MARK DREYFUS MP

Member for Isaacs

ABC RN Breakfast Hamish Macdonald 24 October 2019

24 October 2019

SUBJECTS: John Setka; Malka Leifer.

THE HON. MARK DREYFUS QC MP
SHADOW ATTORNEY-GENERAL
SHADOW MINISTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM
MEMBER FOR ISAACS


E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC RN BREAKFAST
THURSDAY 24TH OCTOBER 2019

SUBJECTS: John Setka; Malka Leifer.

HAMISH MACDONALD: Mark Dreyfus is the Shadow Attorney-General, welcome back to Breakfast.

MARK DREYFUS, SHADOW ATTORNEY GENERAL: Good morning Hamish. Thanks for having me.

MACDONALD: Can we clear one thing up first? Has Anthony Albanese expelled John Setka or has John Setka resigned?

DREYFUS: John Setka has been removed from the Labor Party and I don't think there's the slightest value in playing with words about exactly the process. The important thing is that Anthony Albanese commenced a process to remove John Setka from the Labor Party. He's now been removed.

MACDONALD: Is there a difference between removed and expelled?

DREYFUS: The proceeding that Anthony Albanese started under the rules of the Australian Labor Party was to remove John Setka. He's now gone.

MACDONALD: You said you don't think there's any point in playing with words and it seems like it's doing exactly that. What's the difference between expelling him and removing him?

DREYFUS: I'm interested in outcomes here. And the process was to have him expelled from the Labor Party and he's now gone. That's where it should end Hamish.

I think that some people are trying to make some other point about process and I don't think it's of any value to us to make whatever points people are trying to make about process.

The end of this is John Setka is no longer a member of the Australian Labor Party. That was a very important thing to us because his actions were incompatible with the values of the Australian Labor Party, and it's the right thing that he ceased to be a member of the Labor Party.

MACDONALD: I'm trying to help our audience understand exactly what has happened here, though. Has Anthony Albanese initiated a process which has resulted in John Setka resigning?

DREYFUS: Absolutely.

MACDONALD: Right.

DREYFUS: And the start of that process was interfered with by John Setka rushing off to the Supreme Court of Victoria, wasting his members money on a proceeding about whether or not the rules were being followed correctly. He lost. Then he appealed to the Court of Appeal in Victoria against the Supreme Court judge's decision. He's now withdrawn that appeal and he's been removed from the party.

MACDONALD: Okay. We got there in the end. Will Labor now stop taking money from John Setka's CFMMEU?

DREYFUS: It's not John Setka's union.

MACDONALD: Lets not quibble over the description? Will you continue taking money from that union?

DREYFUS: The CFMMEU - and I'm not quibbling Hamish - is affiliated with the Australian Labor Party. The Australian Labor Party is the party of the union movement and it's not about one person. It's about the tens of thousands of construction workers, forestry workers, mining workers, who want to be, and want their union to be, affiliated with the Australian Labor Party.

So the question of whether or not the fact of the State Secretary of one division of the CFMMEU is no longer a member of the Labor Party should not in any way alter the relationship that the CFMMEU has with the Australian Labor Party.

MACDONALD: The Attorney-General, though, points to his argument that 80 CFMMEU officials have breached industrial relations laws, that the union is responsible for 22 of the 2000 contraventions by the CFMMEU in the last 15 years. You are comfortable taking money from that union despite all of those breaches?

DREYFUS: I say again, Hamish, the Labor Party is the party of the union movement.

MACDONALD: Yes, we've heard that.

DREYFUS: This is what's important, though. It's not right to allow the Attorney-General, Christian Porter, now the Minister for Industrial Relations, to pursue this personalised attack, trying to equate the actions of an individual or some individuals with the interests of the union movement or the interests of this union.

What's important is the role the CFMMEU plays in the construction industry, and the other industries that it represents workers, in keeping those workers safe. The CFMMEU and its members have an interest in seeing a Labor Government elected in this country. They have an interest in that because it's a Labor Government that will deliver better occupational health and safety. It's a Labor Government that will deliver fairer wages. It's a Labor Government that will protect penalty rights. For all those reasons, that affiliation between the CFMMEU and Labor is going to continue and it's entirely understandable that it should continue.

MACDONALD: So is that union right to commit all of those breaches?

DREYFUS: No, it's not right for union officials to break the law. But I'm not defending the breaking of the law. What I'm doing is resisting the personalised attack that this Liberal Government wants to make. The attack on unions that this Liberal Government wants to make. It's just more of the same. We've had years and years of attacks on unions and Christian Porter is seizing on this as an opportunity to further an attack on the union movement, on individual union leaders and on the union movement. This is much bigger than that.

MACDONALD: Clearly those breaches can't all be put down to John Setka. So in a sense, we're actually talking about something beyond John Setka here, which is a question of why, if you oppose the fact that those breaches have taken place, are you still willing to accept the money from that union?

DREYFUS: Well, I'm not having a union that protects the workers in important Australian industries demonised because of that particular conduct, or the fact that this minister in a Liberal Government can point to some breaches of the law. It's a much larger question than that. This is a century old association between the union movement and the Labor Party that this Liberal Government wants to attack and we won't have a bar of it. Labor will continue to be affiliated with the union movement and the unions will continue to defend the interests of workers.

I know that that's what this Liberal Government wants to attack. I know that this Liberal Government would like us to become a low wage country, one where there's no unions defending workers. Well, we're opposed to that and we're going to stay opposed to that. And it's a shameful thing that Christian Porter should be going on with the attack on the union movement in the way that he is and personalising it in the way that he is.

MACDONALD: So do you want the CFMMEU to stop breaching industrial laws?

DREYFUS: I don't want any law breaking in Australia and you wont ever hear me defending law breaking and that's where it ends.

MACDONALD: Okay. In his statement John Setka has strongly criticised Labor's support of free trade agreements. We've been talking about those on this program this week, we spoke to the ACTU President Michele O'Neil expressing some very serious concerns, particularly about the Indonesian free trade deal. Do you accept that there are many within the union movement that are quite unhappy about Labor's position on this?

DREYFUS: I accept that people within the union movement don't like some aspects of these trade agreements. And they know, and we in Labor know, that the exact terms of these trade agreements are not as would have been negotiated by a Labor government.

But we don't get the choice here. It's binary. We have to decide whether or not to support these free trade agreements or oppose them and our judgment is that the benefits to Australia, the jobs that are going to be created by the extra trade that these free trade agreements will bring - particularly the Indonesian agreement - outweigh the disadvantages caused by the terms of the agreements that we don't like or that the union movement don't like.

The choice that we have to make is whether to vote in favour of the changes to the customs tariff legislation. We've done that. We voted in favour of that. We don't get to renegotiate the terms of the agreement from opposition, neither does the union movement.

I think it's unthinkable that we would not be supporting a free trade agreement with our largest, closest neighbour, Indonesia. A country that we have, as yet, not enough trade with. It's going to be a growing economy over the next several decades, the Indonesian economy. It's vital that we make our relationship with Indonesia closer, and part of that is to sign up to this free trade agreement. A free trade agreement that was talked of by Labor and initiated by Labor when we were in government.

MACDONALD: We will be talking shortly to Nicole Meyer about this case of Malka Leifer being extradited from Israel. These women have been up in Parliament House trying to keep up the pressure to have Malka Leifer brought to Australia. Do you think there is more that can be done at a political level, at a diplomatic level, to ensure her extradition?

DREYFUS: I think that Australia, the Australian Government, and everybody in the Australian Parliament have to keep the pressure on the Government of Israel to make sure that Malka Leifer, a woman who's been accused of horrendous crimes, is extradited to Australia and quickly. This has now been going on for more than five years.

MACDONALD: The question is what more can be done at a political and diplomatic level?

DREYFUS: What more can be done is continuing pressure. There have been representations made by more than one Australian Prime Minister. There have been representations made by shadow ministers directly, including me, directly to the Government of Israel on our visits to Israel.

We think that Israel is a great friend of Australia's. Its a country that respects the rule of law and it's long past time that this extradition happen.

MACDONALD: Can I just ask, when you've had those conversations, Mark Dreyfus, what have you heard from Israeli politicians about the delays? How did they explain it? Because clearly, the case has political dimensions within Israel's domestic politics.

DREYFUS: And we've seen that there have been domestic political dimensions in Israel. We don't think that those matters should play any part in what should be a standard extradition process.

Our representation - I'm not going to give you the blow by blow of what happened in these conversations - but our representations, the representations made by Malcolm Turnbull, the representations made by Scott Morrison, have been courteously received by government ministers in Israel, by the Prime Minister of Israel. And what we're going to do, both sides of the Australian Parliament are going to continue to keep the pressure on the Government of Israel to make sure that the legal system produces the result that we want, which is that Malka Leifer be extradited to Australia to stand trial for these very serious charges.

MACDONALD: I need to move on pretty quickly but the fact that Dave Sharma is now getting involved, former ambassador to Israel, he's clearly got a lot of connections in Israel and is quite well respected there. Do you have some hope that he might be able to get a breakthrough where others may not have?

DREYFUS: It's a help that Dave Sharma, the Liberal Member for Wentworth is involved and spoke to Parliament yesterday, as did I, as did Tim Wilson, the Member for Goldstein and Josh Burns, the Member for Macnamara.

I know that Dave Sharma's contacts will help. We are all going to, as one, speak on behalf of Australia and say that Malka Leifer needs to be extradited to Australia. So yes, it's a good thing that Dave Sharma is throwing his weight behind the pursuit of justice here.

MACDONALD: Mark Dreyfus Thank you very much.

DREYFUS: Thanks very much.