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

The problem we have with this government is that it seems unable to admit when it got it wrong. They've got it wrong on budget spending, which has added fuel to inflation around our country. They've got it wrong on energy policy, where their intransigence on nuclear energy is pushing up the price of power and leaving Australia behind in the race to build data centres and catch up with the information economy. And they clearly also got it wrong here when it came to abolishing the cop on the beat, the regulator to deal with misconduct in the construction sector.

Obviously, this has been a problem that has bedevilled Australia's construction sector for decades upon decades. It goes way back to the seventies and eighties, and Bob Hawke had to deal with this when he was in government. But at least then we had a prime minister that was willing to stand up to the thugs and some criminals that have often beset our construction sector. He took them on. Instead, when Anthony Albanese became Prime Minister he, very differently from Bob Hawke, rolled over to the criminals and thugs in the construction sector.

It should not have been news to anyone, least of which the Prime Minister of the land, that there were elements of criminality and thuggery in our construction sector. This has been a longstanding problem. In the last couple of decades, the CFMEU has been found guilty over 2,000 times—I'm told over 2,600 times since 2003—and paid $24 million in penalties. It's a shocking rate of law-breaking that is hard to compare to any other organisation in this country, certainly no other organisations that are welcome in polite society, as the CFMEU were for the Labor Party and the Greens. They were happy to take donations from the CFMEU, who regularly broke the law, and, worse, they were happy to then change the law of the land in response to the CFMEU's requests to take away this oversight and control over their law-breaking activities.

The ABCC, the Australian Building and Construction Commission, was clearly working. It was working to at least help rein in some of this blatant breaking of the law. The ABCC actually had over a 90 per cent success rate in prosecutions, and they weren't short of work, as I've mentioned. They were doing their job—and doing a job for all of us and our country. But Anthony Albanese came into government, and he got the request from his donors in the CFMEU and then went to remove this cop on the beat that was reining them in. We've seen the shock from the new minister for workplace relations and others who said: 'Wow, we didn't know there was all this criminality in the sector. What a shock—what a surprise!' It's even become impossible for the former defenders of the CFMEU to defend the indefensible, and we've seen multiple revelations, mainly from the good work in the Nine media network to expose rampant criminality—not just thuggery, not just bullying, not just harassment that we all knew occurred—across the CFMEU. It became too much of a stench for even this Labor government to ignore.

Instead of just admitting they got it wrong and re-establishing the ABCC to get this cop on the beat going again, they are instead putting in place only a limited control, a temporary control, on the CFMEU in response to the public outcry. I think it would be much better to go back to what was working. That's what this bill does, and that's why I'm happy to support the efforts of my colleague Senator Michaelia Cash to just re-establish and go back to what was working. It's very simple. Put it back in place. It had been in place for many years. It works. We can just reintroduce this legislation. There is no need for heaps of new committees or drafting of new laws. It's all ready to go. Here is one we prepared earlier that works. Let's just do that.

This bill obviously is to re-establish the ABCC. There are two Cs in that name, but, in the rest of the time I have available here, I'd like to concentrate on three Cs here. The three Cs that bedevil our construction sector are criminality, impacts on cost of living, and conflicts of interest. As I said, we have seen terrible examples of criminal behaviour from CFMEU officials, including cosy relationships with bikie gangs and outright criminals. That is why we have supported the government's efforts to place the CFMEU into administration. But to me it does not seem to be a strong enough action here, especially when you see the administrator that has been appointed already comment that the level of criminality is much, much worse. I've found his name now. This is Mr Mark Irving KC. He's admitted that the union's corruption is much worse than initially reported. What extra steps are being taken, given that information, to rein this in? Another step we could do is pass this legislation and get it back into place.

This exposure of criminality should not come as any news to people that have been following this. There have been many examples of the CFMEU's misconduct in recent years. There has been much speculation on its influence over, or with, bikie gangs and others. And, now that it's all been confirmed, the government is just acting too late. That belated action from the government has also had a real cost on all Australians, not just those that might be directly affected by the criminal behaviour of this organisation. The rampant thuggery, bullying, threats and intimidation that exist in this industry have ruined the productivity and performance of our construction sector, and this has a real and direct impact on Australians in many, many ways.

Perhaps the one that is most felt by Australians today is the fact that we don't have enough homes for people. I'm astounded that I now live in a country where there are large tent cities in our major capitals. It is incredibly sad when you walk or run around our major cities and you have to go past people in the most dire circumstances who do not have a roof over their head. I never thought I would live in such a country. I live in Australia; Australia would never get to that position. We're a prosperous and wealthy nation. Why can't we provide homes to the Australians that live here? There's always an element of homelessness, of course. Bob Hawke did try and say, 'Get rid of homelessness.' We're probably never going to get there. People are often in sometimes unfortunate, desperate and very tragic circumstances. But it is clear that many of these families living in tents, who otherwise often have jobs and have lives that are functional, in any other normal time would be able to have a house. There are simply not enough houses for Australians. Some people are the victims of that shortage and have nothing but a sheet of plastic to put over their head every night.

There are a lot of reasons for that, but the situation is not helped by the shocking underperformance of our construction sector, unable to build things at a reasonable cost. We have actually been building fewer and fewer homes over the last few years, despite the increased demand and the increased population growth we have. We've crashed to below 170,000 homes being built a year, despite bringing in 500,000 people a year in net terms. It's just not enough homes being built, as well as needing to replace homes that are knocked down from time to time that are old and condemned. It's just not enough. We should, therefore, be seeking to increase and uplift the performance of the construction sector so we can build more homes without them costing so much. It's pretty hard to build a home now for less than $250,000 or $300,000. It's ridiculous. It's crazy. That is why we've got this housing shortage now in our country. It's not helped by the fact that we have in this industry, the construction sector, a situation where the people building the homes, the people who have to hire all the contractors, the subcontractors, the chippies, the sparkies, the concreters and everybody else to build a home, often live in fear at the moment. If you talk to many of these small businesses, they are in fear of the CFMEU and the retaliatory bullying tactics that could be inflicted on them if they have the temerity to employ people that are not approved by the CFMEU just to get something built or get a job done. That clearly has impacts on being able to get jobs done. If you've only got a small menu of suppliers and contractors to deal with because of the CFMEU's corruption and criminality, you're going to have fewer homes built. You're going to have a lot more delays in construction. You're going to increase the cost of home building in this country, and that is what we see in front of us.

So passing this bill would help alleviate this situation. We have a situation right now where the government are coming in and waxing lyrical about their rent-to-buy scheme. They think it's going to be the panacea or solution. It's clearly not. It's clearly not going to build enough homes. We have to lower the costs and make it easier for all businesses, the myriad thousands of builders across our country, to get things done. Our housing crisis is not going to be solved by spending more taxpayer dollars from Canberra. It's going to be solved when we remove the red tape and constraints that are holding back the many thousands more people who actually know how to build homes.

The Labor Party might be good at some things. I don't know. I struggle to think of them. But I don't think they're good at building homes. I don't think I'm good at building homes. I don't think Senator Cadell is good at building homes. I don't think any of us are good at building homes. The people who are good at building homes—surprise, surprise!—are builders. So why don't we help them? Why don't we help those businesses take this anchor and weight that is the CFMEU' crushing anvil off their heads and off their businesses and help them do what they do best for the Australian people and fix this crisis that is in front of us?

On the cost of living, the other aspect is our infrastructure challenges. It's not just our homes, of course. In my state of Queensland, I don't understand what's happening with the Bruce Highway. I drive the length of that, from Rocky to Brisbane, five or six times a year at least. That's the length of it. I drive parts of it many more times throughout the year. I've never seen it like this. It's never been a great road. No-one has ever written poems as an ode to the Bruce Highway. But it's been workable. You could drive it. Some parts of the Bruce Highway have been good. The coalition helped fund the Gympie Bypass. That's going to be an excellent road when it opens in about a month. It's a small section. Now north of Gympie you get these potholes in the road. If you're in a little hatchback, you're taking your life in your hands, particularly at night when you can't see these things. They're as big as a tyre, these potholes. You're going to lose your car in them. You'll bottom out. This is a national highway. It's not some rural road. It's the No. 1 national highway linking our major towns, and it's been left in a state of disrepair.

I don't know all the answers to that. The Queensland government won't let us meet with the main roads department anymore because they like to play politics with people's lives on the roads rather than just get the information out there. But at least partly it can't be helped by this situation in our construction sector where, again, every construction project and every road project seems to come back 50, 60 or 100 per cent more in costs than what it was originally costed at. The Rocky Ring Road was originally costed at $1.1 billion and it ended up coming back at $1.6 billion or $1.7 billion. A lot of contractors blame the Queensland government's union-aligned so-called best-practice industry conditions or something—I can't remember what the 'C' stands for—for that result. It has not helped. People's lives are hurt by this. There are lives being lost on the Bruce Highway because we just can't simply build something like a road anymore in this country. What is happening to our nation? It's crumbling before our eyes.

Finally, I want to finish on the other C: I want to highlight the conflicts of interest. This government has taken millions and millions of dollars from the CFMEU in donations to the Australian Labor Party. Since Anthony Albanese has been leader, it's over $6 million. It's hard to believe that the government won't agree to pay that money back or give that money to charity or something. Obviously, they don't want to give it back to the CFMEU, but that's tainted money now. It's come from an organisation that's been exposed as being criminal and as being engaged in criminal conduct. How could any self-respecting political party continue to hold those funds when they've got such a taint to them? Give them back. If you're really fair dinkum about trying to fix the mess in our construction sector, give that money back and work with the coalition to get a strong cop on the beat back into the construction industry.