Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If there's one thing I'll give the opposition credit for it's their ingenuity when it comes to naming bills. Even when they're pushing the boundaries of legislative overreach, like they are with this bill, they come up with an innocuous title like 'removing criminals from worksites', a title that expresses a sentiment that's hard to argue with but also belies the true intent of this bill. At the same time as those opposite pretend to be friends of Australian workers, they are introducing the most extreme antiworker legislation. They claim they want to clean up Australia's building and construction industry, but the reality is they are using their response to the bullying and thuggery in one industry as a Trojan horse for an ideological attack on all workers.

The Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Removing Criminals from Worksites) Bill 2024 (No. 2) is basically the fourth iteration of the coalition's ensuring integrity bill, another bill innocuously named to make it sound like they're doing workers and the union movement a favour. In the other three attempts at introducing the ensuring integrity bill, it was clear to the rest of the parliament that this was an ideologically motivated attack on workers and the trade union movement. History shows that the Liberals and Nationals have never liked the trade union movement. They've never liked workers being able to assert their rights at work or collectively organise to demand better pay and conditions. This is, after all, the coalition that engineered the 1998 waterfront dispute, conspiring with big business to sack a union workforce and replace them with industrial mercenaries. It's the coalition that introduced Work Choices. When last in government, the coalition were confronted with their poor record on wage growth, and they revealed that low wages were a deliberate design feature of their economic policies. They wanted to keep wages low. The coalition of Work Choices and the coalition of dogs and balaclavas on the docks is also the coalition of deliberately suppressing wage growth for Australian workers.

Now in opposition they have the gall and the hypocrisy to complain about the cost of living, but at the same time they vote against every measure we put forward to get wages moving again. You cannot argue that the measures they tried to block have not been effective, as has been astutely pointed out by Australia's unions. If Mr Dutton and those opposite had had their way and wages growth had remained at the levels seen under the previous government, the average worker would be $4,700 a year worse off.

As if the opposition's hypocrisy is not bad enough, they're making plans to unravel our workplace legislation, a move which will almost certainly see wage growth slow or possibly even go backwards. Ms Ley, in the other place, has said she will kill our changes, Senator Cash has said the coalition will wind back our policies and Mr Taylor has said they will take a targeted package of repeals to the next election. The opposition are already talking about ripping away the rights of casual workers and the right to disconnect.

What do the opposition think returning to the record low wages growth that we saw under their government would do to the cost of living? I cannot believe the audacity of those opposite complaining that Australian households are struggling when they plan to not only ditch cost-of-living relief measures, destroy retirement savings by raiding super funds and jack up power prices by funding expensive nuclear reactors but also introduce an industrial relations policy that will reduce the wages of Australian workers. Do they really think they can get away with telling Australians they care about struggling households while putting forward a suite of policies that will actually make them thousands of dollars worse off?

No matter how hard those on the other side pretend, they have never, ever been a friend of Australian households or Australian workers. When the third ensuring integrity bill was introduced in 2019, Labor wrote a dissenting report to the inquiry into the bill. Labor senators pointed out that schedule 1 of the bill impinges on the internationally recognised right of freedom of association, a concern which was shared by unions, academics, civil society groups, churches and the bipartisan Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. It was noted in Labor's report that the grounds for which an officeholder in a registered organisation could be disqualified go beyond those in corporate or banking sectors. Isn't that amazing?

Schedule 2 of the bill would have allowed for the deregistration of an organisation simply for taking industrial action or for less serious contraventions of industrial law. Those provisions would seriously impinge on the ability of registered organisations to function or represent their members effectively. What we have before us now is almost a carbon copy of those two schedules of the 2019 ensuring integrity bill, with nothing to allay the widespread concerns that many stakeholders had with the previous bill. It just goes to show that, when those opposite recycle their trash, they end up producing more trash.

The bill before us is nothing more than an attempt at union busting while, at the same time, doing nothing useful or substantive to address the real concerns about the construction and building industry. It's a radical, far-right attack on the rights of all workers, regardless of what industry they work in—whether they are nurses, teachers, first responders, flight attendants, retail workers, hospitality workers or even aged-care workers. Under this radical bill, a union official could be disqualified or an entire union deregistered for a minor technical breach. To give an example from the industry I previously worked in, if early childhood educators were to wear campaign badges or T-shirts supporting equal pay for educators, their union could be deregistered. If the nurses union were to hold a protest demanding that health services introduce safer nurse-to-patient ratios, they could be deregistered. A union could even be deregistered for something as trivial as being late for filing paperwork to the Fair Work Commission.

Under this legislation any person with sufficient interest would have standing to bring disqualification and deregistration charges. As such, these charges would open up all registered organisations—that is, unions and employer associations—to having to defend themselves endlessly against vexatious and frivolous proceedings. Whilst I give the opposition the benefit of the doubt—which I don't, really—I would say that burying registered organisations in this red-tape nightmare is a result of poorly designed legislation. But, while those opposite have a history of gross incompetence when it comes to developing policy, I suspect that this is something more sinister. Given their record, I would say this is a deliberate design feature. They want trade unions to be tied up defending endless vexatious and frivolous claims. They want them to be diverted from their core business. They want them to be unable to function or represent their members effectively. Why impose the same destructive requirements on an employer organisation? Because they consider it to be justifiable collateral damage in their crusade against trade unions. This is the kind of extreme anti-union, antiworker legislation we've come to expect from those opposite.

Let's face it: the coalition is a one-trick pony. When they were in government, they never once lifted a finger to address wage theft—not once. They did not advocate for increases to the minimum wage, not even to make the uncontroversial claim that the Albanese government made, which was that workers on minimum wage should not go backwards. They did nothing to address the underpayment and exploitation of labour hire workers or workers in the gig economy, they did nothing to address the need for equal pay in feminised industries, and they did nothing to fix the broken bargaining system and get wages moving. Whether in government or opposition, every time the coalition introduce industrial relations legislation, it is to erode the rights of workers and to erode the ability of unions to effectively represent their members. This bill is just another plank in the low-wage, anti-union, antiworker agenda that the Liberals and the Nationals have continued to pursue for decades.

This bill purports to be about the CFMEU and clamping down on criminal behaviour in the building and construction industry. But, as the actions of our government have shown, we are serious about cleaning up the CFMEU. In doing so we want to ensure that the CFMEU construction division members are effectively represented in advocating and negotiating for their rights and conditions. We also recognise that, where there is corruption, the legitimate role of decent trade union members, delegates and officials is undermined by the kind of behaviour that we've seen from the CFMEU construction division. By beginning the process to place the CFMEU construction division into administration we took swift, meaningful action which ensured construction workers would continue to have strong, effective representation and safe workplaces free of corruption, criminality and violence. I'm pleased that we had the support of the opposition for that legislation. Had we gone down the path Mr Dutton suggested, of deregistering the CFMEU, the same people and problems would have been in place but without the ability to effectively regulate them. By commencing the process to place the CFMEU construction division into administration, we took the strongest action that has ever been taken against them in history.

While we hear the opposition say that the issues in the building and construction industry were around for a long time and hear them ask why we didn't act sooner, it begs the question: what did they do? John Setka rose to power while those opposite were in government. They say they had the Australian Building and Construction Commission and that we should bring it back, but the ABCC was ineffective. They didn't want women's toilets on a building site! It beggars belief. Productivity in the construction sector fell when the ABCC was in place, and it has gone up since the ABCC was abolished. The uncomfortable truth for those opposite is that the ABCC was ineffective and no more represents action on these issues than throwing a damp cloth on the bench represents cleaning the kitchen.

The opposition pretend that this is an instrument designed to clean up the building and construction industry and to crack down on corruption and criminality, but it is nothing of the sort. They know full well that this is a cynical ploy to use the issues in the building and construction industry to launch an ideological attack on the entire Australian union movement. They are basically seeking to deploy a sledgehammer for an operation that requires a scalpel. Those opposite can drop the pretence that this bill represents a genuine attempt to clean up corruption and criminality in the building and construction industry, because if they think Australians are being fooled by this approach then they are only fooling themselves.

If the opposition are serious about forming government after the next federal election, they have an important lesson to learn: elections in Australian politics are fought in the sensible Centre. But a bill like this demonstrates that, under Mr Dutton's leadership, the coalition wish to occupy the extreme fringe of Australian politics. Far be it from me to offer the opposition free political advice, but this should be a no-brainer. When Australians are looking for cost-of-living relief, attacking their ability to earn a living is really not going to win them over.

Regardless of whether Australian workers choose to join a union or not, it is undeniable that most advances in pay, in job security, in working conditions and in health and safety outcomes have been hard fought and won by Australia's trade union movement. It's clear that this bill, if passed, would hamper unions' ability to effectively do their job, so much so that the right to freedom of association would be completely undermined. That would, no doubt, wind back the clock on pay and conditions, leaving workers worse off.

Let's be clear: all Australian workers would suffer as a result of this extreme bill, not just those who are union members. All Australian workers should be in no doubt that the undermining of their pay and conditions, their job security and their safety at work is not an unintended consequence of this bill; it is a design feature. Do not be fooled that this bill is aimed at the CFMEU or designed to clean up the building and construction industry. This bill has implications for workers in every industry. It is the extreme Liberal-National coalition's antiworker agenda laid bare. I call on the Senate to reject this extreme bill and consign it to the garbage heap, where it belongs.