Federal election 2016: PM backs fireys to pressure Bill Shorten

Malcolm Turnbull has seized on a protest against union power to challenge Bill Shorten on workplace relations.

Malcolm Turnbull with Country Fire Authority volunteers in Melbourne yesterday. ‘We will back you to the hilt,’ the Prime Minister told them. Picture: David Crosling

Malcolm Turnbull has seized on a ferocious protest against union power to challenge Bill Shorten on workplace relations, vowing to toughen laws to save volunteer “heroes” from the industrial tactics backed by Labor.

Turning a dispute over Victorian firefighters into a national election issue, the Prime Minister condemned the “extraordinary ­assault on fundamental Australian values” by union officials seeking to take over the state’s regional fire authority and its 60,000 volunteers.

The move comes as Employment Minister Michaelia Cash prepares to unveil stricter laws for union officials in a formal government response to the trade union royal commission, putting industrial relations at the heart of the campaign.

A new crackdown on union agreements that led to a reduction in workers’ conditions, including penalty rates, will sit at the heart of the government response — particularly in situations where an employer has gone on to pay money to the union.

“Secret deals between employers and unions are a scandal that the existing IR laws have failed to prevent,” Senator Cash told The Australian. “It is essential that the law is changed to prevent such deals from ripping off workers in future. The Labor Party has been completely silent on this issue, presumably because Bill Shorten was directly involved in doing such deals when he was running the AWU.”

The Opposition Leader yesterday played down the Victorian firefighters dispute by saying it was a state matter and that Labor Premier Daniel Andrews would “get the balance right” and resolve the concerns.

But Mr Turnbull, taking his election campaign to the heart of Melbourne, told a rally of 2000 volunteer members of the Country Fire Authority that he would alter workplace laws to strike out the validity of the contentious agreement, winning praise from blue-collar firefighters who might normally back Labor.

In the 2004 election campaign, then prime minister John Howard undercut his Labor rival Mark Latham by winning the backing of blue-collar workers in the ­Tasmanian timber industry by ­allowing the logging of old-growth forests to proceed at existing levels — a move that won him the approval of the then CFMEU national assistant secretary Michael O’Connor.

“We will stand with you, we will defend you; you are the spirit of Australia,” Mr Turnbull said yesterday. “I will never forget inspecting the devastation of the Black Saturday bushfire and going to the CFA at Diamond Creek and thanking you. Your heroism that day was the best of Australia; when 19,000 of you in that time of horror stood between Victorians and that ­inferno and put your lives on the line … you are the very best of us and we will back you to the hilt.”

Mr Turnbull wrote to Mr ­Andrews on Friday night urging him to withdraw support for the enterprise agreement between Victoria’s Country Fire Authority and the much smaller United Firefighters Union, warning it will ­“seriously undermine the operation of the CFA” and jeopardise the safety of Victorians.

“The proposed agreement ­appears to transfer the leadership of the CFA to the United Firefighters Union,” Mr Turnbull wrote. “The effective subordination of the CFA volunteers to the members of the UFU runs the grave risk of seriously ­demoralising and demotivating the volunteers.”

The agreement is not supported by the CFA or the volunteers, but representatives of the state Labor government led by Mr ­Andrews are playing a key role in pushing for the deal to be ­approved despite the opposition of Emergency Services Minister Jane Garrett.

“If we are re-elected … we will rectify it,” Mr Turnbull said yesterday. “There’d be changes to the Fair Work Act that would relate to what would be objectionable or unacceptable clauses in EBAs. But we will deal with it.”

Senator Cash yesterday warned the agreement could pose a threat to public safety by compromising the ability of volunteer firefighters to respond to emergencies, challenging Bill Shorten to intervene in favour of the volunteers. “What the EBA says is basically that the union firefighters will no longer have to take ­instruction from volunteer firefighters. You’re talking men and women who have 30 years’ experience fighting fires,” she said.

“At this stage we are working through all possible options, but certainly it is looking at potential changes to the Fair Work Act to ensure that we protect these types of situations and in particular any steps that are taken to compromise the ability of emergency services to undertake their role in an efficient manner.”

She confirmed the government would unveil its full ­response to the Dyson Heydon royal commission into trade unions before the July 2 election, seizing on the firefighters’ dispute to buttress the case for key policy changes. “Our focus will be on cracking down on some of the scandalous deals that have seen unions agree with employers to cut conditions such as penalty rates in situations where the employer has then paid money to the union,” she said.

CFA acting chair John Peberdy yesterday wrote to UFU secretary Peter Marshall, seeking further clarification on a number of clauses in the proposed agreement that he warned could be discriminatory.

He said the CFA had sought a compliance review of the UFU’s log of claims from the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission in December and now considered the terms of proposed agreement to be non-compliant with the Equal Opportunity Act.

The CFA has previously warned the agreement would lead to the union controlling key decisions about staffing and resources. The UFU denies the claims, saying the deal will not affect volunteer firefighters.