The Turnbull government’s legislation to intervene in the Country Fire Authority dispute will now pass the Senate, with One Nation senators supporting the bill.
The One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, has said she and her three Senate colleagues will provide the crucial votes the government needs to get the bill through the Senate, which will happen this week.
Since Labor and the Greens oppose the bill, the government needed nine of the 11 Senate crossbench votes.
The government has now secured nine Senate votes, with One Nation (four), the Nick Xenophon Team (three), Derryn Hinch and Bob Day supporting the bill.
Hanson told ABC radio on Monday she would support the government’s attempt to stop volunteer firefighters in Victoria from having to consult with unions when an enterprise bargaining agreement was being settled.
“Yes, I will be. I think it’s important that we do support the government’s position on this,” Hanson said.
“I think it’s reasonable that we do so. I think the unions have overstepped the mark here.”
In August Malcolm Turnbull and the employment minister, Michaelia Cash, claimed the Victorian Labor government was seeking to hand control of Victoria’s country fire volunteers to the United Firefighters Union through a new enterprise agreement that clearly discriminated against volunteers and provided the UFU with an “unreasonable, unwarranted degree of control over volunteer operations”.
They said their proposed changes to the Fair Work Act would prevent that from happening, while also stopping “similar union takeovers” from happening to volunteers of other firefighting and emergency services bodies covered by the Fair Work Act.
The One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts said the CFA dispute was systematic of a broken industrial relations system.
“Like so many issues that come before parliament, the CFA bill is an issue of freedom versus control,” he said.
“The control mechanism proposed is an EA [enterprise agreement] that gives union bosses the right to dictate the daily operations of the community-based rural fire brigades,” he said.
The shadow assistant treasurer, Andrew Leigh, said Labor would continue to oppose the bill.
“This is fundamentally a state issue with Malcolm Turnbull looking to make political mileage out of the CFA volunteers,” he said on Monday.
