Bill Shorten says he put workers first as AWU leader but rejects some questions
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Version 0 of 1. Bill Shorten has rejected claims he put his own interests ahead of the workers he represented as a union leader by saying he had been a modern consensus-seeking unionist – but has refused to answer questions about some specific business payments to the union he ran. The Labor leader and former Victorian and national secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union has brought forward his appearance at the $61m trade unions royal commission to 8 July, but also answered questions about the allegations on Sunday as pressure mounted ahead of the final parliamentary sitting week before the winter break. Speaking on ABC Insiders Shorten fiercely rejected allegations that a deal he struck had disadvantaged workers on Melbourne’s $2.5bn EastLink tollway but refused to answer specific questions about separate allegations over payments from Melbourne building firm Winslow Constructors because he had not seen all the paperwork available to the royal commission. He also attacked the royal commission as “disgusting and unethical” after reports it was seeking information from his former wife Deborah Beale over share transactions. “They were obviously chasing down some smear but what I would say is it is disgusting, it is unethical and I don’t think there’s been too many precedents in Australian politics,” he said. “She’s a decent person and she does not deserve to be dragged into this because of who she was once married to.” Shorten refused to be drawn on allegations that Winslow Constructors directly paid his union hundreds of thousands of dollars over a decade for its employees’ union dues – a deal that allegedly boosted the AWU’s membership and political power while delivering the company greater industrial peace. “Certainly companies would collect payroll deductions … it is entirely possible [but] it wasn’t the practice of the union as its preferred model,” Shorten said. “I can’t go to every bit of evidence and every document which I don’t have in my possession so what I’ve done is I’ve asked the royal commission ‘I want to come and present and you ask all the questions you want’,” Shorten said. “What I’ve also asked the royal commission now is that please provide me with all the documents you have. There are tens of thousands of documents.” “My preference is employees pay their union dues ... When we get further into the detail of particular transactions, it would be foolish of me to simply say yes or no to every question. What I need is the same documentation that the royal commission has.” The AWU’s Victorian state secretary, Ben Davis, told the royal commission that Shorten’s agreement with Winslow had “profoundly” weakened the union’s industrial position. Shorten did defend himself against allegations regarding the industrial arrangements for the EastLink project, which have also been backed by Tony Shepherd, former Business Council of Australia president and chairman of the Abbott government’s audit commission, who was at the time the chairman of Connect East which subcontracted Thiess John Holland. Shorten said as a union leader he wanted to “make sure we have cooperation in the workplace”. “What I also understand is that where employers are able to make a dollar, make a profit, be competitive, compete with the rest of the world then they can keep employing employees. When Tony Abbott got elected into parliament and some of his team, it was the mid 90s, they didn’t know what enterprise bargaining was. “I was a modern union leader in that we knew the old centralised system had ended. Hawke and Keating and Kelty said we need to put the focus on enterprise. I’m proud of my record of negotiating agreements, representing people and making sure both employers and employees could get the best out of going to work every day. “The real issue is that somehow a company working with a union in the best interests of employees and the project is somehow suspicious. There’s almost a reverse class war analysis going on because I’m a modern bloke, trying to get cooperation not confrontation, you know, people are saying that is the wrong way to go.” Shepherd, who continues to advise the Abbott government on business, said the EastLink deal had been a “great agreement” that saw the workers “paid record rates for an urban construction project [and] gave the employer a lot more flexibility regarding rostering and what have you”. “We got much, much better productivity and it was delivered five months ahead of schedule … We’re talking about Victoria 10 years ago when construction was appalling,” he said last week. The prime minister, Tony Abbott, has said union officials had been putting themselves before workers. “It seems to be a pattern of conduct on the part of a number of unions, particularly Mr Shorten’s old union, the Australian Workers’ Union – is that workers have been ripped off so that union bosses can benefit,” Abbott said on Friday. “It seems that this particular union – and perhaps many others – have had a whole lot of ghost members, a whole lot of ghost members that have been funded off the books of the unions because of dodgy deals between management and union bosses. Related: Labor accuses Tony Abbott of smear campaign against Bill Shorten “It almost seems like some of these unions have been guilty of identity theft: taking people, putting them on their books who never knew that their identities were being used in this way to pad the numbers so that unions were given more power inside the Labor party. “It all looks like a very squalid power-grabbing exercise by union officials inside the Labor party and it’s not just Mr Shorten who is in trouble here, it’s the whole labour movement which is in difficulties here because power inside the Labor party seems to have been more important to these people than the actual benefits to workers.” |