This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Union leaders have accused senator Eric Abetz of hypocrisy for opposing a federal anti-corruption body due to possible harm to the reputations of people under investigation.

They cited the reputational damage to trade unionists by the royal commission Abetz launched, including to former prime minister Julia Gillard.

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At a Senate committee hearing into a national integrity commission on Thursday, Abetz objected to the possibility it could investigate conduct that falls short of criminal behaviour, including “commercial immorality” which he said was as “very vague notion”.

“We’d all have our views on ... commercial governance and acting with the very best levels of morality. But don’t we actually need an objective test, such as that behaviour is either criminal or not criminal?

“When do we start impugning people’s reputation by saying ‘it wasn’t criminal behaviour but’ and leaving people’s reputation besmirched?”

Abetz cited the example of former New South Wales premier Nick Greiner who he said had his career “absolutely demolished courtesy of an over-eager [Independent Commission Against Corruption]”.

“We also had wild opening statements from people at Icac where the evidence then doesn’t support the opening statement; we have Icac pursuing [Margaret] Cunneen and then [the case] blowing up in their face.”

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Abetz, formerly the employment minister, established a trade union royal commission that spent two years investigating a wide variety of alleged misconduct from criminal behaviour down to conflicts of interest between union leaders and members.

Australian Workers Union national secretary, Scott McDine, told Guardian Australia “comments like this make you wonder if Abetz has any of the normal human capacity for self-reflection”.

“Here is a bloke who dedicated much of his brief time on the front bench to using quasi-legal constructions to impugn the reputations of his political enemies in the labour movement,” he said.

“Here is a bloke who spent most of his time in opposition trying desperately to smear the reputation of our first female prime minister over allegations that were later rejected by his own carefully curated kangaroo court.”

The royal commission investigated Gillard for giving legal advice to her then-boyfriend, former AWU official Bruce Wilson, on establishing a union slush fund. Commissioner Dyson Heydon found Gillard did not commit a crime and was not aware of any criminality but had demonstrated a “lapse in professional judgment”.

McDine, who supports a federal Icac, said “there are very sound arguments in favour of not using the investigation of misconduct that falls short of criminal behaviour to damage someone’s reputation... However they are not arguments that Eric Abetz can make with any semblance of credibility.”

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He suggested Abetz apologise to Gillard if he was worried about reputational damage.

Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union construction secretary, Dave Noonan, said Abetz had demonstrated a “grotesque double standard”.

“The servants of the Abbott-Turnbull government at the trade union royal commission ... have been completely heedless of besmirching the reputations of people in the construction industry and particularly unionists.”

A spokesman for Abetz said the union royal commission made 93 references to law enforcement agencies, 54 of which concern possible breaches of criminal law, and more than 10% of references were of employers.

“On any scale this shows that there is an endemic and widespread issue that was worthy of investigation by the Heydon royal commission,” he said.

“It is noted that the royal commission exonerated Gillard. Unions calling for an apology for Gillard for her having her name cleared is quite bizarre.

“To date, there has been no evidence provided of widespread corruption in the federal political arena ... and the current arrangements and level of scrutiny of the executive to parliament, the public and under law are working well,” Abetz’s spokesman said.

In the Senate committee, the Transparency International Australia chairman, Anthony Whealy QC, rejected Abetz’s claim the concept of misconduct was vague because “the community understands it when they see it”.

“Whether it’s misbehaviour about entitlements at political levels, misbehaviour on donations to political parties ... it’s where conflicts of interest arise, it’s where big business is favoured at the expense of legitimate interests. We all recognise those as misbehaviour and there’s no way to doll it up.”

Addressing Abetz’s examples of harms to reputations caused by Icac, Whealy said “it’s legitimate that investigative bodies do make mistakes, they sometimes overreach and reputations can be unfairly besmirched, everybody knows that”.

He said these were “not arguments against a federal Icac at all”, but showed the importance of care in investigations and hearings.