Calling out the Liberals unrelenting and opportunistic attacks on the CFMEU

Today in Parliament, Abigail fiercely opposed the Coalition’s shameless and self-serving motion to establish a royal commission into the activities of the CFMEU.

Abigail said:

On behalf of The Greens, I also oppose the motion. Any allegation of criminal conduct should be taken very seriously and investigated by the proper means. An investigation is underway in New South Wales, and it is not appropriate to comment further on that. We need to await the outcome of that investigation. However, it is worth reflecting on the pretty shameful opportunism of some political leaders who have been seeking to make political hay of the media scandal.

Unions are more than just the officials that represent them; they are about the members. That particular union is looking after members who work in really dangerous situations. They are democratic membership organisations that deserve the right to self-determination. When the impact on the people who need their representation could be so severe, it is pretty shameful to make political moves to strip a democratic membership organisation like a union of its ability to govern itself or to take heavy-handed actions to try to score political points by suggesting a royal commission, because the allegations need to be tested in the court and further investigated through the proper means.

I note that the Liberals did not call for royal commissions into the sports rorts affair or the selling off of public assets in this State, in really terrible deals that have set us up with conditions that will hamstring the State and its finances for decades to come. We did not even hear calls for some sort of royal commission into the Labor Party's paper bags scandal. When Qantas was proven to have illegally fired 1,700 of its ground staff, we did not hear calls for any kind of royal commission. The most grotesque examples of corruption at the highest levels of corporations and political parties do not seem to matter enough to provoke calls for royal commissions. However, we do get such calls when there is an opportunity to get involved in something that is already being handled in order to paint unions as being something other than what they are, quite frankly. I remind members again that the average union member is a 30‑year‑old nurse, and those precarious workers need their unions.

Thankfully the motion was negatived.

Read the full debate in Hansard

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Calling out the Liberals unrelenting and opportunistic attacks on the CFMEU

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