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

In response to the Governor-General's address on the commencement of the 47th Parliament, but also in response to some very poignant words that Senator O'Neill said just earlier regarding the Uluru Statement from the Heart and in response to the genuineness of Senator Pat Dodson—I certainly wholeheartedly support her comments and the genuineness of Senator Pat Dodson.

The Governor-General spoke at length about how the Albanese Labor government will tackle the cost-of-living and wages crises left to us by the previous government. We've moved quickly, with cheaper child care legislated for 1.2 million families. We have made medicines cheaper. We have secured a meaningful increase in the minimum wage and introduced workplace reforms that are the first steps to ending the lost decade on wages.

Those workplace reforms are critical. Already, major employers like Coles and ANZ have come back to the bargaining table as a direct outcome of the laws passed late last year. The hysteria from the opposition and some in the employer lobby about those reforms was, frankly, embarrassing. They said the country would grind to a halt as soon as those laws were passed. And yet here we are, and the sky hasn't fallen in. But that scare campaign was part of a broader issue that this government must address. That issue is the way that some employers, supported by the Liberals and Nationals, suppress wages by suppressing workers' voices and unions.

In many parts of the world, government, business and unions work together productively to achieve better outcomes for workers. In Germany and most of northern and western Europe, business collaborates with organised labour rather than attempting to destroy it. And their economies are both fairer and more productive.

I know there are many businesses here in Australia who desperately want this more-collaborative approach, but they struggle to compete with the businesses that undercut them by suppressing wages, workers' voices and unions. This is a serious workplace issue, it is a serious issue for the Australian economy and it is a serious human rights issue.

The most fundamental tenet of human rights law—the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights—states explicitly in article 23:

Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of their interests.

That right should be unimpeachable. Instead, we see from the Leader of the Opposition a flagrant disregard for human rights. I'll refer to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, published on 1 April 2006, entitled 'Sign on the dotted line'. It tells the story of how the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Dutton, when he was Assistant Treasurer, treated his employees at the Australian Valuation Office. The article says that the opposition leader refused to negotiate a union agreement with staff 'even though 91 of the 105 in question had voted for one'. Instead they were offered a non-union workplace agreement, or AWA, that would see some lose $17,000. So the opposition leader's employees at the Australian Valuation Office, when he was the minister, voted by a whopping 86 per cent majority for a union agreement. And he responded by depriving them of what is a fundamental human right, and in the process he robbed them of $17,000 each.

This is the same opposition leader who claimed some weeks ago that he represents the Australian working class—a bloke who stopped his own workers having a union agreement even after they voted to do so. What message does that send to Australian businesses? It tells them that they, too, can rob their workers of their voice, in order to make an extra buck.

Let's take BHP, the biggest and richest company in Australia. Surely a company that made a $32 billion profit last year doesn't need to suppress wages and its workers' voices. A number of weeks ago, the Federal Court found that BHP unlawfully sacked Daryl, a labour hire worker at a BHP coal mine near Moranbah. Justice Collier found that BHP sacked Daryl because 'he insisted on exercising workplace rights at the mine'. What was the workplace right that BHP fired him for exercising? He was fired for speaking up about unsafe work practices. He was fired because he said it was unsafe for workers to continue working during a lightning storm and because he refused to take an out-of-service tag off a truck with an oil leak. But that's not all. Justice Collier also found that BHP senior management was particularly interested in Daryl for another reason. To paraphrase Justice Collier, the other reason is that Daryl's brother is a union health and safety representative at another BHP mine.

Unfortunately, Daryl is not the only person that has been illegally sacked by a large Australian employer due to their connection to a union. Take Theo, for instance. Theo worked as a Qantas cabin cleaner for almost seven years before the COVID-19 pandemic began. He was also a trained and experienced union health and safety representative. I will quote Theo directly on what happened next. He said: 'At the start of the pandemic, we were directed to clean planes with just water, no sanitiser for the trays or anything. PPE was not mandated, despite managers wearing hazmat suits. We were not even provided with masks or disinfectant. I made numerous approaches to management to ask for further PPE or for the risk assessment they had done. After everything was declined, I directed a group of workers to cease unsafe work, which is one of the health and safety representative's powers. That day, I was stood down, and it was my last day at Qantas.'

Qantas is being prosecuted by WorkSafe. Three years later and this case is still ongoing. Of course, Theo is not alone in being discriminated against for exercising a workplace right at Qantas. Qantas is currently in the High Court over their illegal sacking of close to 2,000 workers. The Federal Court has found that, on two separate occasions, they were sacked because Qantas did not want them to bargain together with the Transport Workers Union for their next employment contract. Worse still, even though the Federal Court ruled that Qantas was guilty twice, they didn't have to give the workers their jobs back because Qantas said that they would just sack them again anyway. That is the hallmark of a broken system. Sure, they might pay a penalty, but Alan Joyce has already got what he wanted. He sent a message to every single Qantas worker that, if you dare to work together to make your workplace safer or fairer, you'll be dealt with. It is an absolutely totalitarian way to approach a workplace.

The Leader of Opposition, Peter Dutton, and Alan Joyce are not the only people refusing to let their workers choose to bargain through their union. There's Woodside, which makes tens of billions of dollars a year flogging our national resources while paying as little tax as possible. Back in June of last year, eight months ago, Woodside's offshore gas workers filed a majority support determination at the Fair Work Commission. That means a majority of them have decided that they want to be represented by their unions, the AWU and the MUA, and negotiate a new agreement with Woodside. That is their legal right. It happens in workplaces around Australia every day. In the eight months since then, Woodside has launched nine legal challenges, each one more ridiculous than the last, and every single one has failed. As we know, the 10th legal challenge has also recently failed. Woodside has dragged those workers through the courts for almost a year. Woodside has no case to argue.

In one case, Woodside claimed, without any evidence, that some of the signatures on the petition were fake. Then, after this fraudulent argument had delayed bargaining by eight months, Woodside argued the petition was now outdated. But get this: they also refused to hold a new ballot. The entire Woodside case was fraudulent. It was only designed to waste the time and resources of its workforce, the AWU and MUA. As the Offshore Alliance's coordinator, Zach Duncalfe, said:

Woodside is filing application after application trying to discourage its workers and their union from seeking to enforce their right to bargain.

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every one of the applications was "without merit" …

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It's underhanded and entirely cynical.

Just the other morning, Woodside announced that it had launched a 10th legal challenge, which it has now failed on.

This behaviour from the opposition leader and from BHP, Qantas and Woodside needs to be called out for what it is. It's about suppressing wages and workplace voice. It's about silencing and intimidating workers. These are flagrant beaches of the intent of articles 20 and 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and when they get caught, they drag the workers and their unions through the courts for years at a time. If they have to pay a small fine at the end, they'll make it and more back through suppressed wages. They'll happily pay a fine or legal cost, provided it sends a message to their workforce. That message is that, if you try and organise with your mates to have a strong voice in the workplace, we will attack you. It is corporate thuggery at its worst and its absolute ugliest.

Of course, the only reason so many big businesses feel emboldened to flagrantly suppress wages, unions and a workers' voice is that they have explicit support from the Liberal and National parties. Whether it's the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Dutton, refusing to negotiate with his workers, even after 86 per cent of them voted to do so; former Prime Minister Morrison refusing to say every worker should be paid the minimum wage, which happened only last year; former workplace relations minister Christian Porter saying, 'It's too hard to regulate minimum conditions for gig workers;' or the former Assistant Minister for Industrial Relations, Senator Stoker, saying to the nearly 2,000 illegally sacked Qantas workers that it was their own fault, we have a fundamental crisis in this country. The Leader of the Opposition and the renegade employers that dominate some of the biggest boardrooms in this country think they can silence their workers democratic voice to save a buck.

Conservatives and employers have fostered a culture of fear amongst Australian workers when it comes to unions. They have created an inherent fear among workers that if they try to organise they will be persecuted and punished by their employer. The reality is that millions of Australians want to join a union. They just haven't had access to the opportunity to do so. In 2010, the Australian workplace representative survey found that 34 per cent of non-union employees would join a union if one formed at their workplace. That is over 3½ million Australians who have been deprived of their right to join a union and whose families have been left financially worse off as a result, and there's the rub.

We don't have a decline in new membership in Australia. We have a decline in access to the opportunity to join a union. The people who ultimately pay for that are all Australians. Union members earn an average of 32 per cent more than nonmembers. That's a difference of $350 per week. In some industries, like construction, the gap is 44 per cent. That explains why those opposite have such feral, thuggish attitudes towards the CFMMEU. Employers know this, and that is why they and their stooges in the coalition fight tooth and nail to crush unions. That is why they have imported US-style union-busting 101 tactics.

Every Australian worker deserves to have access to the superior pay and conditions that come with union membership. If we are going to reverse the economy-wide decline in wages, job security and conditions, we need to reverse the decades of attacks on unions. We need to ensure that those millions of Australian workers who would join a union if they could have the ability to do so. That is the only way that we're going to ensure the middle-class jobs once again have middle class pay and conditions.