Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will begin by saying how outraged I am that we are once again seeing an abuse of the parliamentary process by this government. What we are seeing here today is, once again, Australian workers having their rights attacked by this government, which is taking an arrogant and sneaky approach. When the government first brought out its Work Choices legislation, I was amongst all my colleagues on this side of the House who said: ‘Where were these proposals in the lead-up to the election? Where were these proposals when the Australian people were casting their vote?’ Of course, they were nowhere. In the sneaky approach which we have learned to grow accustomed to from the Howard government, they were nowhere. The government was silent on these issues until it thought it could sneak the changes through after the election.

What we see here today is that, as a result of the lack of due process when the government passed the Work Choices legislation, there has been a need for so many amendments that the government has now tacked them onto the Independent Contractors Bill 2006. The government does not want to draw attention to the flaws in Work Choices, so it has tacked amendments onto the attacks on independent contractors in this legislation.

I say to the government: if you actually want to fix this legislation, it is no good just tinkering around the edges. If you want to fix this legislation, I will tell you exactly what you should do, and that is what we are proposing to do: tear this legislation up and replace it with legislation which restores unfair dismissal laws, which protects the components of Australian employees’ take-home pay and which restores a role for the independent umpire.

I would like to particularly focus on an area of recent debate within my own electorate. It will be no surprise to members of this parliament, as I have raised this issue before and I will continue to raise it, but I think there are some really important lessons that we learnt out of the recent ordeal at Radio Rentals in my electorate, at Prospect. It was during this recent conflict that the spotlight was really shone upon the problems involved in protecting employees’ redundancy pay. I note that schedule 3 of these amendments regards the protection of redundancy entitlements in certain circumstances.

I am actually glad that the government are finally acknowledging that there is a major problem here, because that is the problem that we saw recently in Prospect. I will remind members opposite of what happened at Radio Rentals in Prospect. The collective agreement of the Prospect Radio Rentals service technicians was terminated earlier this year. Following this termination, three long-serving technicians, who also happened to be union activists, with 30, 26 and 17 years of service with the company respectively, were made redundant. As a result of this, one of the technicians lost $86,000 in redundancy pay. There was outrage within my community. Within the community of Adelaide there was much media attention focused on this matter.

Whilst I am pleasantly surprised that the government are finally admitting there is a problem—that is certainly not the line that the Minister Assisting the Minister for Workplace Relations, Minister Hockey, put on Radio 5AA when he denied that there was a problem and denied any responsibility for what was going on with these technicians—the solution that the government have put forward is inadequate.

The government argues that schedule 3 will give protection for employees in circumstances where there may be a risk that they will lose their redundancy entitlements once their agreement passes its nominal expiry date and the employer moves to terminate it. But the problem is that the entitlement is overridden where the employer and employee make a new workplace agreement. The problem also is that the obligation is on the employer to inform employees that they are still entitled to the old redundancy clause. Further, employers can offer a ‘take it or leave it’ AWA with no redundancy provisions which, on the amendments, will override the redundancy entitlement.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I think you will see, just in this one schedule, the flaws that come about when you rush through legislation, when you do not follow due process and when you try and sneak attacks on Australian workers past the public and past this parliament. I spoke against the independent contractors legislation when it was before the House originally and my opposition remains. (Time expired)

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