28th Nov 2019, 4:53 PM – Senate Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment (Ensuring Integrity) Bill 2019 - in Committee - Schedules

The majority voted in favour of keeping item 9 of schedule 2, and schedules 3 and 4, as amended, unchanged. The question was put after the Jacqui Lambie Network moved for those schedules to be opposed.

What do these schedules do?

According to the bills digest:

• Item 9 of Schedule 1 amends the bill so that a person who has been convicted of a prescribed offence as defined in section 212 is not eligible to be a candidate for election to, or to hold an office in, an organisation under subsection 215(1).
• Schedule 3 deals with the administration of dysfunctional registered organisations and
• Schedule 4 proposes a public interest test for amalgamations of registered organisations.

What is the bill's main idea?

The bill was introduced in order to:

• include serious criminal offences punishable by five or more years’ imprisonment as a new category of ‘prescribed offence’ for the purposes of the automatic disqualification regime which prohibits a person from acting as an official of a registered organisation
• allow the Federal Court to disqualify officials from holding office where they have: > * contravened a range of industrial laws > * are found in contempt of court in relation to industrial laws or certain other circumstances > * repeatedly fail to stop their organisation from breaking the law or > * are otherwise not a fit and proper person to hold office in a registered organisation
• make it an offence for a person to continue to act as an official or in a way that influences the affairs of an organisation once disqualified
• allow the Federal Court to deregister an organisation (or make alternative orders) where there is: > * unlawful or otherwise improper conduct of the affairs of the organisation > * serious criminal offences committed by the organisation > * repeated breaches of a range of industrial laws by its members or > * the taking of obstructive unprotected industrial action by a substantial number of members
• allow applications to be made to the Federal Court for alternative orders, including suspending the rights and privileges of an organisation, an individual or a branch or division of an organisation, instead of making an order deregistering an organisation.
• expand the grounds on which the Federal Court may order remedial action to deal with governance issues in an organisation and expressly provide that the Federal Court may appoint an administrator to an organisation or part of an organisation as part of a remedial scheme and
• introduce a public interest test for amalgamations of registered organisations, which will allow relevant matters to be taken into account, such as each organisation’s record of compliance with industrial laws.