Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the shadow of the corruption and thuggery that has now been revealed in the CFMEU and in the shadow of the inherent weakness on display in this Labor government in the last two years as it kowtows to its paymasters—and by 'its paymasters', obviously I don't mean the taxpayers of Australia; I mean the union movement—I think it's worthwhile reminding everybody of the elephant in the room about the union movement, which is just how few Australian workers they actually represent.

Under 10 per cent of the private sector workforce are members of a union. On the latest figures, it's down to about eight per cent of the private sector workforce and, if you take out some heavily unionised industries, particularly white-collar industries, and go to the blue-collar part of our workforce, closer to five or six per cent of our private sector workforce actually believe that the union movement supports them. And the union movement doesn't. We've seen that revealed in the last few weeks in terms of the corruption and thuggery inherent in the CFMEU, and we'll see it if we just cast our minds back in history and consider the inefficiency which the union drove into the mining sector of Western Australia and which took very protracted disputes to actually clean up, such as the Robe River dispute where, in the final wash-up, it was revealed that two in three jobs were actually not needed. Two in three jobs were basically paying the unions— (Time expired)