this country and to kickstart the economy. Instead, we've got Work Choices mark II: tying up unions in unbelievable amounts of paperwork, stopping their vital work in lifting wages.

What about the comparison? This is supposed to be the same set of laws applying to unions as to companies. Senator Payne referred to a particular union that had seven offences against it. What did we see this week? Bank officials having broken the law 23 million times.