Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

True. You can't give it back to them. They're under administration. At least give it to charity or something. That's exactly right. Don't take the money. But they are not going to do that. Let's be realistic; they won't do that, of course not. But we could easily put in a provision here that the CFMEU no longer makes political donations while in administration. That seems fair enough. If they are in administration, why would they be making clinical donations anyway? No corporate business would do that. They've got to focus on getting themselves out of this process and should not be involved in politics while they're doing so. They should be clearly focused on their members right now, not on trying to influence politics.

There is also the issue here that the minister, with just a stroke of a pen, can take the organisation out of administration—again, with no parliamentary accountability and no ability to disallow. We think there needs to be a proper and more vigilant process here than simply giving one minister of a government that's compromised by the CFMEU this untrammelled power. There are some very reasonable amendments to be made here.

There's also a suspicion that we have, understandably, that the government is somehow trying to ram this through with these clear issues in the bill and not expose them to public scrutiny. There should be some hearings on this. We can do that quickly, and we can make sure we get it through, but the government has not felt the need to act for two years while it's been in government, and now it wants to pass this within two weeks. There's something fishy about that. It should be done properly. It's a serious issue, and there is no reason that there shouldn't be proper hearings and proper accountability so we can get to the bottom of these particular issues in the bill and make sure we get this right.

It's very important we get this right. Obviously, there's the issue of making sure that people and significant institutions like the CFMEU abide by the law. That is very important in our law-abiding society. If we allow people just to break the law willy-nilly and not face consequences, then it will destroy our harmonious society. That is the principal reason we need to act here. But there is also a broader issue: the conduct of the CFMEU, their tactics, are imposing an enormous cost on Australian society, and especially on average Australians.

The biggest issue people face right now is simply the cost of living—their ability to buy basic things at the shops, to stay in their own home, pay their mortgages. It's a major issue, and there is a connection here because one of the major reasons for this cost-of-living crisis is our poor productivity performance. That's been going on for a number of years, but to some extent the chickens have come home to roost the last few years. We have constantly had an inferior productivity performance for some years; meanwhile we kept spending government money, we kept interest rates low and eventually, when you have too much money, too much government spending chasing too few goods being produced you end up with inflation. That's positional.

There are two ways we can fix that. There's a hard way and an easier way—well, they're both hard, but one of them is much harder on Australian families. The harder hard way for Australian families is we have to have the Reserve Bank keep raising interest rates until the pain's too much and we take out that excess demand from the economy. That's very hard for people, and we're seeing the consequences of that now. The less painful way—it's still hard, but it's less painful—to impact on Australian families is to increase our productivity to produce more goods so that we soak up excess demand and then we don't have to raise interest rates by as much to bring inflation down.

The productivity performance of the construction sector in particular has been absolutely woeful. In fact productivity in our construction sector is effectively at the same level it was in the year 2000. There has been a 0.2 per cent a year increase in multifactor productivity growth in the construction sector for 24 years. For a quarter of a century, for a generation, we're basically at the same level. It's one of the worst-performing sectors across the Australian economy.

If we could lift the construction sector's productivity performance to that of the economy wide average—just the average; get it to the average level and have some moderate increase in productivity performance over time—that would unlock $56 billion in savings—$56 billion we could potentially spend to build other things. And if you put that into real things, tangible things that people can understand, $56 billion could build a thousand new schools. It could build 10,000 kilometres of new roads, and don't we need that! We need that in regional Australia in particular. Regional roads are horrible at the moment. I don't know what's happened there, if it's the productivity performance or not, but in the last few years the basic standard of our roads, like the Bruce Highway and other country roads, have become horrible. It's a safety issue right now. We're losing people because of that. We could do that—10,000 kilometres of new roads. That would be great if we could improve productivity in the construction sector. It would also help us build 25,000 new hospital beds too, that $56 billion. Again, we need that. We have public hospitals currently sending people to private hospitals because they do not have enough beds, they do not have enough space. We could invest in that.

There is a real cost here for not reining in the lawlessness of the construction, the C of the CFMEU. And while this is a belated effort by this government to do this—it is a mess that they have made by abolishing the ABCC, which they're trying to clear up—it is very important that we get this right for those reasons, for all Australians to get this right and make sure there is a proper cop on the beat. We could strengthen this legislation. We also need to reintroduce the ABCC, if the government was serious about fixing this problem and making sure we have a construction sector that delivers for all Australians and is not corrupted for the political purposes of the Labor Party.