Page 1315 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2016
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government that he has highlighted. But there are three issues that I want to canvass in particular that are ongoing with this government: firstly, the ownership, regulation and profit from their pokie empire; secondly, the corrupting influence of the CFMEU; and, thirdly, the recent police sensitive information leaks from your former office to the CFMEU.
Concerns about ethical governance in the ACT are shared by many others, but attempts to clean up the Labor Party from within have so far failed. Indeed, former Chief Minister Jon Stanhope has been crusading for reform for many years and has said publicly that the unions and the factions have corrupted the party. He has called for an end to what he calls the rorting in the party that he says has seen it become the plaything of a handful of union-based factional leaders.
This followed Stanhope’s earlier comments that the millions of dollars that the Labor Party derived from these 500 poker machines was “morally unacceptable”. He said, “The Labor Party should not be in a position where it is perceived as owning poker machines and facilitating gambling.”
I think that Canberra is the only jurisdiction I am aware of personally, outside of tin-pot African dictatorships, where the governing political party and their associates own, operate and then regulate gambling assets. It is true that the ACT Labor Party and CFMEU between them operate the profit from about 1,000 machines in places like Charnwood. By taking money from some of the poorest families in Canberra for their own use and then regulating the industry, the ACT Labor Party has an untenable conflict of interest that is clearly unethical.
Unfortunately, the Labor Party and their CFMEU-affiliated colleagues are addicted to the rivers of gold that flow from those machines, and the sums of money are vast. It is money that is taken from Canberra families that should be going back into the community, but is instead flowing to the CFMEU and to the ALP.
Although I have had disagreements with Jon Stanhope in the past on policy matters, I acknowledge his relentless efforts to clean up the Labor Party. Unfortunately, the secretary of the Labor Party has shown no such inclination. When recently a sub-branch president, who was also a CFMEU organiser, was arrested on charges of blackmail, he was suspended from the Labor Party, but was replaced by another CFMEU organiser who is facing charges.
When the ALP secretary was asked by the ABC why the individual was not also suspended, his response was, and this is extraordinary, “If we started throwing people out of the Labor Party for fines, we probably would not have many members left.” That is the ethical standards set by the head of the Labor Party.
Of course, the merging of the CFMEU and ACT Labor has reached a point where it is difficult to see either as separate. Denying that corrupt actions of the unions have nothing to do with ACT Labor is disingenuous. As Jon Stanhope said:
The ALP will insist that it was “them” that were at fault, not “us”, when in fact they are in reality “us”.
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