Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare) Share this | Hansard source

As the previous speaker, the member for Canberra said, the Independent Contractors Bill 2006 and the Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (Independent Contractors) Bill 2006 are part of a set of legislation that also involves the Work Choices and the Welfare to Work legislation. It is part of the government’s extreme ideologically driven attack on the valuable protections that used to exist for workers in our industrial relations system. It is part of the race to the bottom for workers’ pay and conditions. It allows—indeed it encourages—independent contractors to compete by taking pay cuts and losing the protections that should be available to them when they are in an employee-employer relationship.

Labor support any person who wants to set up a small business or to be a genuine independent contractor. What we do not support is a system that pretends it is about flexibility but is actually about pay cuts and cuts to conditions of workers. This legislation comes at a time when the families of these workers are already under enormous financial pressure, particularly in the case of owner-drivers. Owner-drivers may well have taken out an enormous loan to have bought their truck in the first place. Across the board these workers are facing mortgage interest rate rises. They have borrowed more than ever before for their homes, so any little change in their financial situation puts enormous pressure on their ability to repay their ever-increasing mortgages. That is why we are seeing greater rates of mortgage defaults than ever before. We are also seeing increases in fuel prices on top of that. In this instance they are affecting owner-drivers more than other workers, but they are obviously affecting all of the workers who are covered by this legislation.

So you have an ideological position from the government that is all about supporting employer choice and employer control over their workers and not at all about supporting the workers generally and, in this case, some of the most vulnerable workers in our community. The Prime Minister talked about work and family balance as a ‘barbecue stopper’ issue. The provisions in this legislation will mean that people are forced to work longer hours to make the same amount of money and that owner-drivers will be forced to drive for unsafe periods of time and, as many of them have felt they had to in the past, to take illegal stimulant drugs to stay on the road to meet their basic expenses. This legislation makes all of that so much worse. The idea that the Prime Minister is in any way interested in work-family balance or indeed in supporting families more generally is really given the lie not just by the Work Choices legislation and by Welfare to Work but also by this Independent Contractors Bill.

The previous speaker spoke of a constituent of hers, a young woman with a mild intellectual disability who was given a contract to sign and signed it. We do not know how many cases like this one there are in the community. If people who are facing this situation, such as cleaners or outworkers, were really good at reading contracts, perhaps they would be lawyers and not cleaners. A lot of people in the cleaning industry and in the outworker industry in particular have English as a second language and do not have a particularly high educational attainment. That is obviously not true of all of them, but there is a significant proportion for whom English is a second language. The idea that they will negotiate the details of contracts with unscrupulous employers and do okay out of it under this new legislation is absolutely fanciful.

The government is quite happy to talk about the sense of responsibility that people should feel and that they should and must discharge their responsibilities as Australian citizens. What about the responsibility that an employer has to a genuine employee? Is it not the case that someone who employs a worker should be responsible for basic things like paying their superannuation and ensuring that, if they have an accident in the workplace, they will be covered for that? This is one more way that costs that should rightly be borne by genuine employers for their genuine employees are to be shifted onto those employees or onto the general public. They are borne by individual employees if they have an accident and they go from being able to support a family to requiring the support of their family. The family picks up the caring bill and the public hospital system picks up the rehabilitation bill. We have a WorkCover system for a very good reason: by each contributing a small amount to cover their employees, employers are able to minimise the costs to themselves, to the individual employees and to the Australian community. Why would we retreat from a system that insures us against the sorts of terrible workplace injuries that we see? The same goes for superannuation. Why would we want to retreat from a system that has a small to moderate contribution from employees and employers over time so that people have a decent retirement income to live on when the time comes?

I think there is pretty common agreement that the bill is likely to force people into sham independent contracting agreements; that their entitlements, their conditions and their protections will be reduced; and that the laws will tear away protections that people have taken for granted for some time. Basically, the government are saying: ‘Well, too bad. You’re on your own.’ They are saying it to workers generally with the Work Choices legislation but in this instance with this legislation they are saying it to some of Australia’s most vulnerable workers. If you look at outworkers in particular, there was unanimous bipartisan agreement on the committee that looked at this legislation that part 4 of the bill is not going to work. It is contrary to the intention in the bill’s explanatory memorandum and it will in fact undermine existing conditions and make things worse. It will effectively render outworker protections that exist under state laws largely ineffective. The Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union made this case very strongly, but it was not just the union. The Victorian government agreed, and obviously they were pretty successful in convincing a bipartisan group of parliamentarians. What is the point of having committees that inquire into bills if when you actually get bipartisan agreement—and I keep stressing: bipartisan agreement that one piece of the legislation is seriously flawed—the government persists in ignoring all sensible advice from all sources in order to continue on an ideological jihad against the protections currently afforded to ordinary Australian workers?

Owner-drivers are seriously affected by this legislation. These people have enormous debts to start with: the debts that they incur to buy their trucks to set up. There are significant protections in state legislation for the very reason that keeping owner-drivers safe is not just good for them and their families but vitally important for safety on our roads.

Debate interrupted.

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