Cash blasts Shorten over TWU ‘slush fund’

Employment Minister Michaelia Cash has lashed Bill Shorten over a six-figure payment made to the Transport Workers Union.

Employment Minister Michaelia Cash has lashed Bill Shorten over a six-figure payment made to the Transport Workers Union to help raise awareness of Labor’s Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal.

The $222,224 payment to the TWU granted so it could devise an “education and communication strategy” came in 2013 after the union lobbied Julia Gillard to set up the tribunal a year earlier.

The TWU said it used the funds to create a smartphone app to inform users about the tribunal, but it is yet to be completed almost three years after the money was paid.

The full bench of the tribunal sat in Sydney yesterday to hear a fresh application by the TWU to defer an order on minimum pay rates until next year. A previous application by the TWU to defer the order was rejected by the tribunal.

The latest application, criticised by the Coalition as a last-ditch effort by the TWU to quell growing public outcry against the industrial body, also sought for the first time to ensure owner-drivers were not disadvantaged by the pay scales.

Senator Cash branded the payment to the TWU while Mr Shorten was workplace relations minister as “dubious”.

“The arrangement appears to be little more than Bill Shorten bankrolling a taxpayer-funded union slush fund,” Senator Cash added.

A spokesman for the Opposition Leader yesterday defended the payment, saying “raising awareness of truck safety issues is critically important”.

“Senator Cash should be ashamed of being so flippant when it comes to truck safety and people dying on our roads ... using road safety to score cheap political points is utterly disgraceful,” the spokesman said.