Page 792 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 29 March 2006
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I suspect that what the motion is really about is revealed in paragraph 2 (d) of M Gentleman’s motion, where he talks about his horror at the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner being able to enforce a penalty against anyone who “does not attend for questioning, answer questions or who obstructs an investigation or fails to hand over documents”—and these are documents that would relate to an industrial action.
I ask Mr Gentleman and Dr Foskey: how can they get up here and say that they are against giving the commissioner the powers to demand that people cooperate with information to improve safety, and at the same time try to argue that the federal government’s measures are all about making workplaces dangerous? This is a contradiction in terms.
Mr Gentleman and Dr Foskey would have us believe that the federal government are ignoring deaths in the workplace. Yet clearly the promotion of injury prevention and best OH&S practice is a major priority of the federal government. They have clearly declared that they are committed to improving workplace safety. They have developed a national occupational health and safety strategy and have encouraged its adoption by all Australian governments—state governments and territory governments—and peak employer bodies and employee bodies.
In contrast to Mr Gentleman, the federal government favours measures that prevent accidents rather than simply rely on punishment after the event. Mr Gentleman delights in bringing to this Assembly ghoulish stories of injury. He seems to get some perverted pleasure from trotting out people’s misery. We are all sympathetic to genuine cases of misfortune, but, like I recall my colleague Mr Mulcahy saying, I cringe when I hear these isolated cases being wheeled out of tragic loss of life.
Mr Gentleman’s attitude is redolent of Sharan Burrow’s, who last year on ABC Lateline was filmed at an ACTU campaign meeting saying, “I need a mum or dad or someone who has been seriously injured or killed; that would be fantastic.”
Mr Mulcahy: What a shameful performance that was.
MRS DUNNE: It was an absolutely shameful performance. It was an absolutely shameful performance for a senior official of an important organisation like the ACTU wanting to publicly dwell on the misery of people, rather than rolling up her sleeves and working with industry, working with governments, to make things better. They just want to have the old-fashioned confrontations: “Employers are bad, unions are good, and what we want to do is have the old communist approach, the old capital bad, Labor good approach.” But this is the 21st century, and the BLF has, thankfully, gone.
That should not be the attitude that we take to industrial safety in any industry, and we should not take this attitude to industrial safety in the building industry. The sort of stuff that our friends in the trade union movement are doing is exploiting misery and tragedy so that they can run their campaigns, because they feel under threat by the reforms and the changes in the building industry. That attitude demonstrates a complete disregard for workers’ wellbeing by taking advantage of family tragedy. What they are actually saying in the trade union movement is that concerns for workers and their families are nothing compared to the ambitions of senior union officials. These senior union officials are
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