Hanson’s populist charade a win for union thuggery

Anticipating how Pauline Hanson will vote on key legislation is like a game of flip the bottle in the schoolyard. Who can ever tell whether the One Nation senator will stand up or fall down? On Thursday she flipped the bird at the Morrison government in voting against its union-busting Ensuring Integrity Bill, which has been in play since 2017 and which it took to an election. The Coalition had banked on One Nation’s support, given Senator Hanson was closely consulted as the bill was debated this week. Yet the One Nation leader can never resist a close-up or a stitch-up and her scuttling of the bill has derailed the Coalition’s economic game plan.

Bizarrely, Senator Hanson declared she voted with Labor and the Greens as the Coalition had “one rule for white-collar crime and much harsher rules for blue-collar crime”. With Westpac’s dirty-money scandal dominating the news, Labor and the ACTU milked this dodgy equivalence all week, trying to vibe with the integrity theme at large. But it’s a crock. The finance sector is tightly controlled, not least by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, Australian Securities & Investments Commission and Austrac, the watchdog for money laundering and terrorism funding. Last year the Coalition passed the Banking Executive Accountability Regime to keep bankers in line. The failed integrity bill aimed to rein in industrial malfeasance at its worst, with the penalty of banning law-breakers from leadership roles and deregistering rogue organisations.

Without doubt, Senator Hanson’s move — and the wilting of Tasmanian Jacqui Lambie in the heat of decision time — is a win for the poster boy for union thuggery, John Setka, Victorian boss of the construction division of the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union. The union is responsible for more than 2000 breaches of industrial law since 2004. Racking up fines and legal fees, $65m in total, is part of its operating model. The CFMEU has imperilled many projects. Master Builders Australia estimates taxpayers have been slugged an extra 30 per cent for schools, hospitals and roads because of union lawlessness.

To be sure, the bill’s harder edges were smoothed away to meet the many concerns of the crossbench — to no avail. The rogues now have the green light to harass and bully as they please. One Nation’s leader said it was a “shot across the bows” to unions to behave and to the government to clean up white-collar crime. Yeah, right. Here was the perfect opportunity to vote for the rule of law rather than the rule of the jungle, and senators squibbed it.

It may be only a temporary setback for raising compliance with industrial law. The government will try again next year. Some watering down of the bill or blood money may well be extracted by the crossbench vandals. But the episode bodes ill for Scott Morrison’s wider agenda, including the upcoming repeal of the medivac laws; a Federal Court ruling on medical transfers from Nauru and Manus Island also has raised the degree of difficulty for the Coalition.

The Prime Minister lately has had a horrid time in parliament, which wraps up for the year next week. With weak GDP growth, slack consumer spending, stagnant wages and productivity on the slide, the Coalition is holding its nerve and opting for incremental, not big bang, policy changes to shore up the economy. But bolder structural fixes, such as reducing taxes, red tape and workplace rigidity, are required to improve the nation’s ability to sustain higher rates of growth and to build economic resilience. With Senator Hanson’s look-at-me antics and Labor’s union dependence, the task of boosting business investment and national competitiveness — difficult at the best of times — just became a lot harder.