Sarah Henderson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

It is my pleasure to rise and again raise, along with my coalition Senate colleagues, profound and serious concerns about this rogue union. Of course, what this bill, the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Administration) Bill 2024, tells us is that Labor has gone into panic mode after failing to do anything about the bullying, the intimidation, the lawlessness, the standover tactics, the illegal payments, the corruption and all the other heinous conduct courtesy of the CFMEU. And it has to be said again, as Senator Cash said so strongly in her media statement, the Albanese government is not telling the truth when it says that its CFMEU legislation will clean up the scandal plagued construction sector. The government's bill is weak. The government's bill does not do the job. The CFMEU should be deregistered the way the late Bob Hawke had the courage to do when he led the deregistration of the BLF. Only a number of years before he died, he even called out Labor for failing to take the strongest stand against the CFMEU.

And what people perhaps don't understand about the CFMEU is that every Labor politician who comes into this place, and particularly those in the Senate, comes as a representative of their union. There are a number of representatives of the CFMEU on the Left. In fact, I am still waiting for answers from the member for Corangamite—on 10 July 2020, I issued a release after it emerged that the CFMEU, which had backed Ms Coker in her campaigns, was demanding that Ms Coker repay hundreds of thousands of dollars in industrial Left union donations.