Builder says ABCC desperately needed to clean up industry

Construction firm owner Dan Perkins wants to help clean up the ‘tarnished’ image of the industry he joined 23 years ago.

The Australian. Builder Dan Perkins wants the image of his industry tidied up. Pictured on site in Como, Perth. 23/03/16 Picture : Lincoln Baker

Construction company owner Dan Perkins wants to help clean up the “tarnished” image of the industry he joined as an apprentic­e carpenter 23 years ago.

The managing director of Perkins Construction employs 300 people at the business his father and uncle founded in Bunbury, 180km south of Perth, in 1965 — jobs he said would be safeguarded by the Australian Building and Construction Commis­sion watchdog.

The long-running battle between employers and unions over the ABCC comes down to “power” and “the long-term preservation of jobs”, Mr Perkins told The Australian from Bunbury last week.

As national president of the Master Builders Australia industry group, he is lobbying hard for the reinstatement of the regulator the Gillard Labor government scrapped in 2012, which is fiercely opposed by the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union.

“The unions criticise the ABCC in the name of protecting jobs and about safety, but from my firsthand experience this issue isn’t about either of those things,” Mr Perkins said.

“If the unions were serious about jobs, they’d want to protect the companies so they stay viable.

“If you don’t look seriously at the commercial viability and balancing the risks those companies manage with every contract, they disappear, you kill the golden goose.

“They want to assert all of the power and all the control over who we employ, where and when we can’t work,” Mr Perkins said, adding that this would “effectively reduce (his) ability to negotiate commercially sound contracts”.

Like Perkins Constructions, most employers in the industry were small to medium-sized enter­prises with tight margins, Mr Perkins said, adding that he had experienced union pressure over wages and working hours.

“If we don’t have the return of the ABCC as some sort of protection or moderating of the effect of all that on the small and medium-sized corporations and sub­contractors you’re going to lose the labour (force) and go the way of manufacturers and the car industry.” Mr Perkins’s experience of “having restrictions imposed on days and hours of work” and “being required to employ certain people for certain purposes” was found by the Productivity Commission’s Public Infrastructure report in 2014 to be a factor of the industrial­ landscape.

Tighter regulation on unions would also level the playing field for employers and unions, Mr Perkins said.

“Us company owners, directors, even a sole trader, a husband-and-wife partnership ... (in the construction industry) we’re tightly governed by all sorts of regulation, the ATO and ASIC ... employment law, OHS, all of it — all the ABCC seeks to do is bring some sort of semblance of equiv­alence”.

Importantly, Mr Perkins said, youth, talented workers and women were being put off the industry by the “intimidation, bullying and abuse in the construction sector”.

“If the ABCC does nothing else but clean up this image, it’s going to be a wholesale win, it’s going to rapidly advance female participation, and the only way we can do that is by polishing up a fairly tarnished image,” he said.