Luke Foley opens door to toxic Victorian mate

VICTORIAN Premier Daniel Andrews joins the NSW election campaign today but you can bet he hasn’t brought his friends from the rogue Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) with him.

Mr Andrews intends to ­attempt to forge a link in NSW voters’ minds between NSW Liberal Premier Mike Baird and Prime Minister Tony ­Abbott with the argument: “Same agenda, different face.” But as I argued three weeks ago, after newly anointed Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk had jumped the banana border to lend her support to NSW Opposition ­leader Luke Foley’s campaign, it is Labor, federally and in Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, which really has the same toxic agenda represented by different faces. With Mr Andrews in town, what is he going to propose? Perhaps he will advise Mr Foley on how to spend a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money doing nothing, as he proposes to do in the debacle over Melbourne’s much-needed East-West link, or will he be telling Mr Foley to let the rogue construction union, the CFMEU, run riot in NSW and put a halt to the state’s infrastructure boom as he has done in ­Victoria? Before he was elected last November, Mr Andrews personally assisted and encouraged the CFMEU in its attempts to expand its influence in the Victorian Labor Party, even admitting it into his own Socialist Left faction, allowing it to wield influence in Labor preselections, and share centre stage with its leaders at the ALP conference, a privilege which may explain the ­record $668,000 which the CFMEU has since donated to the Victorian Labor Party. In Mr Andrews’ first sitting week as Premier, as his first priority after taking office, he rewarded his union friends by introducing legislation to ­repeal police “move on” powers that were put in place to protect legitimate Victorian workers from the thuggish ­behaviour that marked the CFMEU’s 16-day Grocon blockade, which brought chaos to the heart of Melbourne’s CBD in 2012. As federal Employment Minister Eric Abetz pointed out: “The previous government’s laws were put in place to protect honest, hardworking Victorians from the sort of ­violence and intimidation which was engaged in by the CFMEU at the Myer ­Emporium dispute. “No decent Victorian would wish to see a repeat of those ugly scenes, but clearly Daniel Andrews does. “The repeal of these laws is clearly the next kickback by Labor to the CFMEU. “Only a premier that is completely in the pocket of this union would pursue such a policy.” Senator Abetz added that: “It is very telling that Daniel ­Andrews’ first priority as premier in the first sitting week of parliament is to give ­another pay off to his favourite union (the CFMEU)”. It wasn’t the only gift to the CFMEU, either. Mr Andrews has also abolished the Victorian Building Code, thereby fulfilling a promise he made to CFMEU bosses Dave Noonan and Bill Oliver as they stood beside him at the 2012 Victorian ALP state conference. The code ensured that building companies on Victorian construction projects operated lawfully and ­efficiently and provided value for money for taxpayers. When he confirmed he would abolish the code, Mr Andrews claimed that the “code that has been found by the court to be unlawful”. That statement was as dishonest as Luke Foley’s claim that the planned leasing of half of NSW’s electricity poles and wires by a Baird government will drive up power prices. A Full Court of the Federal Court in 2013 found the Victorian code to be lawful when it threw out the CFMEU’s legal challenge to it. Mr Andrews and Ms Palaszczuk want NSW to fall into Labor’s hands, opening the door for the CFMEU to practise its industrial thuggery just as our state is taking off. With Labor already in office in SA, Victoria and Queensland, core industrial disputes have been steadily increasing. Figures from the Fair Work Building and Construction Commission show that business inquiries are increasing monthly from 155 in December, to 188 in January and 281 in February. The number of inquiries about coercion and the building code are showing the same dismal upward trend. “If there was a league table of illegal behaviour in the construction industry, Victoria would be at the very top,” head of Australia’s construction and building regulator, Fair Work Building and Construction, Nigel Hadgkiss told me. “The problem was largely restricted to Victoria and WA in 2008, when Labor abolished the Australian Building and Construction Commission,” Hadgkiss, the former deputy ABCC commissioner, said. “It’s a national scourge now,” he added. It is clear that this is an ­industrial plague which Daniel Andrews, who is joined at the hip to the CFMEU, would hope to see take root and grow in NSW. “Same agenda, different face” is how the spin doctors have portrayed the message he hopes to sell during his fraternal visit to his NSW comrade, Mr Foley, today. The voters of NSW should tell this carpet-bagging south-of-the-border union apologist Andrews that they don’t want either his agenda or his different face here. And next weekend they should tell Luke Foley they have had enough of the lies he has told in support of his ­unproductive featherbedding trade union mates throughout this campaign. If he wants to support rogue union agendas he can take his face elsewhere, too.