Page 1142 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 6 April 2016

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important role in promoting and protecting workers’ rights and health and safety. I will talk further about the actual content of the MOU in just a moment.

I point out that, as an agreement between the Labor Party and the unions, the text of the agreement is seasoned with a little political flavour. It is more than just a straight factual MOU that lays out clear obligations. It repeats existing obligations that it does not really need to repeat. It is probably not how I would have drafted such a document. As an example, clause 1.7 of the MOU, which I will call the no escape clause, says that the MOU remains in force unless both parties agree to withdraw, which does to me seem a little strange. Say the government wants to exit the arrangement, apparently it cannot without union agreement. I certainly would not have signed up to such a clause. Having said that, this is a memorandum of understanding only. It is not a binding legal agreement. So the MOU is not really a clear or clinical document.

It is these vagaries that have made it easy for opponents to criticise the MOU. They have also fuelled concerns of other bodies such as the business and construction community, causing them to worry exactly what this MOU is doing. Naturally they wonder what might be happening out of sight. The vagaries in the MOU have also made it easier for the Liberal Party to attack it in a political way. In fact, this whole issue of unions is infused with politics.

It would be helpful, I think, to look at the text of this MOU, look at how it operates and ask, “Is there really any problem here?” I think that when we do that analysis it is clear that this is in fact a benign document, and most likely it is useful to the government’s procurement agency as it goes about its duties.

But let me start by getting the politics out of the way. The Liberal Party, we know, are almost obsessed with unions. It is a clear political tactic to push the claim that the Labor Party and the unions are too close, to constantly talk about union mates and of course to intimate that unions are corrupt or thugs. Their federal Liberal colleagues oversaw a royal commission into unions which, if we are honest, the Liberals have milked as much as they can to aid their political attack on unions and the Labor Party. Of course, the findings in the one that was infamously released between Christmas and New Year were so thin that it literally got taken out with the trash when most people were on holidays.

Of course, the local Liberals always try to squeeze the Greens into their critique as well, because if they are mounting a political attack they may as well hit as many opponents as possible. That is a stretch of reality that really has no basis. Yes, the Greens support the good work of the unions and many policies of unions, but there is not any special affiliation.

The Liberal Party says that the local CFMEU has provided a donation to the Greens. Yes, it is true; it is a matter of public record. And that is because the CFMEU supports our strong policies on work health and safety. Beyond that, the Labor Party and the Greens work in different ways. Remember that the Greens have a donations reference group and every donation is scrutinised against our framework of principles and ethics before we will accept it. The CFMEU does not influence our policies, sway our decisions or have any special access beyond, of course, the fact that we, as we do with


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