Page 3766 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 24 August 2010
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a long, long time ago under previous Labor governments. Under previous federal Labor governments we left behind the idea of no ticket, no start. But this takes us back there. And you have to ask why. Why is it that we have to have special legislation that allows the LHMU to recruit? What is the public interest in saying that a particular union should have a special legislatively backed way of recruiting?
If they are serving their members, if they are representing their members, representing the employees in their industry, there is no doubt that they will have a strong membership base, because people will want to pay their union dues and get that representation. That is healthy in our democracy. That is something that is enshrined and should be enshrined. But the idea of going further and effectively making it compulsory to get the approval of the union before you start working in an industry completely undermines that freedom of association and that right to choose to go through a union or to choose not to go through a union, to choose to join a union or to choose not to join a union.
We do need to ask why the government is so desperate—it appears with the Greens’ support on this—to give such a leg-up to one union. Where is the public interest rationale? Given that these information statements are already required under law—we have actually got commonwealth law that says you have to get this information—is there a suggestion that the employers are en masse breaking the law in this area? Is that the suggestion? The suggestion is that they are breaking the law. They have not been able to enforce it, apparently. There is this besmirching of all of these employers, saying that they do not abide by the law. Well, if someone is not abiding by the law, let us prosecute them. If there is a law that is not being complied with, the way to fix that is not to undermine the law and undermine the ideal behind the fact that there should be freedom of association, that employees in this industry, like every other industry, should have the right to choose if and when they want to join the union. They should not have to go through this process of no ticket, no start.
We have effectively got the government, through its legislation, besmirching these employers, saying: “Well, they can’t be trusted. They can’t be trusted to comply with the law.” Apparently, the government is ineffectual in enforcing its own laws. This apparent problem has not been articulated. It seems the problem the Labor Party and the Greens in this place are seeking to fix is the issue of union membership. Now, that is not the role of this legislature. It is not up to us to pass laws that are simply about increasing the number of people who join a union, any more than it is up to us to pass laws designed to have fewer people join a union. It would be just as offensive for us to stand in this place and have a law which was specifically designed to discourage people from joining a union. This is about boosting the numbers of a particular union. This is about returning to a regressive form of industrial relations that says no ticket, no start.
We reject that approach; we reject it completely and comprehensively. We reaffirm that there should be freedom of association in the workplace—that people should be free to join a union or to not join a union and that we should not be putting in place special legislation that is simply designed to boost the stocks of a particular union. That union is free to work to serve its members according to the law. The Fair Work Act allows them to do that; it enshrines their right to do those things. They are free to pursue that. We do not need to put in place laws that are about simply boosting the
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