A bill ensuring integrity? Who wouldn’t want that?

Senator Pauline Hanson is yet to show her hand on how she will vote on the bill. Picture: Mick Tsikas/AAP

In years gone by bills before the parliament were full of dense procedural subject headings. Now they come with a helpful set of parentheses that provide easy catchphrases to government members as a marketing tool.

The Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Ensuring Integrity) Bill 2019 is set to go to the Senate. A bill ensuring integrity. Who wouldn’t want that?

READ MORE: Hanson keeps Coalition hanging | Liberals take sting out of move to rein in unions | Union-busting bill vote delayed |

At this stage the PHON leader, Pauline Hanson is not showing her hand.

“I am not going out there to union bash,” she said, adding that the level of union misconduct was not important compared to issues like the drought.

“I am not going to go out there and fall in line with the government because that’s what they want because they are looking after big business and the multinationals. They can’t even deal with the multinationals here. They can’t even deal with China taking over this country.”

As usual, Hanson has a knack of dealing with one issue by means of false equivalence with numerous other unrelated topics.

I am a betting man, so I’ll tip Hanson will vote with the government.

What Jacqui Lambie might do to ensure the passage of the bill is a riddle within an enigma. I could try tossing a coin or a quick game of acey-deucey.

Labor, no stranger to false equivalences of its own making, has pointed a finger at malfeasance in the big four banks and Westpac especially as a form of one rule for us, the other for them exercise.

There is talk, too, from Labor that union officials may be sent to industrial relations Coventry if they fail to prepare paperwork in sufficient time, but this is a hysterical over-reaction to the bill as it reads.

Labor part of the problem

Labor will not say it because they are part of the problem, but the most effective criticism of this bill is simply that it holds union officials to higher standards than the parliamentarians who are voting on it.

In some respects the bill makes sense, in terms of disqualifying any official who has committed a crime, a violent offence or a conviction for any offence that comes with a 24 month or more term of imprisonment.

Those who aspire to traipse the green or red carpets via candidacy in federal elections, however, will find they have less boxes to tick than a union official.

A passage within the bill reads as follows: “in any criminal or civil proceedings against the person, or in any action against the person by an agency of the Commonwealth or a State or Territory, the person is found to have engaged in conduct involving fraud, dishonesty, misrepresentation, concealment of material facts or a breach of duty.”

The material sentence here is “found to have engaged in”. Who would make that finding? Judgments made in civil matters often include criticism of individuals be they witness, plaintiff or defendant, depending on how the matter pans out.

Assertions of the concealment of material facts or breaches of duty are the stock in trade of almost all litigated matters.

Would Hanson find herself in trouble? Clive Palmer is no longer an MP but could his numerous forays in the courts have disqualified his candidacy?

Well, no because the objective facts associated with the amendment are directed at unions not our parliament.

Another thing you won’t hear from Labor about the Ensuring Integrity Bill is that it is definitive of big government with an even larger policing apparatuses that is given to error and heavy-handedness.

The difference between Labor and the Coalition is Labor thinks big government is desirable while the Coalition simply gets on and builds it.

The Michaelia Cash incident should serve as a memo to all politicians: white boards make terrible props. Picture: Lukas Coch/AAP

Not to put too fine a point on things the Federal Court made a judgment earlier this week that the Registered Organisations Commission’s decision to investigate a 12-year old matter involving the Australian Workers Union under Bill Shorten’s leadership was invalid.

It’s a complex ruling which goes to a form of limitations on actions after an extended period of time.

White boards make terrible props

We might remember the raid that took place in October 2017 with revelations that individuals within Workplace Minister, Michaelia Cash’s office had tipped off the media. The ensuing hue and cry led to some amusing moments where Cash was seen scuttling around the parliament reportedly using a white board for cover.

Memo to all politicians: there is a long history of white boards being terrible props. Using one as a shield or even camouflage if you are suitably attired is akin to thoroughbred racing’s screens pitched somewhere along the straight around the 200 and when they go up, bad things are about to take place.

Memo to government: any form of raid on an opposition party’s members has the look of the Stasi about it to your run of the mill punter, and if past experiences are anything to go by, tend to backfire spectacularly eg: this event and another that had staffers of former Telecommunications’ Minister Conroy’s homes raided during the election campaign of 2013.

In that case, the AFP was ordered to return all documents seized in the raids after another expensive and desultory legal brawl.

I would have thought the NBN leaks bandwidth far more easily than it does documents.

I’m not sure where we are now in comparison with other nations in terms of internet bandwidth and speeds, somewhere around fiftieth, next to Uruguay and Vietnam on fixed broadband but an impressive sixth in the non-NBN mobile networks. Faster and more expensive is not much of a slogan but that’s where we are.

The government has indicated there will be an appeal of Justice Bromberg’s judgment. The metre will continue to run at taxpayers’ expense in an exercise that seems to have at very least run its political use by date. If indeed it was part of the government’s Kill Bill strategy, there seems little point to it now. God only knows how many millions of dollars have been spent on it thus far. The legal bill alone would come in at telephone numbers with the international prefixes attached.

I could find a way to support the unimaginatively named Ensuring Integrity bill with some amendments and some guarantees that the bill would not be used as a party-political weapon. It’s just hard to do so when the mob voting for it enjoy less scrutiny and more privileges than the rest of us, and regard accountability as someone else’s problem.