Christian Porter open to changes as he tries again on union-busting bill

Attorney-General Christian Porter has signalled the government is willing to make further changes to the Ensuring Integrity Bill.

Attorney-General Christian Porter. Picture: Getty Images

Attorney-General Christian Porter has signalled the government is willing to make further changes to the Ensuring Integrity Bill in a bid to convince the Senate crossbench to back the union-restricting laws.

Following last week’s surprise decision by One Nation to vote down the bill, Mr Porter will re-­introduce it into the lower house on Wednesday in the same form.

Mr Porter maintained that One Nation’s stated concerns about the bill, including its claim that administrators could be given “unfettered powers” over unions, were not raised by the minor party during negotiations with the government before the Senate vote.

The government will not put the bill to another Senate vote until next year and Mr Porter said the reintroduced bill would provide a “strong starting point for a fresh round of consultations with crossbench senators”.

“Since the bill was voted on last week in the Senate, issues have been raised which were not raised with the government during consultations on the bill,” he said.

“The Morrison government ­remains willing to engage constructively with all crossbench senators in order to ultimately ­secure this important reform.”

ACTU president Michele O’Neil flatly denied on Tuesday any suggestion unions had threatened to campaign against One ­Nation if its senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts had voted for the bill. “No, absolutely not,” she said. “The reality for us is that we always campaign across the country about trying to support improvements in workers’ rights but there was no discussions with One Nation, and I was involved in those discussions each time we met with them, in relation to any element of campaigning.”

Ms O’Neil said the government was “desperately flaying around for some justification for the basic problem which was they had an unfair and unjustifiable piece of legislation that didn’t get the numbers to support it”.

“It also stank of hypocrisy given what was front of mind to most people in Australia at the time, which was the behaviour of both banks and corporations in criminal breaches of the law and in stealing workers’ minimum ­entitlements,” she said.

Mr Porter said while the bill ­applied the same standards to ­employer associations as it did to unions, the construction union had “made an artform of law-breaking”. He said it was absurd to suggest paperwork offences could lead to disqualification of officials.