Rod Sawford (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Despite its name, Independent Contractors of Australia is not a representative organisation; it just pretends to be one, as the shadow minister tells us. This was exposed during the Senate inquiry into the Independent Contractors Bill. Sustained questioning by Senator Steve Hutchins and Senator George Campbell revealed that the ICA’s claim to represent 1.9 million independent contractors is nothing but a total sham.

The ICA executive director, Ken Phillips, confirmed that the organisation has just 200 members, who each pay the princely sum of $5 a year, plus $50 for access to the website. The nature of the ICA membership was not revealed to the Senate—that is, it is not even clear how many of the 200 members claimed by the ICA are in fact independent contractors. According to Mr Phillips, the ICA has a ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ membership policy. In his own words, prospective members ‘put in an application’. He said:

... um, we have a look at it, give them a phone call, have a chat, um, there hasn’t been an application we’ve rejected so far.

Nudge, nudge; wink, wink. What is clear is that none of these members were consulted about the ICA’s position on the Independent Contractors Bill. According to Mr Phillips, the ICA’s position was drafted by him and discussed with the 12 members of the ICA committee of management only. That is a bit short—about 1,899,888 short—of the 1.9 million Australians purported to be represented by the ICA.

The founder of the ICA is a Mr Bob Day, the Liberal candidate for Makin at the next federal election—surprise, surprise. The links between the ICA and the Howard government do not stop there. The woman who succeeded Mr Day as chair of the ICA is Ms Angela MacRae. According to the ICA website, Ms MacRae was contracted to the Prime Minister’s office after the introduction of the goods and services tax to resolve ‘GST and BAS problems’. Asked in June this year whether the Independent Contractors Bill would affect the negotiating position of vulnerable workers, including the low-skilled and people from non-English speaking backgrounds, Ms MacRae told the Age newspaper:

If I can do it, pretty much anyone can ...

That statement reveals a lot about the ICA and its understanding of the Australian workforce. According to the ICA website, Ms MacRae is a former tax director of CPA Australia. As I have noted, she has been contracted to provide taxation advice to the Prime Minister’s office. In October 2005, Ms MacRae was appointed to the government’s taskforce on cutting red tape, alongside Productivity Commission chair Mr Gary Banks, former Australian Stock Exchange managing director Mr Dick Humphry and Mr Rod Halstead from Clayton Utz. Press reports reveal that Ms MacRae holds a first class honours degree in economics and a masters degree in commerce. If Ms MacRae genuinely believes she is in the same position in the employment market as a school leaver, a retrenched middle-aged labourer or someone who lacks English language skills, she is kidding herself.

I want to return now to Mr Bob Day, an individual I have referred to as the founder of the ICA and the Liberal candidate for Makin. That description sells him short. Mr Day is also a multimillionaire property developer and former president of the Housing Industry Association. He is a long-serving president of the Liberal Party’s Makin federal electorate council. Australian Electoral Commission records show that Mr Day is a major financial contributor to the South Australian division of the Liberal Party through his company Homestead Homes.

According to press reports, Mr Day took personal responsibility for funding Liberal Party election advertisements in the lead-up to this year’s South Australian election. He reportedly vowed to do ‘whatever it takes’ to give the Liberal campaigns in the state seats of Newland, Wright and Florey the resources to win. Unfortunately for Mr Day and the Liberal Party, even his immense personal wealth was not enough to defeat Labor in these seats. I am pleased to advise that in two of them—Wright and Florey—the Labor candidates were returned with an absolute majority on first preferences.

Mr Day is a long-serving board member of the HR Nicholls Society, an extremist organisation that has condemned Work Choices for its moderation. A biography published on the HR Nicholls Society website says that Mr Day has served as secretary of the organisation since 1990. A spokesperson for the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations dismissed the society’s criticism of Work Choices by saying:

What would you expect? Let’s get a grip. The HR Nicholls Society is such a small group it is almost moribund.

I agree with the minister’s spokesperson on these points. The HR Nicholls Society is certainly small, it is certainly moribund and it is certainly out of touch with modern Australia. The problem is that it continues to wield considerable influence inside this government. We saw that earlier this year when another South Australian, finance minister Nick Minchin, gave a private speech to the HR Nicholls Society in which he pledged a further wave of extreme industrial relations changes. During his speech in February, Senator Minchin said:

... there is still a long way to go ... awards, the IR Commission, all the rest of it.

That is more than the government has admitted to the Australian people—so, when the speech got leaked, Senator Minchin and then the Prime Minister ran around denying the meaning of those plain words.

Mr Day is also a member of the Samuel Griffith Society board and, until his Liberal Party preselection, was deputy chair of the Centre for Independent Studies. Mr Day has been a vocal and influential supporter of the Howard government. The government has supported Mr Day as well. In 2003, Mr Day was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia and awarded a Centenary Medal. But none of those prizes are as great as the prize before the House today. The Independent Contractors Bill delivers to Mr Day the legislative change he has long sought.

In 2002, he published a document entitled Contract Bridge: Independent contracting—A solution to Australia’s $64bn unemployment problem. It is a fascinating insight into the premise that underpins the legislation before the House and the motivation of its biggest spruiker. Rather than reading the crib notes provided by the minister’s office, members opposite would have done well to read it themselves before participating in this debate. It gets off to a really rollicking start by extracting, with approval, a claim that the Australian industrial relations system:

... transfers a large part of the post 15 and 16 year old cohorts from workplace experience, notably apprenticeships, into educational institutions where they waste their time and everyone else’s.

Bizarrely, the extract continues:

No one has asked whether the drug problem, which seems to be getting worse amongst young people, is related to this phenomenon.

Mr Day says that independent contracting offers more than a glimmer of hope in addressing this awful situation.

Regrettably, the connection between fairness in the workplace and drug abuse by young people is not quite explained, nor does Mr Day say how less fairness might redress the scourge of drug abuse by young Australians. Far from just providing an implicit endorsement of this ridiculous claim, Mr Day goes even further. He says:

Maintaining the existing Award System – the principle cause of Australia’s consistently high levels of unemployment and all its associated ills (drugs, crime, violence, poor health, teenage pregnancy and even suicide) has been estimated at costing the economy over $60 billion.

We have heard a lot of absurd arguments from the other side in support of the Independent Contractors Bill, but not even one member of the government has been so stupid as to lend support to that farrago of absurdities.

What Mr Day does in Contract Bridge is say that independent contracting offers workers the privilege of giving up what he calls the ‘familiar contents of traditional employment’—you know: annual leave, long service leave, sick leave, maternity leave, superannuation and redundancy payments. That is what he means. He says that independent contracting allows workers to ‘jettison all the old compulsory entitlements, including unfair dismissal protection’. In Mr Day’s view, a positive aspect of independent contracting is ‘the understanding that either party may terminate the contract at any time, for any reason’. Mr Day also talks about other benefits for business, including the ability to avoid:

… the time-consuming practice of contributing to long service leave and superannuation schemes and, most importantly, the responsibility to deduct tax.

That is not much of a deal for workers: no annual leave, no long service leave, no sick leave, no maternity leave, no superannuation, no tax deductions and no job security. What a sell!

It is an especially bad deal when it is forced on vulnerable workers who are in no position to say no. That, sadly, is what the legislation before us will facilitate. Let us make no mistake about that. At the time that Contract Bridge was published, not even the then-Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, now the Minister for Health and Ageing and the Leader of the House, would lend it his support. Writing in the Adelaide Review in December 2002, the minister said:

... although the prescriptive nature of the award system undoubtedly inhibits economic growth, it is not necessarily “the principal cause of Australia’s consistently high rate of unemployment”, as Day maintains.

The minister was kind enough not to draw attention to Mr Day’s absurd and unsubstantiated claim that the award system costs the Australian economy $60 billion. This $60 billion claim is interesting. Is it $60 billion a day, a month or a year? Is it a parliamentary term? No-one seems to know. Who cares? The claim, like much else he has to say, is complete nonsense.

According to the minister for health, Mr Day’s vision is the replacement of employment law with self-employment and the replacement of labour law with contract law. It is a radical vision—one that is at the heart of the legislation before the House. In relation to employment matters, it is not just changes to the legislative regime governing independent contracting that Mr Day seeks.

In October 1996, Mr Day made a submission to a committee of this House advocating the full deregulation of youth and apprenticeship wages and recommending the medieval guild system as the model for a reformed skills training regime. In a further submission in November 1998 titled Slave Labour, Mr Day proposed that junior wage rates should be based on the value of the work to the person purchasing it and set by agreement between the employers and employees themselves. The previous member, the member for Rankin, talked about the Orwellian twist and here is another one: Mr Day said the current system enslaves workers. In a burst of hyperbole, Mr Day said:

... I feel compelled to liken the struggle for the liberalisation of the existing wage regime to the campaign against slavery and to invoke Ernest Howe’s description of it as “a bitter conflict with contemporary sentiment and interests of gigantic power”. Liberty. Freedom. The long struggle to break the shackles of workplace regulation goes on.

The title of Mr Day’s paper Slave Labour is appropriate, but not for the reasons he claims. With knowledge of Mr Day’s radical vision for Australia, as expressed in submissions to the parliament and published in a paper promoted on the Independent Contractors of Australia website, it is no surprise that the Independent Contractors Bill has been embraced so warmly by Mr Day.

Responding to some minor concessions for outworkers and owner-drivers announced by the government in early May, Mr Day said that an opportunity to revisit these concessions would present itself next year. He also said: ‘Everything is incremental, isn’t it?’ and ‘It’s always the first step that is the hardest.’ Doesn’t this language sounded familiar? I remembered someone uttering something similar about industrial relations changes, but I could not quite put my finger on it. It was not until I reviewed Senate Minchin’s words to the HR Nicholls Society in March that the penny dropped. In his private remarks Senator Minchin said:

This is evolution, not revolution, and there is still a long way to go ...

Mr Day could not have put it better himself.

The Independent Contractors Bill does not deliver everything that Mr Day and his fellow ideologues want, but for Mr Day it is a big step in the right direction. Mr Day is one of the people for whom the term ‘industrial ayatollah’ fits like a glove. This term was coined by Justice Michael Kirby in a speech delivered to mark the centenary of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. Justice Kirby said:

... there are those who see no future whatever in the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. For them, it should be closed down, lock, stock and barrel ...

…         …         …

Persons of such views tend to live in a remote world of fantasy, inflaming themselves by their rhetoric into more and more unreal passions, usually engaging in serious dialogue only with people of like persuasion.

After recounting the circumstances of his own niece, who was the victim of exploitation by an unscrupulous employer and who successfully sought redress in an industrial tribunal, Justice Kirby had this to say:

For many young people in casual work and at the lower end of the spectrum of employment in Australia, there is still vulnerability. If we are committed as a nation to the protection of human dignity in conditions of work and “reasonable and frugal comfort”, we still need those who will help the vulnerable. We need those who will assert their rights. But we also need those who will uphold and defend basic rights. The market works miracles, as we all know. But at the edges of the market there are those who lose out. To pretend that everyone has equal power in the market is to indulge in a miraculous self-deception.

It is this same miraculous self-deception that underpins this legislation. The people who will pay the price will not include millionaire property developers like Mr Day or any of us in here. Those who pay the price will be the workers forced into sham contracting arrangements, contractors in dependent contract positions, owner-drivers, outworkers and so on.

It is important the Australian people understand that this legislation did not just emerge from a vacuum. It has been planned—and planned very carefully. Like the Work Choices act, the Independent Contractors Bill is the product of a sustained push by very wealthy and powerful individuals who have long occupied the margins of economic debate in this country. Under the Howard government, they have been brought in from the margin—and they are in there, centrefield.

As expressed by my colleague the member for Perth, the key message delivered to workers affected by this bill is, ‘You are on your own’. I trust that, at the next election, that is the message workers will deliver to Liberal and National Party candidates who have so shamefully sold out the interests of workers. I especially hope that it is the message delivered to the out-of-touch Liberal candidate for Makin. And I trust that the Labor candidate for Makin at the next federal election will be the Salisbury mayor, Tony Zappia, a person of the people who has a track record superior to that of any mayor in this country. He is the best mayor of any local government authority in Australia. I see the parliamentary secretary for water, the member for Wentworth, is at the table. He would know Tony Zappia. He would know Colin Pitman, the world expert on stormwater retention who was employed by the Salisbury council. I hope Tony Zappia will be the Labor member for Makin after the next federal election.

I restate my opposition to the Independent Contractors Bill 2006 on behalf of the people of my electorate and I commend to the House the second reading amendment moved by the member for Perth. Labor stands with workers in opposition to this further attack on their rights at work, and we stand strong and still and resolute. (Time expired)

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