Kevin Rudd panders to union vested interests

When Kevin Rudd said at the start of the campaign “that the old politics of the past just won’t work for the future” he evidently wasn’t referring to Labor’s financial links with the notoriously militant Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU).

The CFMEU has donated $4.5 million nationally to the Labor Party since 2007/08 - and seems to have received a handsome dividend on that investment.

When Labor came to power in 2007 under Kevin Rudd, it promised to abolish the Australian Building and Construction Commission – one of the CFMEU’s key objectives.

The ABCC was established by the Howard Government in 2005 – and successfully cracked down on unlawful conduct in the industry.

The CFMEU has had record fines levied against it over recent years for illegality and intimidatory behaviour with one penalty alone totalling $1.3 million in the Westgate Bridge case.

It is no wonder the CFMEU has been bitterly opposed to the ABCC – and it seems Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party was happy to do the CFMEU’s bidding.

Labor replaced the ABCC with a much weaker organisation, Fair Work Building and Construction.

Remarkably, Labor legislated to prohibit FWBC from pursuing any legal sanctions against wrongdoers once an industrial dispute had been “settled”.  Had this law applied during the Westgate Bridge case, the CFMEU would have got away with its industrial thuggery in that case.

As chair of the Coalition Taskforce on Re-Establishing the ABCC, I have been receiving first-hand information on the behaviour of the militant union bosses at the CFMEU. What I am being repeatedly told is that the good work of the ABCC in bringing back the rule of law has been undone, and the building industry is now back to the “bad old days”.

If Mr Rudd was serious about a “new way” and cleaning up the Labor Party he would reject any donations from the CFMEU and pledge to scrap the laws preventing the FWBC pursuing legal action against wrongdoers.