Mr REITH (Minister for Workplace Relations and Small Business)(6.12 p.m.) —This is quite an interesting development. We are putting up 29 technical amendments and even the ACTU does not really object to most of them. Just looking through your amendments, you are proposing to omit 24 of those 29 amendments. But the amendments in relation to schedule 6 really take the cake.

Let me just explain what is proposed here. If somebody enters into an agreement today and that agreement includes a clause which is not legal under the Workplace Relations Act because it is discriminatory, it is proposed in our amendment that that agreement should not be approved. The reason is quite simple: if the CFMEU—it is the CFMEU, the CPSU and a couple of other trade unions—get some weak employer to agree to a discriminatory, illegal clause, then the union plan is to get that agreement approved through the commission so that it can then go around the work sites and say to employees and to employers, `This has been agreed. This has been certified by the commission. This is the deal.' That is what they have been doing.

All we are saying is—as the shadow minister, the member for Canberra (Mr McMullan) acknowledges—that it is not legal because it is outlawed by the federal act. There are penalties for breaching the anti-discriminatory provisions of the federal law; yet the shadow minister wants the CFMEU and some of these other types to be able to have these clauses in agreements with a commission stamp on them so that they can go around deceiving people and misleading people about the nature of the agreements for particular work sites.

I am amazed that you would go along with this. What you are setting out here is to conspire in a little scheme with the CFMEU so that they should be able to bowl over weak employers and then go around and misrepresent to employees that, because an agreement has been certified with this particular clause in it, there is a requirement on a particular site that people be members of a union. It is a clear breach of the rights that people have under the federal law and you are proposing this amendment effectively to collaborate with some of these people in the trade union movement who want to enforce compulsory unionism. It is the old game.

Quite frankly, the amazing thing about this is most rank and file trade union members do not believe you should be forced into the union. And certainly 70 or 80 per cent of the Australian public do not believe in compulsory unionism. Yet that is all that this is: it is just a device to be able to mislead people. It is a pretty serious thing too because there are penalties for enforcing compulsory unionism. Yet you are going along with a deal to get these clauses through the commission so that the usual games can be played out on the CBD work sites, the building industry and various others.

It does show an incredible attitude from the federal parliamentary Labor Party that, in a labour force today where only one in four people are in a union, where people have been leaving trade unions and where there is a very strong value in the Australian community that you should not be able to jackboot people into unions, it believes that unions should have a right to effectively incorporate into agreements to be certified by the federal commission clauses which they know are void and which will entrap people into breaches of federal law and expose employees to penalties under that law.

You have sunk to a new low. We have abolished compulsory unionism. We think it is quite wrong for you to set out, as you have today, to mislead employees about their basic rights just to support the campaigns of a few people in the trade union movement to dragoon people into unions against their will. This is quite wrong. It shows a lot about the thinking in the federal parliamentary Labor Party. I am disappointed that you do not see the commonsense of the technical amendments before the House.