ANTI-UNION ‘REGULATOR’ A POLITICISED WASTE OF SPACE

Scott Morrison’s union regulator has spent nearly five years and more than $1.3 million dollars of taxpayers’ money on a shameless political witch hunt that has come to nothing.

The Registered Organisations Commission is a totally discredited and unnecessary body designed to attack working people. It’s a biased and politicised body set up by the Liberals and Nationals to go after unions – the organisations that fight for secure jobs, better wages and safer workplaces.

It has pursued the Australian Workers Union relentlessly for years, dragging them through the courts and tying up their resources.

But after an ‘investigation’ lasting nearly half a decade, the ROC has announced – on a Friday afternoon as the world is focused on events in Ukraine – it will not be proceeding with any prosecutions.

If anyone needed further proof the ROC should be abolished this is it.

The Australian public simply cannot have any faith in the ROC’s competence or its impartiality.

This was the ROC’s first major investigation and they botched it completely. They should have abandoned it years ago – but they persisted because their political masters hate the union movement.

It was Minister Cash who weaponised the ROC to go after her political opponents in 2017, namely Bill Shorten as then Labor leader. Her office then tipped off the media about AFP raids on the AWU, ensuring cameras and journalists showed up before the police. It was a politically motivated leak that resulted in a number of resignations from her office.

For many months Senator Cash refused to properly answer questions about this scandal, avoiding media scrutiny and even going so far as to hide behind a whiteboard in Parliament House.

Senator Cash did not fully cooperate with an AFP investigation into the leak, refusing to give a witness statement.

This is the person Scott Morrison saw fit to put back in the industrial relations portfolio.

An Albanese Labor Government will stop the attacks on workers, defund the ROC and return its regulatory functions to the Fair Work Commission.

FRIDAY, 25 FEBRUARY 2022