Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

():  I rise to speak on the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Administration) Bill 2024. Senator Sheldon said that we are coming at this from a different direction, and I think that is undoubtedly true because what we've heard from Senator Sheldon and his colleagues is that the Labor Party just wants to get rid of this issue as quickly as possible. They want to get it off the front pages. They want to take the minimum amount of steps that barely pass the test of credibility to make sure that the CFMEU can continue with its militant activity and pour donations into Labor Party coffers and that the climate of lawlessness that the CFMEU has presided over and fostered in the construction industry—the price for which we all pay as taxpayers, infrastructure consumers and home builders—can continue.

We have to remember how we got to this point today. One of the very first commitments and acts of this Labor government was to abolish the Australian Building and Construction Commission. In his media release of 24 July, the then minister, Tony Burke, said, the ABCC is 'a totally unnecessary body'. The CFMEU was pretty proud about this commitment being implemented. In their July 2022 newsletter, they boasted:

We manned polling booths, worked the phones, donated and talked to our membership on the importance of electing an ALP Government.

Now it's their turn to repay the working men and women of this country. The ALP made commitments to the trade union movement, NOW LET'S HOLD THEM TO ACCOUNT!

So the quid pro quo—pretty starkly demonstrated there—for the CFMEU's support for the Labor Party at the last election, including $6.2 million in donations, was for the abolition of the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

In the 12 months before it was shut down, the ABCC had filed 17 cases against the CFMEU—one every three weeks—for alleged breaches of industrial laws. In a 2021 proceeding brought by them, the Federal Court of Australia found that the CFMEU had broken industrial laws by taking coercive action against a Newcastle crane company to secure a desired result. The allegations were very similar to what were aired by the Nine-Fairfax newspapers and 60 Minutes in their disclosures of last month. In fact, only two months ago, we heard from the then head of the CFMEU's Victorian division the same sorts of tactics that the Labor Party is now professing to be surprised about. At the time, John Setka threatened to shut down the AFL and AFL linked building sites unless they sacked the head of their umpiring department, someone with whom he had a personal grievance. Is this the way that a body that is interested in the welfare and interests of its members carries on? No, this is a body that is drunk on power, that is abusing its power, that is used to getting its own way and that is used to the government, particularly Labor governments at the state and federal level, bending over backwards to keep them pleased.

We've heard from those opposite and will continue to hear how important this solution is and how quickly they want it dealt with. But what they are trying to do is to fix a mess that they directly created. By removing the oversight and policing of the CFMEU, they clearly allowed the worst elements of its behaviour to flourish in plain sight. We've seen employers and firms around the country intimidated by the high price of union payback should they resist the soaring costs of CFMEU approved practices and contractors. This practice has been allowed to flourish because the Labor Party, in one of its first acts in taking office, abolished the Australian Building and Construction Commission and effectively gave control of the sector to its supporters in the CFMEU.

We've seen criminal activity, threats, corruption, bribery, intimidation, violence, bullying, standover tactics, misappropriation of funds and other accusations of lawlessness as revealed by the investigative reporting. The Albanese government was warned this would happen, but they abolished the ABCC anyway. Tony Burke, in his media release in July 2022, said that the ABCC is 'a totally unnecessary body' and 'a politicised and discredited organisation established by the previous government to target workers purely for ideological reasons'. Well, it's clear that it was never an unnecessary body, and it's clear that its abolition has only fuelled the very misbehaviours it was created and designed to prevent.

We have a number of concerns about this bill. Frankly, we know why those opposite are in a rush to have it passed—so they can get it through with the minimum of scrutiny, so they can make a number of small cosmetic changes and so they can suggest that they are now dealing with what has been shown to be endemic corruption in the construction sector. But they've created these problems.

We think this bill has a number of defects, defects by design rather than by accident. Firstly, the draft legislation gives the minister far too much discretion over the administration progression. Under this legislation, the minister could stop the administration of the union at any point if he wanted to without giving reasons. That is unacceptable. We need to ensure that the administrator appointed applies not only to a select few of the CFMEU's construction divisions but to all of them. Under the current bill, as drafted, the minister could make a unilateral decision to end the administration of one or more of the state divisions at any time.

Furthermore, given the seriousness of the matter and the economy-wide impacts of corruption and lawlessness in the building industry, we need the administrator to be a transparent office which reports to parliament regularly. And we believe the legislation should also set clear objectives of how the union, and particularly the construction divisions of the CFMEU, need to change and reform before they are taken out of administration. But, at the moment, this bill just sunsets after three years, regardless of whether anything is actually achieved by putting the union's divisions into administration.

In short, this is a cosmetic fix only. It's designed to give the illusion or the appearance of action, but it ensures that the minister still holds all the power. It ensures that, when this issue is no longer on the front pages or dominating media interests, the minister could, if he or she wishes, end the administration very quickly, and the bill provides no benchmarks, no goalposts, no performance objectives that have to be met before the CFMEU can be allowed to function normally again. So we're concerned that this legislation does not go far enough, that it is just a temporary fix, and that is why we believe we need an inquiry into this bill—to scrutinise this legislation carefully.

This problem has been two years in the making, since the government abolished the ABCC. We've had two years of allowing problems to accumulate in the sector, and throughout that time we were told by those opposite, by the government, that there was nothing to see here, that the ABCC was a totally unnecessary body, that the CFMEU could be policed by the same sorts of regimes that govern other sectors. Well, manifestly, that has not proven to be the case, and so we think it's worth taking the time to make sure that we scrutinise this bill, that a committee is allowed to inquire into it, that we can make sure that whatever remedies are proposed for the CFMEU are sufficiently strong with sufficient oversight and sufficient transparency to give the entirety of the public confidence that the sector is being reformed and, importantly, to give employers and building contractors confidence that they are not going to be subject to the wilful intimidation and standover tactics practised by the CFMEU in the past, that they can begin to once again select contractors on their merit rather than because of fear of reprisals and that building costs can come down as a result.

We believe that, if Labor is genuinely serious about cleaning up this sector, then it would seek to bring back the ABCC or a similar body with greater reform and oversight powers. Rather than just put the construction divisions of the CFMEU into administration, they should deregister the organisation entirely and make sure we have penalties for breaches of the Fair Work Act that are fit for purpose. Since the ABCC ceased to exist and the investigations mandate it had commenced into the CFMEU was passed to the fair work office, the fair work office has, on my understanding, not commenced any new litigations against the CFMEU. In fact, the fair work office discontinued a number of cases that had been commenced by the ABCC.

We are struggling with housing affordability in Australia, we are struggling with overblown budgets on major construction projects and we are struggling with a shortage of workers. And so when we consider how important this sector is to the economy and we see the CFMEU practices which have become embedded and normalised in the construction sector, on many estimations these practices have added a 30 per cent price premium to big infrastructure projects. This has flowed all through the industry, and has resulted in many decent, honest, fair-minded businesses having to accommodate themselves to the CFMEU's preferences in order to remain viable entities.

Now we've seen all that, it's important we get these changes right and that we do not just adopt a quick fix to suit the political convenience of those opposite. We have this opportunity to clean up the construction sector and we should take it. I know those opposite are ideologically opposed to the ABCC—I frankly don't mind if we call the new body something else—but in the interests of Australia and the Australian economy and anyone who wants to build a better and fairer Australia, we need to make sure this part of the economy is properly reformed, policed and put on a firm footing.

The allegations that have been revealed in recent weeks are frankly mind-blowing, so that's why I would urge those opposite to give everyone here who wishes to speak on this bill to opportunity to speak to allow a full examination and open litigation of the merits of competing processes. Those opposite should refer the bill to a Senate inquiry so as to allow the Senate to conduct its work of proper deliberation, oversight and scrutiny. And those opposite should make sure we hear from those who have been affected by these practices in the building sector—many of whom, up until now, have been too intimidated to speak out. We need to make sure the minister of the day—and the government and the courts and our law enforcement agencies and civil society—has the tools that are the necessary and the platforms that are available to them to make sure we can stamp out this endemic corruption. This corruption is an incredible burden on our economy, and the practices have been allowed to continue for far too long.