Tony Burke: Albanese government to strip back Australian Building and Construction Commission powers

A senior Minister has promised to strip back the controversial powers of a watchdog, labelling some of its rules as ‘ridiculous’.

The federal government will strip back the controversial powers of a building industry watchdog as soon as this week, according to a senior Minister.

Speaking on the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday, Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke said the powers wielded by the Australian Building and Construction Commission would be pared back to the “bare legal minimum.”

Mr Burke criticised some of the conduct of the ABCC, labelling some of its rules as “ridiculous.”

Speaking on ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday morning, Mr Burke labelled some of the ABCC’s rules as “ridiculous.”

“We will no longer be spending taxpayers’ money determining what sticker someone is allowed to put on their helmet, whether or not a safety sign has to be pulled down because it’s got a union logo in the bottom corner or what flag might be flying at a building site,” he told the program.

“Those sorts of issues should never have been something for an official government regulator to be wasting taxpayers’ money on.

“As of Tuesday, those offences are gone altogether.”

Mr Burke said much of the ABCC’s work could be done by other watchdogs, such as health and safety regulators and the Fair Work Ombudsman.

Labor has been heavily critical of the ABCC, established by the Turnbull government in 2016, considering it to be politically motivated.

One of the cases pursued by the ABCC was the flying of the Eureka flag on a building site.

We welcome the announcement from @Tony_Burke that the Government will remove all the anti-worker elements of the Building Code. This was an ideological project of the Coalition obsessed with flags and stickers instead of skills, safety and stopping wage theft.

— Sally McManus (@sallymcmanus) July 24, 2022

Unions applauded the news, describing the watchdog as the coalition’s “ideological project”.

“We welcome the announcement from Tony Burke that the government will remove all the anti-worker elements of the Building Code,” Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus tweeted on Sunday.

“This was an ideological project of the coalition obsessed with flags and stickers instead of skills, safety and stopping wage theft.”

Mr Burke said the changes would be pursued when both houses of parliament returned to Canberra on Tuesday.

Originally published as Tony Burke: Albanese government to strip back Australian Building and Construction Commission powers