Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

This is what he said, Senator Scarr, as reported in the Australian newspaper:

Writing recently to members, the union's Victorian secretary John Setka … said he was 'impressed' by Burke's move to scrap the ABCC and the building code.

'Without going the early crow, I'm hoping that this government is going to be different (from the Rudd-Gillard governments) and from what I've seen so far I'm quietly confident,' Setka wrote.

'Our next EBA negotiations are now not going to be restricted to shit clauses and we will have the power to go after the non-union sites …'

There we have it. At least Mr Setka, the head of the most militant union in Australia, who is about to be handed back the building and construction industry on a silver platter, is being honest, unlike Mr Burke and Mr Albanese, who refuse to listen to those people who represent the employers in Australia and who say this bill will not have the effect that the Australian Labor Party says it will.

It gets worse the more we discover about this bill and how it was formulated. It has actually gone from completely absurd to a complete farce. Why do I say that? Let's look at the discoveries in relation to the costs that are going to be imposed on businesses: the bargaining tax that is Mr Albanese and the Australian Labor Party's Christmas present to the employers of Australia. The costs were revealed quite recently in this bill's regulation impact statement. We've learnt that the bargaining costs this government's radical shake-up of the industrial relations system will impose on small businesses is a Christmas present of $14½ thousand or thereabouts. For medium businesses. let's not forget that the cost that was included in the regulation impact statement is actually not the correct cost, because they made a mistake in the calculation.