By Greg Simcoe - Secretary & CSTC Director

The ABCC

A short history lesson is necessary to explain how Howard set up a sham Royal commission known as the Cole Royal Commission.   
  The findings of that Commission which were untested and unfounded were the basis of the establishment of the ABCC with its extra powers.  Powers that can compel you, your friends and your family to secret interview.

By secret I mean that you cannot reveal what was said at those interviews to anyone.  Failing to attend or co-operate could result in 6 months incarceration.  The investigative powers available to this organization have the potential to even override National Security Laws relating to ASIO for example.

 
This power could be used to require a person to:
Reveal all their phone and email records, whether of a business or personal nature.
Report not only on their own activities, but those of their fellow workers.
Reveal their membership of an organization, such as a union.
Report on discussions in private union meeting or other meetings of workers.
 
The provisions can be applied not only to a person suspected of breaching the law, but to:
Workers in the building industry not in any way suspected of wrongdoing.
Innocent bystanders.
The families, including children of any age, of workers in the industry.
Journalists and academics (or even, to take what might seem a farfetched example, a priest regarding what someone has told them in the confession box).

Safety at work – How does this affect your workplace?

Construction workers have fewer rights than all other working Australians.  The construction industry has one of the highest rates of death and injury, compared to other industries.

There should be no law that prevents workers from refusing to put themselves and fellow workers at more risk.  But that is what these laws do.  The onus is now on the workers to prove that the workplace is unsafe.  With the threat of a $22000 fine hanging over their heads workers are more likely to be reluctant to take action over serious safety issues on unsafe job sites.
 
The ABCC portrays itself as being unbiased.  How come with an industry proliferated with sham contractors and under payment of wages that only 2% of all investigations have involved employers.

ABCC powers balanced against democratic rights like freedom of speech and the right to silence:

There is no such backstop in Australian law because we, alone among all democratic nations, lack a national bill or charter of rights.  While that is another story, it does mean that we lack the mechanism that other nations have to ensure that the worst excesses of power are blunted.  We may like to talk about “our rights at work”, but the reality is that until these rights are put into law they can often be merely rhetoric, and, as this law shows, can be too easily taken away. 
 
There are few better examples of why Australia needs a national charter of rights than the ABCC and its powers.
 
We demand that the Rudd Labor Government repeal these laws and restore construction worker rights to the equal of all Australian workers and just as important hold true to the Labor party Principles on which the party was founded.

Stay Collective. Stay Strong.