The CFMEU calls upon South Australian politicians to honour the mandate created at the recent Federal Election to repeal the discredited Australian Building and Construction Commission, and condemns the secret plot recently leaked by figures within the dysfunctional SA Liberal Party to create its own local version of the discredited political attack dog.
“The ALP took to a federal election a plain policy for the repeal of the ABCC and the Registered Organisation Commission and received a clear mandate from the Australian people to do so. Construction workers are entitled to expect that this mandate is honoured, and that there will no longer be one law imposed on them that denies them basic legal rights by forcing them to attend compulsory interrogations at the risk of imprisonment, and another law for everyone else. Instead, they find out through leaking conducted as part of the SA Liberals civil war that the Opposition Leader David Speirs thinks that mandate should be ignored.” said SA Divisional Branch Secretary Andrew Sutherland.
“The ABCC is a failed regulator that actually reduced productivity in the construction industry. It should be thrown on the trash-heap of history and left there.”
The leaked plans come alongside a further attempt by the SA Liberal Party to undermine confidence in the construction industry by releasing dodgy ‘modelling’ about the impact of fabricated wage demands on infrastructure.
“The MBA and Liberal Party are notorious for trying to create public panic by making wild claims based on dodgy numbers that don’t stand up to scrutiny. During the recent election they relied upon a report that the MBA had commissioned about what they claimed would be the costs of abolishing the ABCC to try to scare voters that the sky would fall in, that report was later torn apart by prominent and respected economist Dr Phillip Toner who described it as having relied upon “utterly unacceptable” methods for data collection and of being “empirically empty and useless” as a basis for analysis.”
“Here the SA Liberals and the MBA are again playing chicken little trying to frighten up support for policy made on the run by relying on ‘back of the napkin’ quality guesstimates. The sky is not falling in. Local Enterprise Agreement rates have and will be negotiated locally in cooperation with the local industry, like they have been to date and like they are in Tasmania”
“If David Speirs seriously thinks that the lesson that his party needed to learn from their historic South Australian election rout was that they didn’t do enough to attack the standard of living of working South Australians he should spend less time holidaying on yachts and more time speaking to South Australian workers.”
