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Canberra Today 27°/29° | Tuesday, March 19, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Opinion / Using unity to balance scales

AN interesting phenomenon has emerged amongst conservative politicians and commentators.

Dean Hall
Dean Hall.

The thinkers who engineered and promoted the three-word slogan have now set their sights on changing the meaning of five simple, yet significant, letters: CFMEU.

As the secretary of the ACT branch of the CFMEU, those five letters hold a significant meaning for me. The CFMEU is not the obscure name of a shelf company bought in the Cayman Islands to dodge paying taxes in Australia. The CFMEU is over a hundred thousand working people.

When the big business lobby group, the Master Builders Association says: “The CFMEU are driving costs up” that’s a phrase cleverly designed to make you forget the true meaning of CFMEU.

What they really mean is that the people on the ground, the people with calloused hands and dirt in their boots, are demanding a fair go. These are the people who live in your world. They pay their fair share of tax and send their kids to school with yours.

I have worked on the ground in construction. I have watched my colleagues lie bleeding on the concrete and dust as the result of a workplace accident.

Construction workers all know someone who has left their family in the morning, and never returned home.

It’s a dangerous, hard industry where highly-paid multinational corporate executives heap pressure on to individual workers through sub-contracting arrangements. These arrangements are designed to minimise risk for the building executives, leaving everyday workers and subbies with only one way to balance the scales: unite.

Because of the falsehoods of the multinational construction lobby groups, Australia now faces an early election. In announcing his recall of both houses of Parliament on April 18, the Prime Minister said the restoration of the “ABCC is critical to the Coalition’s plan for jobs, growth, productivity and prosperity”. In doing so, Mr Turnbull pushed the Coalition past empty, meaningless sloganism, and straight into falsehood.

The Coalition’s plan for jobs is to drive up casualisation, injuries and deaths, and to drive down apprenticeships and the workforce participation of older workers.

The Coalition’s plan for growth and prosperity is to rely on thoroughly discredited economic modelling while turning a blind eye to sham contracting and rorting that costs the government alone around $487 million in unpaid taxes and charges.

The Coalition and their big business backers say the ABCC will be good for the economy, and that John Howard’s original Building Commission boosted productivity. That’s wrong, according to the Government’s own Productivity Commission.

The Coalition’s plan for construction jobs is to use a Building Code that will impose new rules for government tender. These rules use the government’s buying power to discourage construction companies from negotiating in good faith with their workforces.

The enormous regulation goes into even small things like prohibiting union stickers on hardhats, forbidding inclusion of apprenticeships, making it harder to employ older workers and local workers, and bans on overtime clauses.

They’ll even have the gall to say it’s good for safety. Last time the ABCC existed, with all its coercive muscle, deaths in the construction industry almost doubled (“Work-related Traumatic Injury Fatalities, Safe Work Australia 2013”, July 2014). That’s what happens when a government body with powers as strong as a Royal Commission is created as a weapon against a union that stands up for workers.

Is this really the cornerstone of Malcolm Turnbull’s vision for the future?

Dean Hall is the secretary of the ACT branch of the CFMEU

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Ian Meikle, editor

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