Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great sorrow that I rise to make a contribution to this debate on the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Ensuring Integrity) Bill 2019. I did hold out some hope that some of those on the crossbench might actually see the great folly of this piece of legislation the government is advancing and see through what the government is doing, but, sadly, we are not seeing that in the debate we are undertaking at this time.

I want to take this opportunity to put on the record my absolute opposition to what can only be described as a draconian bill. It's an outrageous bill. In fact, it could have been drafted by an authoritarian regime, it's so bad. It's undemocratic, it's unprecedented and it's un-Australian. It attacks the organisations that have been the backbone of Australia's democracy and economy since before Federation, and it attacks the democratic right of workers to associate freely in trade unions. It attacks fundamental liberties that we hold dear, including the right to free speech and the right to withhold your labour. These are not new concepts. They are realities that have been hard fought for. They are internationally accepted as basics in a democratic society. But that means nothing to this government filled with ideologues who, every day, advance an attack on Australian workers and on decent businesses that want to do the right thing and look after their workers because they know they are vital to the success of their businesses.

This bill looks like it will pass, and that will no doubt delight this government as it moves ever closer, incrementally, to achieving its goal of a weak and emaciated union movement. That's what it wants to see. I tell you: you may get this bill through, and it looks like you're going to get this bill through, but you will never ever take away the heart of the union movement. It might be severely impacted by this draconian piece of legislation, but you will not take us down. We will continue to stand and fight for the working people of this country.

The LNP want a union movement that is silent. The LNP want a union movement that is broken. The LNP want a union movement that is no longer able to stand up to this government's relentless attacks. But I'm a Labor senator and I'm proud to stand here in this chamber, with my Labor colleagues, against this legislation. With them and the broader labour movement, I will always—always—stand up for fairness, for workers' rights. We cannot and we would never ever, not in a million years, support anything like this bill.

A past version of this bill was rejected in the last parliament for being far too extreme. It was rejected then; it should be rejected now. This emboldened government is trying, as it does every time it gets the chance, to gut unions and to destroy the ability of working people to organise themselves and demand safe workplaces and fair and decent pay for their endeavours every day.

There are too many extraordinary measures in this bill to go through them one by one. But I will always remain impacted by the appalling and frightening evidence, frankly, that we received in the Education and Employment Legislation Committee inquiry with regard to the likely impact of the passage of this legislation. There is the impact on volunteers. The government are so removed from the reality of unions that they talk about unions as if they're an enormous workforce of highly paid people—because that's what the government experience in corporate life. They think that everybody experiences that. We have volunteers in every union across this country, including nurses, airline stewards and teachers—people who are just doing the right thing by standing up for somebody in their workplace. They're all going to be impacted by this very extreme bill.

In my view the critical issue in this bill is the ability of courts to deregister unions based on a vast array of grounds that should absolutely be considered unlawful but will be enabled if this legislation passes. The grounds for deregistration have no corporate equivalence. People know about the Hayne royal commission. They know that this government fought it tooth and nail. They know that the commission recommended that 76 important things should happen and that this government should move to enact those in legislation. But we're not here tonight sorting out the 76 recommendations of the Hayne royal commission, despite the appalling findings about the banks then and the reinvigoration of our understanding of how diabolically bad the action of the banks has been, given the 23 million instances of failure to abide by the law that have been documented this week in the public place with regard to Westpac. People know that's what the government should be doing; in fact, people are being hoodwinked into thinking that is what the government is doing. But, I tell you what, they're not doing that, Australia. They are not implementing the recommendations of the Hayne royal commission; instead they're here attacking the unions. That's what they're doing. That's their priority. Michele O'Neill of the ACTU said:

None of the grounds for disqualification or deregistration require the conduct to be serious, deliberate, knowing, wilful, repeated, persistent or systematic.

This set of laws, make no mistake, is a set of laws that demands an entirely different standard from volunteers who are just standing up for their workmates than it requires of those in corporate Australia.

I take this opportunity to thank all the unions for their care in their submissions and to thank all the volunteers working in unions who do their work every day to support their fellow workers, many of whom came to give evidence to us. I also acknowledge the incredible leadership of the two great Australian woman who have led the ACTU in its very careful, very considered, very well-informed critique of this bill throughout the entire inquiry. They are operating in a context in Australia where our unions are among the most heavily regulated in the world. No-one who is a decent Australian wants the measures that are in this bill. The only group of people to whom they appeal are far-Right think tanks, all the people sitting on that side of the chamber and the ones who sit on the crossbench who are going to make their way over and support this government with this legislation.

The bill reveals that Liberals and Nationals stand for one major thing—that is, attacking workers and their representatives, silencing political dissent and taking away basic rights in a democratic society. If passed, this bill will enable unprecedented political interference in the activities of unions. It's going to give more power to the Registered Organisations Commission, despite the disgraceful record that it has. People know about what happened with the AWU and the raids. That's who this government want to empower. Embedded in this bill is more power for the ROC. The bill will put onerous red-tape restrictions on already-stretched organisations. It will increase the power that people called 'interested persons' have to entangle unions in costly legal battles and it will drain already-strained resources that should be used for helping workers in their workplaces and enabling them to be better skilled, do a better job and come home safely at the end of the day. It is very likely that the legislation that looks set to pass this place will increase vexatious litigation. It will certainly tie up the unions and it will strain their resources and strain the capacity of the courts. There already exists myriad laws and regulations governing the conduct of unions, but this government wants to send a message to those who would dare to stand up for workers' rights, and the message is: Be silent. Don't stand up for one another. Just accept what you're given.

The bill sets out a very different standard for unions than it does for any corporation. We haven't seen anything like the restrictions in this bill ever being considered to be applied to CEOs like the bankers who stole from ordinary Australians. There are no laws proposed by this government to deal with the appalling cases of wage theft by 7-Eleven, Caltex, Domino's, Pizza Hut and the now infamous George Calombaris. The same scrutiny and legislative crackdowns are simply not being applied to them. I want to acknowledge the work of the unions in actually uncovering what was going on with wage theft in those institutions. I particularly want to acknowledge the SDA union and its leadership at the federal level by Gerard Dwyer and at the New South Wales level—the state for which I am very proud to be a senator—by Bernie Smith. Through their efforts as unionists they got together the stories of people who were being totally ripped off. They came together, they put together submissions and they participated in the democratic processes. They put submissions to committees that you and I, Deputy President, were on, and we heard those unions giving evidence in defence of hardworking, ordinary Australians. This bill will make it harder, so much harder, for the truth to be told about what's going on in our country.

Those who will vote for this legislation don't care about ensuring integrity in industry. They're solely focused on attacking workers' representatives that dare to advocate for wage increases, for safer worksites and for better deals for their members. I want to share some memorable insights from the previous hearings that clearly lay out the new landscape of industrial relations that will occur if this bill should pass.

In a Sydney hearing we heard from Nick McIntosh from the TWU, representing truck drivers with real safety concerns, because the men and women in that industry are 13 times more likely to die than in any other occupation. That means safety is a key priority for the union to look after its members, to literally keep them alive. Mr McIntosh said that a snap strike such as the one held regarding safety concerns the morning after a bus driver in Western Sydney was stabbed could now result in disqualification of a union official or even lead to the deregistration of a union. That is how extreme this bill is. The very real safety concerns that bus drivers had that morning would not be able to be acted upon. Instead of considering just the safety of the workforce, of those men and women, they would have to consider the threat of extremely punitive action that could be brought against them by any person of interest—that's what this bill allows.

In the Melbourne hearing I heard evidence from a union secretary about the two-sided nature of the right of entry. For the union there are already very tough penalties for violations of right of entry, yet many companies deny lawful right of entry and get off scot-free. In evidence received, we heard about the tragic deaths of many young workers. Mr McIntosh referred to Mr Ballantine, a 17-year-old man who, on his first job, died after falling 12 metres to his death while installing a glass ceiling. I can remember being in this chamber when families, seated in the two front rows in the gallery, came here to receive the report that we brought into this place regarding industrial deaths. These were the families that relied on unions to tell them about what was going on after the death of a loved one because the government agencies just didn't do it.

The Liberals have made a great song and dance about certain union officials, but they ignore the responsibilities of corporate Australia. Gerry Hanssen is a Liberal Party member with a blind hatred of unions who blocked the CFMMEU safety inspectors from his company's worksite. Union safety inspectors were illegally barred weeks before a young German national tragically fell 13 floors to her death on that site. Yet this industrial law-breaker's company was fined only $62,000 for these breaches—half as much money as he donated to the Liberal Party. It's telling that this government continues to bring legislation in here that is much more interested in attacking the work safety of workers and attacking work safety inspectors than in criminalising industrial manslaughter and ensuring that building sites are safe.

This government's driven by a blind hatred for unions. It has one law for its Liberal donors and another for the workers' representatives. What appalling moral blindness. What disgraceful priorities. How dare the government claim to speak for workers when it restricts the ability to be safe, when it penalises those who dare to be sure that they get home to their families safely? Death after death occurs on construction sites across our nation—yet limiting the capacity to provide safe workplaces is what this government strives to do with this legislation.

We heard evidence from Lisa Fitzpatrick of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation of the chilling effect this bill will have on necessary unprotected industrial action in the health sector. If you as an Australian are listening to this debate and think this doesn't matter to you, let me tell you that, if you have somebody you love in aged care or in a hospital and nurses or workers in that institution think something unsafe is going on and they want to take unprotected action to provide for safety, they will be severely limited in being able to do that going forward. This is about safety for workers but also for the people they serve and look after. Ms Fitzpatrick knows this only too well. She spoke at the campaign to enshrine nurse-patient ratios in law and about how, due to the nature of ratios, they cannot be provided in an enterprise agreement and therefore are unlawful. This shows the current restrictive and downright arcane situation of regulatory hoops that unions are going to have to jump through to get better deals for their workers. But this bill will make it more difficult to ensure that the punishment for a minor transgression of that union can be overcome. Ms Fitzpatrick also brought up the retrospective nature of this bill which undermines the fundamental principle of law that laws should not be retrospective. How can union officials take any action now, knowing that this bill is before parliament and that any action they take could be prosecuted by laws in a form they are still unaware of? The future of every union is in jeopardy every single time they seek to act if this law is passed.

In Brisbane, Professor Anthony Forsyth gave evidence that he believes that the three bills passed since the Heydon royal commission sufficiently address issues of union corruption and that this bill is overreach and unnecessary. He clearly outlined current remedies that exist in the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Act for the alleged behaviour of some unions. He said what everyone in this chamber knows, even the government—that this bill is entirely and utterly unnecessary. It is a tool for the government to silence dissent, it's undemocratic and it will severely limit the liberties of Australian workers.

The public interest test is of concern. The civil penalty contraventions outlined are also appalling. For unlawful industrial action, pickets or coercion, there could be fines of $210,000—enough to bankrupt many small unions. For a paperwork failure to remove non-financial members from a register of membership, there will be fines of $63,000. That's $63,000 for a minor clerical error. Fines of $7,200 can be levied on the hapless clerk who makes that tiny error. For failure to undertake training in relation to financial duties, there's a fine of $105,000. I'd love to see inflicted on Westpac a fine of $105,000 for each one of the 23 million infractions that have been declared this week as part of their business model.

This bill is a sham; it is a disgrace—from a government that has no plan for Medicare and no plan for the economy. It has no plan other than to destroy the voice of workers. The bill doesn't ensure integrity; it ensures a terrible legacy from this government. (Time expired)