Royal commission: Shorten comes up short on the witness stand
Before he appeared at the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption this week, Bill Shorten was confident he would short-circuit the political pain he was suffering and positively present his record of standing up for the workers.
If the Opposition Leader is confident his two days in the witness stand have achieved those ends he’s deluded.
Shorten’s tactics and strategy, aimed at truncating the daily bleed of damaging news in the media and restoring trust in him as a leader, have failed.
He failed because he was overconfident in his own ability to handle the courtroom pressure, relied on the conviction that the Australian Workers Union under him was a “better” union than others, and used a flawed and blinkered argument that all unions were doing secret side deals and had been for years.
For a politician seeking to restore lost public faith, a ferocious attack on your critics, a refusal to acknowledge a lack of transparency in your dealings and a failure to recognise shortcomings is definitely not enough.
To be fair to the Labor leader, there have been politically motivated attacks on him from Liberals, he has been white-anted by competing and more militant unions, there has been some hysterical media coverage, there has been a misunderstanding of the aim of enterprise bargaining agreements, he has argued for the right principles of trying to ensure regular work, and his career as a union leader is being raked over as union officials are being dragged down in public opinion because of graft, corruption and theft.
But when presented with this political challenge after recently suffering a dramatic slide in public faith, being seen as instrumental in the destruction of two Labor prime ministers and lying about his role in those leadership coups, Shorten’s response has been found wanting.
Shorten’s explicit “desire” in an appeal to royal commissioner Dyson Heydon last month to “address all issues of interest” at the earliest opportunity was a reaction to a storm of media stories about various deals done when he was the AWU leader before entering parliament in 2007.
Revelations at the commission about cleaners getting a low pay deal from a cleaning company that made cash payments direct to the AWU had already cost his former AWU colleague, Cesar Melhem, his job as the government whip in the Victorian upper house.
On a daily basis new revelations were being made in the media about payments of more than $1 million being made to the AWU from various companies that were negotiating — or were about to negotiate — EBAs for workers covered by the union.
One of those deals, with cleaning company Cleanevent, has become notorious and now has been repudiated by the AWU for not providing high enough pay.
The public criticism of Shorten was that he had participated in the negotiations for the EBAs on behalf of AWU members at the same time AWU officials were being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret side deals to enhance the financial and political power of the union. The critical claim is that low-paid workers ended up with lesser deals than they should have because of the side deals.
There has been no suggestion of personal corruption in this practice and Shorten was confident that his record of representing workers and pursuing the spirit of enterprise bargaining and getting productivity gains was enough to deflect his critics.
Immediately after finishing his testimony at the royal commission, Shorten told the media he believed he had succeeded in putting his case.
“I said before the royal commission, Tony Abbott’s royal commission, that I would relish the opportunity to put my record of standing up for workers in Australia, up against Tony Abbott’s any day of the week,” he said. “What happened in the royal commission is that I answered hundreds of questions, hundreds of questions on my record of standing up for Australian workers.”
When asked if he believed there had been any conflict of interest, he responded: “Not at all. There was no evidence demonstrated of any conflict. The truth of the matter is that every day I was a union rep I was standing up for our members and of course where we could we would co-operate with employers for the best interests of our workers, no conflict of interest whatsoever.”
That was Shorten’s take on his two days in the witness box: He stood on his record as union rep, he answered hundreds of questions, there was “no evidence” of a conflict of interest and, indeed, no conflict of interest at all.
Shorten’s evidence, which at times resembled one of his more expansive and rambling press conferences, was consistent with this conclusion. He pointed out regularly that his philosophy as a union negotiator was to ensure businesses stayed afloat to provide jobs, that where possible people got regular work and the approach that the “twain” of employers and unionists could “never meet” was wrong.
He pointed with pride to the fact Melbourne’s East Link tollway delivered great pay rates for AWU members, provided thousands of jobs and finished early because of productivity-enhancing changes to rostered-days-off agreed with Thiess John Holland.
Likewise, he was proud of deals with glassmaker ACI and argued for a different employment and pay system for Australia’s biggest mushroom producer, Chiquita Mushrooms, because workers were hurting themselves in pursuit of the generous piece rates available.
He also defended the expansion of labour hire firms, such as Unibilt, because he said it was preferable for there to be a job, even a contract job, than no job at all.
All of this was part of Shorten’s defensible record in achieving productivity gains, protecting jobs and keeping at bay the more militant and disruptive union rival, the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union.
As he said outside the commission: “As far as I was concerned I was willing to co-operate, willing to talk about my record of standing up for Australian workers when it comes to better pay, better conditions, better safety, better job security.”
But these outcomes, just because they result in lower pay or conditions, do not necessarily mean the workers are worse off and do not provide the grounds for Fairfax Media to call for Shorten’s resignation before he appeared at the royal commission.
Even after Shorten’s two days in the witness stand, and let’s remember he is a witness who is not accused of anything as part of the royal commission, there are no grounds to say he must step aside as Opposition Leader, as Melhem has in Victoria, and there is little likelihood of any illegality being found against him.
But for an Opposition Leader with a trust deficit, a former union official who stands for fairness for workers, a Labor MP who was helped into parliament with his own union’s funds and those from a labour-hire firm he dealt with, there is a higher political benchmark for success.
The two new headline revelations were that Shorten had not disclosed a $40,000 payment to the Australian Electoral Commission, a payment from Unibilt via the AWU to finance his election campaign director, Lance Wilson, which helped him get elected to parliament in 2007. Shorten and the AWU were dealing with Unibilt at the time.
Nor did Shorten disclose a similar payment direct from the AWU. But this was more than just a slip of the memory: the evidence before the commission showed that Shorten had known about the lack of disclosure for some time yet he did not inform the ALP (to tell the AEC) until Monday morning, 44 hours before he was to give evidence and eight years late.
Jeremy Stoljar SC, counsel assisting the commission, made the point that the disclosure was made only after Shorten’s lawyers became aware the royal commission was aware of the donation and that steps were taken to disguise the nature of the payments.
The other bad headline came as a result of Shorten’s “evasive” answers and Heydon’s intervention warning the Labor leader about the danger to him of providing “non-responsive” and “extraneous answers”.
Heydon acknowledged Shorten’s publicity problems and his legitimate right to use the appearance to rebut criticism.
Then, in a warning that was actually “sage advice”, as Shorten said later, but became a flaying backhander, Heydon said: “What I am concerned about more is your credibility as a witness: a witness — and perhaps your self-interest as a witness as well.” However it was intended, the warning about “credibility as a witness” from a royal commissioner to an opposition leader was enough in itself to neutralise Shorten’s attempt to clear the slate. It was a condemnation of his performance in the witness box and death knell to his political intent and judgment.
Shorten fared no better on the key issue of whether he was part of a pattern or system of union officials accepting secret side deals for the benefit of the union through financial gain or membership growth while conducting negotiations that give away pay and conditions of workers.
Shorten was presented with evidence of “bogus” invoices and misleading statements about the real nature of payments from companies to the AWU made under the guise of advertising in union newspapers, tickets for dinner dances, training, education, seminars and even company-paid union delegates on site to prevent “trouble”.
Before the commission Shorten could not and would not say if there was a conflict of interest for union officials negotiating for workers while receiving secret payments from the companies involved.
Without the rancour of some Liberals, Acting Treasurer, Small Business Minister and retail politician extraordinaire Bruce Billson put it best yesterday when he said: “Imagine if you had a trusted mate going and buying a car for you, trying to get you a good deal, and then you find out your mate’s getting a sling from the guy that’s flogging the car. I mean, that just looks dodgy.”
Shorten may have defended his record as a union leader, but he only has damaged his reputation as a Labor leader.
Too much union, not enough politics.
