David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I've been waiting all morning for the opportunity to continue my remarks on the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Administration) Bill 2024. It's a substantive bill that people have been discussing in various terms throughout the morning. What I'd like to do initially is to just highlight the areas that I will be addressing. For many people who've perhaps been either in the gallery or listening online to the last couple of hours, they may well wonder just what on earth this is all about. I will talk a little bit about the context of this morning and the context of this bill that we are currently debating, but I will also talk about why the coalition has concerns about the bill as presented by the government in response to the situation with the CFMEU. I'll talk about why the actions of the CFMEU are bad for my home state of South Australia, for taxpayers, for small-business people and even for workers in the construction industry.

The coalition believe that this bill does need to include measures around a minimum term for any administration that is put in place as well as transparency to make sure that this parliament, on behalf of taxpayers and those people who are affected by the actions of militant unions such as this, can be scrutinised.

The topic that has absorbed the chamber for all of this morning is this: if we genuinely believe that the actions of a union under its current leadership, even though Mr Setka has left, are illegal and toxic and not in the best interest of Australia then why would parties either not return funding or commit to not taking funding, and that includes both the Greens and the government—I can almost guarantee they've never donated to the coalition—into the future?

Why is there an issue? For people who have been following this—this is an issue that has been around for a long time, but the most recent trigger was probably the bullying behaviour we saw from Mr Setka and the CFMEU over football umpiring of all things. People would ask, 'What has football umpiring got to do with the debate we just had here in the chamber?' People may recall that, under the coalition government, we established a watchdog to make sure that the militancy and illegal activities of the CFMEU and other militant unions acting in that construction sector were actually held to account. It was such a bitter relationship between Mr Setka and those in the Australian Building Construction Commission that, when the former head, Mr Stephen McBurney, who was involved with AFL football umpiring, was appointed by the AFL to a leadership role in their football umpiring, Mr Setka said that the unions would target all of the construction programs that were associated with the AFL. On one hand, you could say, 'Well, why should the broader public care?' They should care, at least partly, because football leagues are largely funded by memberships, mums and dads, small sponsors and the taxpayer—look at the debate around the stadium in Tasmania, where the taxpayers are putting up funding—and they should look at the evidence that has come forward over a number of years about the cost premium of 10 to 20 to up to 30 per cent across a range of areas once was the CFMEU decided that they would action on or against those projects.

I think it was the public response to something as inane as Mr Setka having a personal dislike of Mr McBurney that flowed out to the Australian public and media which highlighted that this kind of bullying behaviour and the cost it would then impose on community is not good. It also highlighted the unwillingness of the Prime Minister and his senior ministers to send a forceful message to Mr Setka and the CFMEU that said that this behaviour that divides our society is just not appropriate. We've seen this weak leadership on display from everything from the immigration disasters, which my colleague Senator Paterson has prosecuted so successfully and where the Prime Minister has been unwilling to intervene let alone sack a minister who has caused so much disruption in the release of criminals into our society, right through to issues around the Middle East and how our society has been divided because of a lack of moral clarity and leadership about what is acceptable in this country, regardless of your views or what happens overseas. The Prime Minister has been weak on setting clear boundaries and standards as to what is acceptable in this country.

Following the football incident, the thing that probably pushed the government into acting were the revelations by the Australian Financial Review and others that underworld figures, including bikie gangs, had infiltrated the CFMEU's ranks and had adopted positions of leadership. This potentially explains the illegal behaviour. Indeed, documents in the Federal Court claim that the CFMEU has breached workplace laws some 2,600 times over 20 years and has accumulated more than $24 million in fines. Some 213 of the court cases resulted in total penalties of that $24 million plus at least $4 million ordered against particular officeholders, employees, delegates and members.

You would think that those actions would be enough to dissuade wrongdoing, but what it highlights is that those financial penalties are not enough to dissuade a group like the CFMEU because the total that they can extort from industry far exceeds the fines and because of the power and control that is given to them. The result is like that old saying, 'Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' For an organisation that is set up to be, on paper, for the benefit of its workers, we've seen, like in many totalitarian regimes, that it's actually to benefit the senior leadership and enhance its power base. That's why we see, for example, manufacturing division members of the same union being intimidated, harassed and bullied by the construction division simply because they're in a different part of the union that doesn't bow the knee as much as people in the construction sector do.

We heard evidence here from my colleague Senator Scarr about some of the actions that have been taken against people who've turned up to a workplace wearing the wrong T-shirt—one alleging loyalty or fealty to a union other than the CFMEU and Mr Setka—and who were driven to the point of taking their own life. Mr Setka has even been recorded on video intimidating the leaders of other parts of the union, highlighting that he knows where they live and that they can be affected if there is not loyalty to that union.

Long story short, the government have come up against what we would call a boundary and have said: 'The Australian public is not going to accept this, because of the bullying and illegal behaviour, particularly involving the underworld. We need to do something about it.' Many of you would know that my former career was as an experimental test pilot, and there's a condition in aircraft design that we try to avoid whereby a pilot can induce an oscillation. Some pilot induced oscillations are caused by what we call boundary avoidance: you suddenly realise that you're flying far too close to an obstacle, or you're approaching the ground more quickly, and you instinctively react; you jerk the controls, you overcorrect and, before you know it, you get into a big porpoising movement that is unsafe. To some extent, that's what we've seen here, with the government rushing to bring in this bill. They've rushed to bring in this legislation without adopting the normal processes of the Senate.

One of the objections that the coalition has is that, rather than having a knee-jerk reaction to put forward a bill that may well have unintended consequences; that may not achieve the outcomes that are intended—I'm giving the benefit of doubt that the intention is good—or, in the worst case, if there is a commitment to do something purely to avoid public criticism, that may have a structure that is not going to achieve the outcome intended by the government and put forward to the public, the reason we have the Senate, the house of review, and the committee system is to engage with stakeholders, legal professionals and others and to ask: Will this bill address the problem? Will it have the outcome that we're looking for, or are there unintended consequences that will make matters worse?

One of the strengths of the Senate is the committee process, where we can scrutinise legislation, and, where there is a timeframe, that can be done quickly. I have sat on committees before that have had very limited time and that have, within a week, asked for submissions, considered submissions, held hearings and then reported. It adds value to the whole process and it means the laws that are passed by the parliament are actually effective.

The sorts of things that we are concerned about are: if we have laws that don't actually hold the CFMEU to account; if we have laws that enable executive government to establish or disestablish the administration at will; if there are no terms for the length of administration—for example, in this case, if there are elements of the CFMEU, in terms of branches, that are not covered—or if the actions of an administrator are not open to scrutiny by the parliament, including by the mechanisms of the Senate, such as Senate estimates, where we get to evaluate whether or not an appointed authority—be it a department, an agency or, in this case, an administrator—is actually implementing what the public and the elected representatives in the Senate expect of them and is being effective in its role, then it's almost worse than appointing them in the first place, because people assume they're doing the right thing, but, without that transparency mechanism, nobody would know.

For a government that was elected on a platform of transparency and accountability, it is truly shocking the number of times this government has sought to frustrate measures to put in place transparency and accountability for its actions or the actions of bodies that it wishes to appoint.

To the last point, around the funding, if we genuinely believe that these are essentially proceeds of crime, that the money the CFMEU has in its coffers has come about because of actions that have seen it face numerous fines and convictions, then on what basis can any party of government or, indeed, any party of protest—being the Labor Party and the Greens, respectively—actually refuse to commit to taking funding from such a body?

So there are a number of areas, and I'm aware that there have been discussions between the coalition and the government where we have closed the gap; the government has ceded in a number of these places. But the whole purpose of the Senate is to have the inquiry so that we can lay out for the public whether legislation will be fit for purpose and we can propose amendments. Rather than doing this in backroom deals, it's done through the process of debate, informed inquiry and amendments moved in this chamber, which, again, is part of transparency and is in the best interests of the Australian people.

I cannot support this legislation unamended by the amendments proposed by the coalition.