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

I take that interjection from Senator Pratt. The fact of the matter is that a bad bill can't be made better with these amendments. This legislation is designed to deal with integrity. It is trying to improve integrity in one section of the community. But what do we know about the integrity of this government, the government that's proposing this legislation? The fact of the matter is that a government with no integrity can't seriously introduce a piece of legislation to improve integrity in the body politic of Australia. Obviously, we have a government that is well past its use-by date—it's getting up to seven years. The reality is that each day that goes by in this parliament we see another example of a government that has no interest in integrity. If it did, then when the first issues regarding Minister Taylor arose—where either he, his office or somebody else sent to a New South Wales newspaper a letter clearly detailing false and misleading allegations—Minister Taylor would have immediately resigned. That is what would have happened if the minister had had some integrity. But, even if he wasn't prepared to do that, if we had a Prime Minister who had some integrity, then that Prime Minister would have called upon the minister to immediately tender his resignation or, at worst, step aside while those issues were being dealt with. But what do we see? Further indications that this government is not a government of integrity. Therefore, if it has no integrity, how can it introduce a bill into this parliament that seeks to impose so-called integrity measures on other parts of the community?

There is a police investigation into Minister Taylor about his behaviour regarding this document. Forget about the source of the complaint; the reality is that we now have a senior minister of the Crown being investigated by the New South Wales Police Force. When that became clear, that would have been the first opportunity, of course, for Minister Taylor to stand aside or resign. I would have thought resignation was appropriate in these circumstances, but he could have stood aside. That would be the integrity thing for this government to do. But what's happened? The minister has stayed in his place—no suggestion, whatsoever, that he's going to move. So, what is the integrity thing to do for a government? The Prime Minister should have gone and had a quiet little conversation with Mr Taylor and said, 'Look, you're now under a police investigation. Serious issues have been raised.' Bear in mind that these are on top of all the other allegations that have been raised about this particular minister over the last six months. This is not a first offence, let's be clear. There are a whole series of allegations about this particular minister and about conflict of interest. So he's not coming to this debate as a cleanskin. The integrity thing to do would be for the Prime Minister to get up and say, 'Okay, you've got this investigation happening. Either resign or stand aside while we get the results of the investigation.' That would have been the correct thing to do.

What does this Prime Minister do in these circumstances? Does he call upon the minister to resign? No. He rings his good mate, his next-door neighbour—I forget who took whose rubbish bins out, whether it was the Prime Minister taking the police commissioner's rubbish bins out or the police commissioner taking the Prime Minister's rubbish bins out, but either way it was completely inappropriate for a prime minister to ring a chief of police about investigations into one of his ministers. Firstly, the Prime Minister should have been the one making the call about Minister Taylor. He should have been the one saying, 'Look, this is inappropriate.' He's done nothing in those circumstances. What a complete breach of propriety for the Prime Minister to seek to put pressure on by ringing the police commissioner in New South Wales. That's a completely inappropriate thing for the government to do.

We talk about integrity. The government are saying they want to improve integrity in the body politic of Australia—they're particularly focused on unions—but how do they have any credibility when all of these things are happening within their government on issues specifically in respect of integrity, yet they do nothing about it? How can the Australian community take the government seriously? When they refuse to take integrity measures in respect of their own government, how can anybody believe that they'll be serious about integrity measures within trade unions and within the Australian working community?

Of course, the fact of the matter is that they're not serious about this. They are simply not serious about this legislation. What they are after is not improving integrity; what they are after is a reintroduction of Work Choices. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott made it very clear what the Liberal Party position was on Work Choices. He said it was 'dead, buried and cremated' and he went to an election with that very promise—he promised the Australian workforce that the Liberal Party had learnt its lesson from the 2007 election. In fairness to Prime Minister Abbott, he did oppose Work Choices in the Howard government. I think he was the only minister who opposed it. So, I think that, when he had the opportunity to kill, bury and cremate Work Choices, that is what he genuinely wanted to do, and he took it to the Australian people. But Work Choices is now roaring back. It's like a zombie. It should have been cremated, but, zombie-like, it has come back. It has been brought back, on this day, in order to reintroduce all of those things that sought to weaken unions but, more importantly, deny ordinary working Australians the opportunity of improving their wages and conditions.

What do we know about Australian industry? I know that you, Temporary Chair Griff, have a background in retail. You've seen all of the figures that have been coming out about retail sales. Retail sales in this country have flatlined. That's always a pretty good barometer of what's happening in the community. Why are retail sales flatlining in this country, Temporary Chair? You know the answer: people have no extra spending money to go into the shops and buy things. Wages, under this government, have stagnated in this country. And there are no signs anywhere that that's about to change.

How do I know that? Well, when the Reserve Bank starts dropping interest rates, what do you know? You know that the economy is in big trouble. What is the Reserve Bank saying at the moment? It hasn't stopped cutting interest rates. It's got another two in its arsenal. It says it's not going to go below 0.25, but it's got another two. That's a sign that this Australian economy is in heaps of trouble. It's in deep trouble.

So, at a time like this, a good and sensible government would be doing a couple of things. It would start trying to ramp up the economy—start trying to get the economy moving again. But also it would be supporting workers to get wage rises. That's what they'd be doing. They be out there doing every single thing they could to ensure that workers were able to go out and bargain with their employers or apply to awards to get increases, so that ordinary working people in this country could, for the first time under this government, start getting decent wage rises. But no! What is this government seeking to do? By virtue of this piece of legislation, what this government is seeking to do is to ensure that the very organisations to whom we give the job of getting wage rises in this country are going to be bogged down in paperwork. And, if that paperwork turns out to be a bit tardy or a bit mistaken, those unions are going to lose their registration. That's a preposterous thing to do in circumstances where the economy is travelling so badly. The government should be doing exactly the opposite of what this legislation is proposing to do. The government should be getting out there and saying to unions: 'Go as hard as you can, because we want to start stimulating this economy. We want to get more people employed.'

That's the other thing I didn't talk about: what's happening with unemployment. I know that you, Temporary Chair Griff, know this is true because of what is happening in your own state of South Australia. Unemployment is rising. So, wages are stagnating, retail sales figures are flatlining and, of course, unemployment is going up. All of the things that this government ought to be doing right now to get the economy moving will be set back and made more difficult if this legislation passes, because, if unions are tied up doing paperwork or tied up in the courts by virtue of all of the new powers that employers will have to stop them doing their job, then the reality is that wages won't just stagnate like they're doing at the moment; they'll simply go backwards, unemployment will continue to rise and the economy will spiral down and down.

I say to the crossbench, and I can't see too many of them—yes, of course, you, Mr Temporary Chair; I've spotted you—rethink what it is you're doing here. If the government has to introduce all of these amendments to their own legislation, that's a pretty good clue that there's something really wrong with the legislation in the first place. While they might ameliorate some of the absolutely worst aspects of the legislation, they don't solve the problem. This bill certainly doesn't restore integrity to unions or to workers who rely on those unions; it simply ties these people up in a whole lot of paperwork, litigation and conflict when they should be doing the very thing that this economy absolutely needs right at the moment—that is, stimulating wage growth, getting the economy moving again and ensuring that unemployment starts going down rather than going up. I see you nodding quite a bit there, Temporary Chair. I hope that's an indication that you're agreeing with everything I'm saying, because we need to ensure, when this bill is voted on sometime after 4.30 this afternoon, that exactly what Tony Abbott said should happen to Work Choices happens here too: this bill should be 'dead, buried and cremated'.