Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration) Share this | Hansard source

For travel to South Australia, as the member for Adelaide has raised, apparently the safety issue ceases to apply. Apparently it does not apply if you make it to Queensland. If you go on a really long drive and make it to Western Australia it does not apply there. I can understand that there is probably going to be a bit of difference because you do not get people travelling interstate to Tasmania by truck all that often. But what you do have is a situation where the safety argument is real, because if you drive rates down below a certain level then make no mistake about what will happen. You will put people in a situation where the way to make ends meet, the way to be able to afford the fuel and to continue to repay their debt and to service their debt, will be to travel more quickly and to sleep less. That is dangerous for those individuals. It is dangerous for everybody else on the road. But the argument is not limited to the road. It is dangerous if you have got an electrician who, in order to cut below reasonable rates, ends up in a situation where they have to work far more quickly than is a safe pace. It matters in a whole range of areas where you want to have thresholds so that you do not, under any circumstances, compromise safety.

The way you have been able to avoid safety being compromised in many of these industries has been to have minimum safe rates. They do not exist in every industry; they do not exist in every state. But from time to time arguments are made that we need to have minimum safe rates. That is the principle. Now why would it be that that principle only applies in New South Wales and Victoria? Why would it be that only that is carved out, and that not only does it only apply in those areas but it only applies for a little while into the future? The answer is simple. The government wanted to get talkback radio off their back, so they decided to embark on a temporary compromise: to give a win for the time being to the TWU—which has championed the cause—but not to actually apply broadly the principles that were the basis of the campaign.

There is no attempt to acknowledge in this legislation that safety is an important issue for independent contractors. There is no attempt to deal with that at all. What we have got is a determination from the government to reduce the costs for head contractors. For head contractors when they are in a situation of employment, the way the government has gone about this has been through the Work Choices legislation. The government has also decided that where the head contractor is in a straight contracting position, rather than an employment relationship, it will have the race to the bottom there. But where we had in Work Choices some concept of a minimum rate of sustenance for employees, what this legislation does is say, ‘No such minimum rates will apply to contractors.’

When I say that no contractors were calling for that, that is not quite true. There was one: the head of the Independent Contractors of Australia. When I served with you, Mr Deputy Speaker Barresi, on the employment committee we had the Independent Contractors of Australia appear before us. It might have been at the Perth hearing; I am not sure which hearing it was. I remember asking the question, ‘How many members do you have?’ And we had a pause. Apparently asking a representative of an organisation how many members he has is a difficult question. The response came back, and I am paraphrasing, ‘We don’t work as a membership organisation. That is not what we try to do.’ I said, ‘You must have some members. How many do you have?’ And after question No. 3 we eventually got a shrugging of the shoulders and, ‘Well, it’s in the hundreds.’

The government wants to turn a blind eye to any trade union. We have the TWU, which has been representing owner-drivers, independent contractors in the transport industry, since the 1920s. We have the trade union movement and, sure, the majority of the trade union movement members are employees. But name one small business organisation that has more small business members than the Transport Workers Union. Name collectively a group of business organisations that have more small business members than the ACTU. It does not mean that the ACTU is the sole voice; I would not say that for a minute. But here is a voice that is disregarded when every other organisation is littler, and the principal advocate for this bill is just minuscule: ‘in the hundreds’. I am not sure what that meant. I think it meant: ‘I really don’t want to ’fess up. Can you do me a favour and end the questioning there?’

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