Page 3377 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 22 August 2018
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
I do not intend to speculate or comment on that situation. Obviously, there has been no conviction made. We abide by the principle that a person is innocent until proven guilty. The matter is still to go to court. That is what we should all be doing if we are to be fair to those individuals.
I note that previously an ACT union official, Mr John Lomax, was charged as a result of the royal commission into unions. That case elicited a lot of publicity. It was all over the front page of the paper, and it got extensive coverage, which included commentary here in the ACT Assembly. Several months after these charges were laid against Mr Lomax, they were dropped—simply dropped—and Mr Lomax received a payout of compensation from the Australian Federal Police for the prosecution.
In terms of the call for ACT Labor members of the Assembly to suspend affiliations with the CFMMEU, I would say that I do not see any problem with the ALP affiliating with and associating with unions. Unions in Australia have a long and proud history of advocating for workers’ rights, and the affiliation between the Labor Party and the unions is no secret. I think it is extremely well understood in the community—in fact, it is proudly trumpeted by many—and I do not think that in any way voters are being deceived about connections. They are very transparent and they are very open about it, and I think that is a well-understood public matter.
However, as always, the Liberal Party want to use anything they can to try to smear the entire union movement. Alleged criminal conduct by an individual or individuals should not taint an entire organisation, nor necessarily should criminal conduct by an individual. The Liberal Party obviously have an ideological position when it comes to unions. They disagree with the things that unions stand for: workers’ rights, fair pay and good employment conditions. The Liberal Party will always swoop on any allegation of bad behaviour somewhere within the vast network of unions in Australia and use that singular example to attack the union movement as a whole.
Mr Wall’s motion is another example in a long line of attacks from the Liberal Party to try to discredit unions, to attack people who work for unions, and to attack their political opponents for associating with unions. These attacks are usually filled with some degree of hyperbole and often a barely contained ideological outrage.
In 2015 Mr Wall moved a similar motion that noted that, following the royal commission into unions, several union members had been arrested. It went so far as to note “the silence” from the Labor and Greens parties, as if we should come in here and comment on active cases, in breach of the sub judice rule and in breach of fair trial principles. I will not be lured into that today, and, just as we did not in 2015, we will not comment on an active matter before the courts, particularly in this space.
At that time, in 2015, I said that it was disappointing, but not surprising, to see Mr Wall and his colleagues trying to make political hay out of these issues, and that the approach was all politics, no policy and an obvious attempt to continue the Liberal Party’s position and war on unions and on workers’ rights and entitlements. The same is true of this motion, and the Greens will not be supporting it today.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video