Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak to the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Administration) Bill 2024. It's pretty obvious that when it comes to unions—and unions are important, I want to add; unions are extremely important for protecting workers' rights. But they should not be used for protecting Labor's rivers of gold. That is what the Labor Party is all about today. It is no longer the party of the worker; it is the party of the rorter. It's, 'How can we use unions to exploit the Australian worker for our rivers of gold?' It doesn't matter whether they're channelling union fees into their coffers directly, via superannuation funds or via childcare centres—that's right, I said it; come at me! That is what the Labor Party is all about today. They do not care about the workers. They do not care about the children. They do not care about the individual. They want to maintain their command and control over the Australian workplace to make sure they enrich themselves.

I've got to tell you: the Australian people have woken up to this. We saw it a couple of decades ago when the Howard battlers came across, and we see it all the time; more and more blue-collar workers are joining the coalition and coming over to the right because they can see through Labor. They can see through the games played by the Labor Party and their bullying tactics. It doesn't matter whether it's the CFMEU in the workplace or, as we saw on the weekend, the Prime Minister or the education minister using names like 'cooker', 'anti-vaxxer' and 'climate denier'; with anything that impedes or gets in the way of their rivers of gold, the Labor Party has to bully people. That's not the way to treat people. That's not respectful. It's not rational. It's not the way democratic debate should occur in this country. We see the leaders of the Labor Party showing us their immaturity and their shallowness in dealing with running a country. Every little step of the way, they are always trying to play games in how they can milk the system in order to enrich themselves and keep those rivers of gold flowing.

I've got to hand it to you guys. I did a master's in finance and I didn't fail a subject, but I failed an assignment that was on superannuation about 15 years ago. I ripped into superannuation back then. I'll call out my own side too; I called John Howard out on this because Costello and Howard should have got rid of super when they got in back in 1996. But they didn't because they got into bed with the CBA, who took over Colonial Mutual, and with NAB, who took over National Mutual, and Westpac, Banks Trust, ANZ and ING. Superannuation today now controls $3 trillion. If you control $3 trillion, you control industry, and it's no wonder that, when we had the Voice vote last year, we had industry promoting the 'yes' vote. We've got this woke mind virus in our corporate boardrooms. We've got it in our childcare centres. We've got it in our education centres. We've got it in our universities. We've now got it in our corporate boardrooms.