WORKPLACE RELATIONS AMENDMENT (PROHIBITION OF COMPULSORY UNION FEES) BILL 2001

Ms JULIE BISHOP  (Curtin) (9.48 p.m.) --Every individual in our great Australian society has an equal right to the protection of government. That premise informs the Workplace Relations Amendment (Prohibition of Compulsory Union Fees) Bill 2001 and should embolden the commitment of this government and of the Liberal Party of Australia to the right of free association and the protection of citizens from the intimidation, coercion and violence that is woven into the very fabric of the red flag of socialism that resonates so evidently in the trade union movement in Australia.

For too long in this country we have been inclined, as citizens and as legislators, to excuse actions, including threats and bullying, that would be reviled in any other circumstance than the workplace. With the foundation of the Workplace Relations Act 1996 by the now Minister for Defence, the Hon. Peter Reith, Australia began steady progress towards the realisation that crimes and other acts of infamy ought not to be excused on the basis of their perpetrators' class consciousness or enthusiastic zeal. It is to our nation's shame that the preceding history of workplace relations in Australia is littered with a hundred thousand examples of men and women subjected to harassment, intimidation, violence and threats by common thugs in trade union clothes. Too often these crimes, petty or heinous, were excused by recourse to `social justice'--an imagined justice by which the rights of the individual were sacrificed to the rights of the mob. If this apparent justice necessitated depriving the conscientious objector of his or her livelihood, and their family of their security, so be it. How chillingly close is such thinking to the twin ideologies of national socialism and international socialism that stalked the century past.

Edmund Burke was right to dismiss out of hand the notion of cleaving justice away from liberty, for, as he said, `whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is safe'. Fundamental to our liberty as a nation and as private individuals is our freedom to associate or disassociate. That freedom is enshrined in the Workplace Relations Act and in the Office of the Employment Advocate. Nonetheless, it is a freedom that has been subjected to unceasing attack over the past six months as the trade unions and their parliamentary delegates in this place have sought by subterfuge, bluff and coercion to reverse the trend against union membership. The vehicle for that attempted reversal has been a compulsory fee applied to workers who are not members of the trade union concerned.

In January this year, non-union workers at Telstra were served with a $400 bill by the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union in Queensland. The CEPU was most cunning in taking this action. They did not specify that the payment--allegedly related to past pay negotiations--was voluntary or compulsory, although they did specify that the `invoice' could be paid by credit card, automatic deduction or single payment. ACTU Secretary Greg Combet was even more opaque in his comments, describing the letter as an `invitation to think about the issue'. The following month, the Australian Industrial Relations Commission released its judgment on the case brought by the Office of the Employment Advocate against a similar $500 fee levied by the Electrical Trades Union. Senior Industrial Relations Commission Vice-President Tony McIntyre found that such fees were clearly designed for coercive purposes; however, they were not prohibited from inclusion in certified agreements. As with the CEPU claim, this fee was significantly in excess of the annual fees charged by the union concerned.

The following day the Australian Services Union indicated that it would begin similar tactics aimed at non-union employees of Ansett and Qantas. The leadership of the National Tertiary Education Union made similar public comments. So did the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Union, the Australian Workers Union, the Victorian Public Service Federation and the Municipal Employees Union, amongst others. By the end of that week, the Health Services Union was implementing another compulsory fee as a companion piece to their disruption of health care services across Victoria. Last month, the ASU was joined by the Transport Workers Union in again threatening non-union staff at Qantas with a compulsory fee--$400 for the TWU, $500 for the ASU.

To some extent, it is refreshing that the most sensible response to date has been from my state of Western Australia. This appalling behaviour has been experienced in Western Australia, for earlier this month the WA branch of the Australian Nursing Federation announced that it would slug non-union nurses with a $400 fee. This irresponsible action brought upon the ANF the outrage of not just the public and the other health professionals but even of the state Labor government. Premier Geoff Gallop referred to the fee claim as a `red herring' and `not desirable'. He said that unions ought to win members on the basis of the services they offered. Indeed! The West Australian editorialised that the claim was `bizarre' and amounted to nothing more than:

... a clumsy attempt to achieve compulsory unionism--a denial of the principle of freedom of choice ...

It would be a more honest and honourable course--

the paper suggested--

for the ANF to ask itself why nurses choose not to join it, than to continue with its demand for money in a manner that suggests vindictiveness.

Just four days later it was revealed that about 150 nurses had signed a petition of outrage at the ANF's fee, including many current members of the ANF. In fact, it was common knowledge that a majority of the ANF delegates present at the meeting at which the fee was decided thought the whole idea was a joke.

Unfortunately, the proliferation of these intimidatory fees is far from funny. And it is right and just that this bill will amend the Workplace Relations Act to prohibit unions and employer organisations alike from requiring non-members to pay fees for `bargaining services' except where an employee has individually agreed in writing, in advance of the bargaining services being provided, to pay the fee. Understandably, given that such an agreement would be a private matter on behalf of the individual involved, the bill prohibits a certified agreement from including any provision relating to the payment of fees for bargaining services. Furthermore, the bill will also amend the act to prohibit discriminatory action against a person who refuses to pay, or refuses to agree to pay, one of these fees. Both unions and employer groups will not be able to encourage or incite others to take discriminatory action for these same reasons.

We have heard much from the trade union movement and from the opposition in this debate about the rationale for these fees-- that is, the rationale other than the boosting of union membership levels, the victimisation of non-union labour and the accumulation of a confiscated nest egg for industrial and political expenditure by the unions and the ALP. Of particular import has been the argument that the fee represents a remedy to a `free-rider' problem. That is, it is suggested that non-union members benefit from union action. Some, including the shadow minister earlier in this debate, have suggested, darkly, that this is a version of user pays. Leaving aside the temerity with which unions--and I include in this category the university student guilds--compare their position to that of the states and the Commonwealth, this free-rider argument does not stand up to reasonable critique. As Mark Paterson, from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, noted on 14 February this year:

... unions negotiate agreements on behalf of their members, and have a clear interest in applying the outcome to non-members to ensure that their members are not undercut by other employees. This has been the traditional approach of unions to awards, and they are now using the same technique with agreements. In short, they act to prevent competition.

So in fact, far from being a free-rider problem, there is an abject opposition on the part of organised labour in this country to the differential remuneration of union and non-union workers.

Worse still is the suggestion that this intimidation can be excused on the basis that a majority of employees support its imposition on a minority. That has been the case in the examples I cited earlier, Qantas and Telstra, and is quite a shocking proposition. I am reminded of James Fenimore Cooper's statement that it is:

... a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

Australia is a liberal democracy. In a liberal democracy, tyranny is not excused by majoritarian support. That a majority of employees in one place might want to persecute a minority of their fellow employees is neither here nor there, so it would seem. But the proper question is that of the persecution.

Some defenders of the compulsory fee have gone even further, suggesting, in the words of New South Wales Labour Council Secretary Michael Costa, that:

... non-members do not have to join anything, just pay for a service.

That is an incredible statement, for the payment in question is one demanded of someone with whom the union does not have a relationship, for services that they did not request or agree to, at an inflated rate and often some considerable time after the alleged service. Outside of workplace relations, such behaviour is regarded as plain extortion, but that extortion should be wielded as an industrial weapon should come as no surprise. As I have already suggested to this House, the compulsory fees for non-unionists is not a perversion of trade unionism; it is a distillation of the intimidation and thuggery that is fundamental to the union movement and its governing ideology.

Western Australians are well aware of the degree to which trade unions and their personnel operate outside of the law and outside of common decency. I have previously mentioned the current Premier of my state in a positive light with regard to the demands of the ANF. His performance with regard to other renegade unions in Western Australia is far less worthy. Since February, Western Australian employers and non-union employees have been subjected to extraordinary behaviour that would be dealt with under the fullest extent of the law were it not cloaked in the garb of unionism. Just weeks after the state election, building sites across Perth were visited by union thugs who intimidated employers and employees alike, destroyed property, glued locks and stopped construction work. Within two months, `no ticket, no start' signs appeared on numerous building sites across the city, including the new Woodside headquarters on the corner of Milligan Street and St Georges Terrace and the residential apartments site on the corner of Victoria Avenue. The obvious intention was to intimidate workers and their employers and openly flout freedom of association protections. CFMEU boss Kevin Reynolds denied that these signs, visible across the cityscape, were indicative of compulsory unionism. `Perish the thought,' said Big Kev, `our policy for years has been to achieve full union membership in the industry. These sites are 100 per cent union members by choice.' Quite how the particular phrase `no ticket, no start' represents persuasion rather than coercion is not readily apparent.

Since these developments, subcontractors have been refused access to building sites and the situation in Western Australia has become embroiled in the wider crisis facing the CFMEU across Australia--a crisis apparently still founded in a split between those union militants whose sympathy is with the dark side of the defunct Soviet Union and those whose sympathies lie with their counterparts in Beijing.

It is also worrying that the building industry task forces established in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia in the early 1990s to fight corruption in the building industry have been victims of political persecution by the ALP. Once the Carr government was elected in 1995, the New South Wales task force was disbanded. Likewise, the Queensland task force was wound up the week after Peter Beattie was elected Premier in 1996. Unfortunately, this has also come to pass in Western Australia. In April, only two months after the state election, the Western Australia task force members were issued with redundancy notices.

There is a very real threat to our civil society from violence excused by politics. I have already expressed in this place my disdain for, and concern about, the violence and destruction of the S11 riots in Melbourne last year. I add to those comments my further concerns about the May Day riots in our capital cities last month. We seem to have reached a point in our political and civil discourse where we can define the assault of police officers, the intimidation of the public, the destruction of private and public property and the robbing of workers of their livelihoods as `peaceful protest'. This parallels the accommodation of violent picketing, mass assaults and vandalism as part of `normal picketing'. These deceits cannot be allowed to continue. A crime is a crime whether or not its perpetrator sports a sloganeering T-shirt. Political crimes should carry no more moral weight than street crimes. A worker is robbed of their livelihood whether or not their assailant is a lone criminal or a picketing mob.

As governments, state and federal, we are obliged to protect Australians from these deceits. This bill represents one step in that direction. It will prevent unions from using compulsory fees to deceive and intimidate workers who choose not to join a union or who wish to leave a trade union. I acknowledge the particular and principled contribution of the Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business in fighting for fundamental Australian fairness in our society. I commend this bill to the House.