Incolink

Mr COWDREY (Colton) (16:02): Supplementary: will the Premier use procurement policy to prevent the CFMEU and/or Incolink from having involvement in South Australian major projects?

The SPEAKER: The member for Colton should not be reading a question if it's a supplementary question.

Members interjecting:

Mr COWDREY: I can listen and write at the same time.

The SPEAKER: I don't see a printer over there.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Let's just have that as a little warning that if they're going to be supplementary they should be genuine supplementaries. Go your hardest.

Mr COWDREY: Thank you sir. Will the Premier use procurement policy to prevent the CFMEU and/or Incolink having involvement with major projects in South Australia like the north-south corridor project?

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier) (16:02): The government is aware of the suggestion that's come out of the Master Builders Association. Having the relationship with the MBA that the government does, we take their suggestions that they put forward seriously and we are seeking advice about that. We are in a difficult position, for the reasons that I have said consistently when this subject has been raised, that there are only so many options that we have available to us in being able to control what is something that is essentially exclusively within the power and the purview of the commonwealth—

Members interjecting:

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS: What we said, what we have been clear about is that we are open to other options when they present themselves. The procurement policy option may well be one of those, but we also have to think about the implications of that because if we have governments seeking to achieve industrial outcomes using procurement policy, then we are starting to talk about something that might have a whole suite of consequences because that isn't typically what governments use procurement policies for. Industrial relations are matters between private sector companies and their employees.

Think about this for the moment—and I invite the Liberal Party to think about this—would it constitute an ill-advised precedent to have a state government, of either political persuasion, now starting to dictate what employees in supermarkets or pubs or restaurants or anywhere else are getting paid, how they are paid and what their conditions are? These are matters that are, generally speaking, resolved between the employee and the employer, which is the great virtue, the great productive outcome, that has arisen out of enterprise bargaining since those labour market reforms were introduced during the course of the 1990s. So we are taking advice on the matter and thinking it through accordingly.