Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Isn't it interesting that yesterday we heard this whole Trumpism of fake news. Somehow there was a mandate to turn around and make these sorts of changes to the representation of working people in this country—to rip out their rights to democratically decide about unions amalgamating; to take away their democratic right to say who their leadership is; to turn around and put substantial resources, in case after case that will result from this point system that is being proposed, into defending what obviously, even to some courts, will be defendable cases. But those substantial resources will be taken away from the fight against wage theft.

Six billion dollars were stolen in the construction industry. We have a government who has not acted on the task force about the exploitation of migrant workers. We see today that, in the last three years, temporary workers in this country have risen from 1.8 million to 2.2 million—where people have been grossly exploited. In all the studies carried out, average incomes are well below the minimum wage. And yet the government turns around and says that the people who can hold all that to account have to be tied up in defending what are defendable cases, 'Don't worry; the court will make a decision about what is in the public interest!'

This is directed at the minister. When I give these examples, I want to hear from the minister whether these are legitimate, defendable cases and why are unions going to be paying for legitimate, defendable cases? The following examples are on industrial action, taking in regard the issue of public safety. As is often the case, working Australians in democratically elected unions use industrial action to draw the public's attention to issues of safety in workplaces that affect not only members but also the public at large. These sorts of actions are deemed illegal and unprotected by the Fair Work Act. They are!

Now, under the government's amendments to the ensuring integrity bill, unions and their officials would be punished twice: first, with fines that already exist and, second, with a punitive demerit system resulting in the disqualification of officials and deregistration of whole unions. These punitive fines would soak up members' money and divert resources from the core business of unions, which is representing members and lifting the boat for all Australians on income. If a union accrues more than 900 demerit points in a 10-year period, it will allow applications to be made for a union official's disqualification or the union's deregistration. These amendments are at odds with the core business of unions fighting for and delivering the rights and conditions of everyday working Australians.

Firstly, I draw the minister's attention to the armoured car industry, in which workers are regularly faced with the threat of violence, robbery and, in some instances, injury or death. The Senate Education and Employment Committee inquiry into the ensuring integrity bill heard firsthand from Charles McKay, a 25-year veteran and worker for Armaguard. He testified about a string of attacks and assaults on armoured car workers between 1994 and 1995 and in the early 2000s. In the instance that a worker had been assaulted or murdered, and as was the case at Armaguard if workers were devastated and scared for their lives, they decided to take unprotected industrial action to raise the issue of public safety with the company, outside of the bargaining process. Under this bill it would be deemed illegal and a breach of the Fair Work Act. The Armaguard industrial actions led to the Peterson inquiry in New South Wales in February 1997. The recommendations that flowed from this inquiry led to a number of safety measures being implemented for saving lives in the armoured car industry to this day.

The second example is that of public safety in hospitals in my home state of New South Wales. Our hospitals have some of the highest rates of assault, with 465 incidents in the last year alone. There are thousands of health workers in New South Wales and hundreds of thousands across Australia, who deserve to go to work without the fear of injury or assault. The work that they do is paramount to the health and wellbeing of all citizens, including in my home state of New South Wales. We know that assaults in our hospitals can be prevented, or the risk substantially reduced, by properly resourcing hospitals with the staff and support necessary to provide security. Health workers know that this is a problem. Your Health Services Union has been raising it with the state government, but those pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

If workers are fed up with government inaction and are scared to go to work, in case of injury and assault, including knifings, bashings, attacks with syringes and the ongoing threat of violence, if they take industrial action, that would presently be deemed as a breach of the act and would result in the collection of demerit points by the union. This is an example where the very action of this Senate, in passing a motion on 31 July this year, would be made redundant. It was where the Senate supported those very same actions. This leads to a situation where unions can be deregistered for taking what is a public interest test. They not only can be deregistered but ultimately can turn around and be held to a situation where they have to spend substantial sums of money diverted from appropriate causes in representing Australian workers' security.

Another example is the bus industry, where there has been a great deal of evidence, over many, many years, of threats of violence and assault in bus drivers' day-to-day work. A horrible situation and example was with Manmeet Alisher, a Brisbane bus driver who was killed by a homemade bomb thrown into his bus. Workers took various kinds of industrial action following that. In the same situation, bus drivers in New South Wales, particularly in my home city of Sydney, and also in Newcastle and Wollongong, have put bans on various bus routes. All of those are breaches of the Industrial Relations Act. In the cases of the bus industry and the armoured car industry I was very proud to support those workers and also very determined to make sure that I supported those workers when they decided to take that action. I encouraged others to take that action. In those circumstances I would at that time have been accountable for that illegal industrial action.

In actual fact, a number of undertakings were given in the Supreme Court regarding the armoured car disputes. In the case of the armoured car area, there was a particularly horrendous hold-up at Padstow RSL. The company at the time, Chubb, was providing services to Padstow RSL. There were four known gangs operating in the Sydney area, and one of those gangs was believed to be particularly domiciled in that area, as there had been a series of other attacks. Chubb tried to change its delivery standards on the basis of trying to win bank contracts and then trying to win club contracts to move large sums of cash from poker machines. Rather than using an armoured vehicle with a three-person crew and two escorts, with two people in each escort, for Padstow RSL in particular, because it was a high-risk position, the company decided to subcontract that work to a soft-skin operator—that was a person in a 10-year-old sedan who had been in the country, unfortunately for him, for only six months. The crim walked up to the side of the vehicle and blew his head off.

My union and I had given undertakings to the Supreme Court that we would not take further industrial action because the banks were turning around and suing us. As a result of talking to delegates following the assault, the following day delegates said that we had to have a meeting of all workers—firstly, as a result of that fatality and, secondly, how could we wait for WorkCover to make some decision over some months and various court hearings over a period of years to decide whether that is a risk to the safety of all in the armoured car, soft-skin or cash-in-transit industry. Those workers went on strike regardless of the Supreme Court undertaking and they went on strike regardless of it being a breach of what is now the Fair Work Act. Under the system that's being proposed, not only would they be fined but they would receive demerit points and would have their organisation deregistered, and I would hazard a guess that their own official would have their right of registration withdrawn as well.

I put the question directly to the minister: could these kinds of unprotected industrial actions, when successfully prosecuted, lead to the deregistration and/or the possible disqualification of a union official?