Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee, , 7:16:00 to 7:19:31
The Commission clarifies its role in tracking staff who leave the CFMEU, noting they do not proactively monitor all 150 departed staff unless credible information of a breach arises.
Topics: Workplace relations, Integrity
Speakers: Patrick Coyle, Senator Jane Hume
I just have a couple of follow-up questions on that on that issue. Of the people that you are referring to as removed persons, do you have account of how many are officials, how many are organisers, and how many are delegates?
Probably not broken down in that way, but we're talking about a not of not a particularly long list. There were 214 officers removed on day one by the scheme itself. There's a list of some 27 names that have been shared with us to date as being removed by the activities of the administrator since we we anecdotally knows the roles of most of those people.
Okay, anecdotally no, but they you don't know whether they fall into any one of those categories.
It's it's a matter that we would be able to identify if we needed to, but it's not something that we're proactively done.
Okay. Um how many of the sorry, how many people do you know of that have left the union that are not considered removed by the union or removed by the administrator?
I think you've heard from the bar table a few times that there's been significant turnover of staff across the organisation. A lot of those people have left under their own volition, and many of them are left in various circumstances. There may be some as you have identified where the administrator has foreshadowed some sort of disciplinary action and they resign.
Yes.
It's it remains an open question from my perspective as to whether those people may qualify as being removed people under this scheme. And that would be a matter of the facts in each particular case that we would need to then investigate.
Yeah, and so uh as the registered organisations uh um administrating body, how do you deal with that?
Well, if if credible information comes to us about a particular circumstance, then we will take interest in it and we will make the inquiries and we will investigate it if necessary.
Okay. Isn't it the intention of the administrator to report in his report to government, considering the government hasn't appointed this administrator? Uh the um number of not just the number of people that have been removed from the union, but the positions from which they have been removed.
I think the administrator's approach with us has been to respect the privacy of these individuals who are employees, have has shared with us such information as is necessary. We we generally have a uh a view of the um circumstances or the names and and the positions that people held uh who have been removed and again to the extent that a complaint were to come to us about an individual, we could make those inquiries.
Okay. So without knowing the names of all of those people that have been removed, how do you, as my colleague has said, know that they are not phoenixing themselves in other organisations?
We do not have a proactive approach to trying to track the movements of the 150 staff that have departed from the CFMEU, and we don't see that that is our regulatory role. Um but we will act uh if we receive credible information that someone who may be a removed person is um operating contrary to the legislation.