Scott Morrison vows no retreat in bid to tame unions

Scott Morrison has vowed to pursue Senate backing for the Ensuring Integrity Bill.

Scott Morrison in Canberra on Monday. Picture: Kym Smith

Scott Morrison has vowed to pursue Senate backing for the Ensuring Integrity Bill, accusing One Nation of walking away from ­assurances it would back the proposed union-restricting laws.

Pauline Hanson insisted on Monday she voted last week to defeat the Ensuring Integrity Bill because it was “poor law” and ­denied telling the government she would back the bill.

The Prime Minister said on Monday the government was committed to the bill as “union thugs” should face expulsion if they entered building sites and threatened people.

Senator Hanson also rejected any suggestion she did a deal with the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union to oppose the bill.

Federal independent MP Bob Katter, an “active” member of the CFMEU’s mining division, made his opposition to the bill clear to Senator Hanson during their ­recent drought tour through ­regional Queensland.

Mr Katter’s Australian Party has again agreed to form an informal alliance with One Nation, and “we’re working together and we’re looking at ways of not stepping on each other’s toes”, he said.

“She would be stepping on my toes big time if she voted for that (the Ensuring Integrity Bill). Without our right to organise, we’d be working for nothing in this country,” Mr Katter said.

“(But) to say that I would influence Pauline, nobody influences Pauline in anything.”

Mr Katter said Senator Hanson had been burnt at previous elections, including the May federal election, when the CFMEU actively campaigned against One Nation in certain seats, including Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon’s Hunter electorate.

“(The CFMEU) scorched her in the last election … and she was very vulnerable in a lot of the seats that she’d normally have a chance of winning,” he said.

“They don’t muck around, they can be brutal when they go on the attack, the CFMEU, and good on them. She took a lot of pain. But she went up north to some town in the coalfields and she was mobbed by them all. So the union gets the message from rank and file that they’re partial towards Hanson.

“(The union must be thinking) she voted with the Liberal Party to destroy us, we did everything we could to inflict pain. If she’s going to vote our way it’s our duty not to inflict pain.”

Attorney-General Christian Porter will take the bill to the partyroom on Tuesday before reintroducing it into the House of Representatives this week.

However, the government will not seek another Senate vote on the bill until next year.