Peter Beattie says if he were Labor leader he would not accept the union’s money

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The government and opposition remain deadlocked in the ongoing battle over the influence of Australia’s trade unions, with Malcolm Turnbull accusing the CFMEU construction union of “controlling” Bill Shorten.

In an interview with Sky News before Victorian prosecutors decided not to proceed with blackmail charges against him, but only broadcast this week, John Setka said achieving results for members meant sometimes being “on the wrong side of a bad law … then so be it”.

“If you play by the laws, you’ll never win,” he said.

It’s not just the government that has seized on the comments.

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Former Queensland Labor premier Peter Beattie joined a growing list of former Labor leaders criticising the leftwing union, telling Sky News that if he was leader of the party, he would not accept the union’s money.

“If it was me, I wouldn’t take their donations because I think at the end of the day you pay too much of a price for it,” he said, adding he believed Setka was “the gift that keeps on giving to the Coalition”.

Blackmail charges against Victorian CFMEU bosses dropped Read more

“As I said, John Setka’s playing to his membership. He’s not playing for the re-election of a Shorten government. I wouldn’t take his money.”

The prime minister was very quick to agree with Beattie.

“Bill Shorten shouldn’t be accepting money from the CFMEU but they are in fact his paymaster. They are his controller. He does the bidding of the CFMEU,” he said from Queensland.

“You know, I can understand what Peter Beattie has said. After all, when Bob Hawke was Labor prime minister, he deregistered the BLF and they were disaffiliated from the Australian Labor party.

“The CFMEU is in charge of Bill Shorten and as you know there’s a written agreement he entered into to get their support to become Labor leader.”

But Shorten said he was not going to take the advice of either Beattie or Turnbull, while adding that he did not believe “anyone was above the law” and he was “not the keeper of every official in the union movement”.

“Nor am I the keeper of every banker or businessman,” he said from Fremantle.

“I think the real issue here, if we want to talk about cleaning up donations, is the Turnbull government should stop taking foreign donations. I mean that’s the real challenge here.

“Unions and business and social institutions all have a right to be involved in politics.

“What we’ve got to do though is make sure that we have transparent and honest politics.

“So my advice to the government is this: let’s clean up foreign donations and also let’s clean up donations generally and make all payments over $1,000 transparent.”

Labor has committed to scrapping the registered organisations commission and the Australian Building and Construction Commission – the watchdogs set up under the Turnbull government to police industrial laws – if it wins the next election.