John Setka’s dumb decision a free-kick for the Coalition

27/05/2018: CFMEU State Secretary John Setka speaks at the Victorian ALP Conference at Moonee Valley race course in Melbourne. Stuart McEvoy for The Australian.

John Setka’s spectacularly dumb decision to use his children to fuel his war against the ABCC has handed Scott Morrison the ammunition to reactivate the ­Coalition’s assault on the CFMEU.

Not that the new Prime Minister needed any encouragement.

It is evident Morrison intends to be more aggressive on industrial relations than Malcolm Turnbull, returning industrial relations to cabinet and replacing the politi­cally damaged Michaelia Cash with the more credible Kelly O’Dwyer.

Beyond linking Bill Shorten to the CFMEU’s unlawful conduct, Morrison has signalled he will seek to kickstart the workplace legislative agenda that slowed under Turnbull and Cash.

While his public threat yesterday to consider deregistering the CFMEU created headlines, the Coalition’s next step will be to try to secure Senate approval for the stalled Ensuring Integrity Bill.

The Fair Work Act allows for deregistration but the bill goes further, lowering the threshold for the courts to deregister a union and permitting them to disqualify union officials if they commit two civil law breaches.

Key employers pushing for government action against the CFMEU say the bill’s passage would be more effective than the costly and lengthy path to deregistration. It is a view broadly shared by former trade union royal commissioner Dyson Heydon.

His final report argued that deregistering the CFMEU would not fundamentally address problems in the construction sector and would impact adversely on members, who were not responsible for the actions of officials engaging in unlawful conduct. “Cancelling the registration of the whole union may have a disproportionate effect on union members who have not been involved in illegal activity,” his report said.

The Ensuring Integrity Bill, containing measures proposed by Heydon and O’Dwyer, with the backing of Morrison, will now seek to win the Senate crossbench support needed to get the bill passed in the lead-up to the election.