Fair Work Amendment (Disqualified Officers) Bill 2026

Senator WHITTEN (Western Australia) (09:59): I rise in support of the Fair Work Amendment (Disqualified Officers) Bill 2026. This bill is not complicated. It does one necessary thing: it stops an arbitrary five-year clock from protecting people who have treated a registered organisation as a personal fiefdom.

The Construction and General Division of the CFMEU was placed into administration on 24 August because the evidence of what that division had become was no longer deniable. Reporting administrator investigations and later inquiry material described a culture of intimidation, standover tactics, alleged links to people who should never have been anywhere near a construction site and a union that too often acted as if the law applied to everyone except its own officials.

This isn't just me pontificating on a headline. I was there. I saw it in person.

I've been at the receiving end of some of their poor conduct. My business dealt with the CFMEU, and I saw them intimidate and bully. Then, I watched Labor opened the doors for them to come to my worksites and do as they please.

Labor is complicit in all of this. Labor is the political wing of the CFMEU, and, had the corruption not been exposed, the CFMEU would be running rampant today under Labor's watch with their blessing. Honest members, the people who actually swing hammers and pour concrete, were not running that show.

A small number of officials were. The rest of the industry paid the price in fear, inflated costs and projects that ran like a protection racket. This is why the administration was necessary.

It's also why the five-year cap on expulsion and disqualification of those involved is an insult to everyone who has had to live with the consequences. The current administrator, Michael Crosby, said the quiet part out loud on national television. When asked why suspensions were limited to five years, he answered that the rules only allowed him five years.

That was as much as he could do. When he was asked whether the rules should change, he said maybe. This parliament should not leave that as a maybe.

If the conduct is serious enough that five years look inadequate, the statute should not force the administrator to pretend otherwise. To say that there is no conduct that would require a lifelong ban is ridiculous. Unions exist to represent workers.

I don't stand against union workers' ability to collectively bargain. I am for workers. Ask all the people I once employed if they were treated well.

What I do stand against is a construction union that becomes a vehicle for thuggery, that treats contractors as ATM machines and that treats its members and the taxpayer with utter disdain. When that happens, the people who suffer first are the members who wanted a clean union and the small businesses that cannot afford to fight a machine. Taxpayers suffer too, because public infrastructure does not get cheaper when intimidation and nepotism are built into the price.

A five-year ban is not a serious answer to that problem. Five years is a sabbatical. Five years is enough time for the networks to wait, for memory to fade and for the same people to walk back in as if nothing happened.

I support removing that fiction. The administrator should be able to impose a longer period or an indefinite one where that is proportional to the misconduct. That is not vengeance; it is justice.

The second change in this bill is also important. It makes clear that a person disqualified under the scheme is a removed person. They should not be able to lose one title and pick up another in a different registered organisation.

Australians have seen this movie before. The official moves sideways, and the letterhead changes, but the same habits continue. Closing that gap is common sense.

Opponents will say this is an attack on the union movement. It's not. It's an attack on the idea that a union official is above the ordinary rules of accountability.

A clean union does not need a five-year maximum written into the administration scheme. The people who need the cap are the people bringing the union movement into disrepute. There is a reason this debate keeps coming back to the construction industry.

That industry is large, mobile, cash heavy and politically connected. When a union in that sector goes rotten, the damage is not theoretical. It shows up on sites, in subcontracting chains, in safety culture and in the cost of public works.

Administration was the admission that self-correction had failed. This bill is the admission that the tools given to the administrator were still too small for the scale of the corruption. Disqualification for 'any period' simply matches the seriousness of the problem the parliament already recognised when it put the division into administration.

If Labor and the crossbench are serious about cleaning up the CFMEU construction division, they will not defend a five-year sunset clause for the worst cases. The members who wanted a lawful union deserve that much as do the contractors who wanted to finish a job without looking over their shoulder and the public that are still paying for the mess. This bill is common sense, and if Labor want to show that they care about their base they should vote for this measure to strengthen a clean union movement.

Or is it Labor's new modus operandi to forget the working class and cosy up to the inner-city elites?