Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industrial Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2007-2008. I do so having listened to the Assistant Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, who is a good bloke, but I disagree with him on a number of matters. It was interesting that the assistant minister chose not to make any reference to either the environment or water resources, but I do accept that this bill provides the opportunity for members to speak on broad matters. Nonetheless, it was instructive to see the assistant minister not refer to his portfolio for 20 minutes.

We are of course in the middle of a very significant debate in this country. We are in the midst of a critical debate about where we want the country to go and what sort of society we would like to live in. I think the industrial relations debate, at least, is certainly a significant topic, a significant area of public policy that provides voters with a choice as to what sort of society they wish to live in, the way in which they would like to treat citizens and the way in which they would like to be treated in return. On any reckoning, the government has, by its introduction and enactment of Work Choices legislation at the beginning of this term, really explained to working Australians that it has very little regard for them at all. There is no doubt that the government has sought only this week to mitigate the adverse reaction to Work Choices by introducing amendments to the legislation, but Labor contends that that is not going to fundamentally alter the problems inherent in the Work Choices legislation.

The fact is that the Work Choices legislation was introduced after the election without any notice to the electorate before the election. In September 2004 the Prime Minister announced the industrial relations policies of the government, and there were no references to the major provisions of Work Choices legislation that was then introduced subsequent to the election. So the Prime Minister, having discovered that he was a beneficiary of an election result which provided him with a majority in both houses of parliament, chose then to introduce legislation in the area of industrial relations that did not resemble in any way the policies that were put to the electorate in September during the election campaign. The Australian public, as they will from time to time, chose to respond in kind by making it very clear to this government that these laws are unfair, extreme and, indeed, unacceptable to this country.

As I say, there has been a political stunt by the Prime Minister and the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations this week to pretend that the fundamentals of the legislation introduced into the parliament in December 2005 have altered and that all of the nasty bits, all of the pointy parts of the legislation that would adversely affect working Australians, have disappeared. That is not the case. The efforts to amend the Work Choices legislation will not alter the fact that the prime reason for the introduction of such legislation was to ensure that the balance was shifted radically towards one group in society and against the other group, if you like—that is, shifted in favour entirely towards employers and against and away from employees. Any tinkering that may occur from this point on—and the tinkering that has occurred this week—will not, in any way, mitigate in any fundamental sense the adverse effects of the legislation.

I think the Australian public understand that. I think that they are aware that the Prime Minister, for more than 30 years, has had an obsession about critically weakening employee organisations that are registered pursuant to the Workplace Relations Act. These are unions that have been representing working people in this country for more than a century. I think it is common knowledge that the Prime Minister has had an obsession with and an enmity towards those organisations. It is almost an initiation test for anyone who wants to succeed in the Howard government to show how much they hate unions if they want to be promoted into the executive or into the cabinet—and this is not going to change. I think the Australian people understand his views, which have been well known for more than 30 years. It is a little late now to attempt to convince the voting public that the Prime Minister has had an epiphany and has woken up recently and thought: ‘Hold on a second, I think I have been a little unfair here. I reckon those unions deserve to be at least recognised as representatives of some working people—if employees choose to belong to them. I think it is only fair that employees have a right to bargain collectively in good faith with their employer.’

What is interesting about the whole notion of collective bargaining is that, if 50 per cent of the workforce in the United States wish to bargain collectively, they do so. The same is the case in Canada, in New Zealand and in the United Kingdom. The right to collectively bargain is enshrined in probably all of those countries that we see as being comparable to our own in economic development and cultural association. We are the odd one out in having legislation dictated that prevents employees bargaining collectively with their employer, even if a majority wish to do so. I accept—and Labor’s policy dictates—that if a majority of employees do not wish to bargain collectively, they will not have to do so. An employer would not have to bargain collectively if it were not determined by a majority of the workforce to do so. I think that is only fair. I think there has got to be a critical mass of employees that wishes to do so.

We have said that there should be a set of decent awards to underpin people’s employment conditions. We cannot always rely upon the market to hold up people’s wages sufficiently. There are occasions on which, and certain sectors in which, that will occur more often than not, and that is a good thing. But there are occasions also in economic downturns or in certain sectors where there has to be some floor. The floor of employment conditions is not only so that employees will be treated decently but also so that employers will know what the minimum is.

Having listened to the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations talk about his fake fairness test, I think it would strike fear into the hearts of many small businesses. The amount of regulation that has now been placed on top of already existing industrial relations legislation and small business regulation is going to frighten small businesses. This notion that you can set up an army of industrial policemen across the country to scrutinise every individual statutory contract in this manner is unheard of. It never occurred before Work Choices. For 10 years AWAs were permissible under the Workplace Relations Act 1996—with a ‘no disadvantage’ test I might add—but that was stripped away by the Howard government as soon as they had a majority in the Senate. But there was not the massive bureaucratic overlay that is now being introduced by the government. Small businesses should be concerned because it is overregulation. It will make it more difficult for many businesses—particularly those of a small and medium size—to enter into agreements in that area. Labor is opposed to Australian workplace agreements. We do not support them.

That is not to say that there are not some AWAs out of which people are doing okay or doing well. There are some industries where the demand for employment is so great that employees could spit on their hands and shake the hand of their employer and that would be a strong enough contract. They will not need written contracts because the demand for them is so great. No-one can undermine an employee’s employment conditions if the demand for their labour is so great. In the mining industry you will see that demand for fly-in fly-out engineers, but that is not as a result of AWAs. That is as a result of a particular set of high skills that are scarce and of people finding themselves, for example, in remote areas of the country and undertaking work with that set of skills.

I understand that there are certain AWAs that pay above the market rate—of course there will be some. Certainly managers who are on AWAs are treated reasonably well more often than not. But the thing that the government seems not to have understood, at least until the polling got really bad—whether it should be believed or not is another question—is that AWAs have been used to subvert minimum conditions in the last 18 months. Statutory individual contracts are being used to hurt the lowest paid in our community: cleaners, labourers in certain industries and many childcare workers. We are finding that low-paid workers are going below what was a minimum industry standard and those instruments are being used to strip away penalty rates for people doing shift work, weekend work and excessive overtime.

We have heard a lot from the government about this notion of the common law contract and of a company that provided 45c compensation per hour, but you really have to look at the nature of a business, whatever it is, and if the business employs people on night shifts or across the weekends or excessively works people beyond their ordinary hours then those people should be compensated so they are not worse off. Clearly, if there was any removal of conditions of employment, there would be less compensation required if those particular conditions were not being used because of the nature of their work.

But what has been happening with AWAs since Work Choices was introduced is that low-paid workers have been stripped of penalty rates, overtime conditions, public holidays and other conditions, making fundamentally worse not only their pay but their conditions of employment, their quality of life and their control at their workplace. These things happened. They happened under the watch of the Howard government and they happened because of the deliberate enactment of legislation that was designed to do exactly that, to cut those conditions. For the last 18 months the Prime Minister has been defending the consequences of that particular piece of legislation. He got up in question time and said that nothing was going on, that nothing adverse was happening to people or that it was something that had to happen. It was a case of, ‘If you want to have a strong economy, you have to have some losers as well as some winners and, so long as there are more winners than losers, who cares?’ That was the sort of attitude that was being displayed by the Prime Minister.

Of course, that is not the case. You do not have to choose between fairness and flexibility. You do not have to choose between having a productive economy and fair employment conditions for Australian workers. You can have both. The government believed that you could not and now they have found themselves in the position this week where they have chosen to introduce a piece of legislation to mitigate the effects of Work Choices. We will support that legislation because, in certain circumstances, it will help some people. I believe that. I think this change has occurred because of the pressure that has been brought to bear upon the government by the opposition and certainly by the public’s concerns for working Australian families. But we should support the legislation because any improvement, however negligible, should be supported. It would be playing politics if we were to oppose it.

The fact is, though, it is not a sufficient remedy to fix the problem. To do that you have to repeal the legislation for Work Choices as a whole. It is not enough to repeal the name. It is not enough to banish the title from the lexicon of the government. You have to repeal the legislation fundamentally. What has happened here is that we have again had the typical Orwellian approach by the Prime Minister, who tends to say one thing and do another, who tends to call things one thing and mean another. We have had the Prime Minister and the government choose to say, ‘Well, let’s make sure we banish the words “Work Choices” from all of the advertising’—and this is after spending $55 million of taxpayers’ money on government propaganda to promote the legislation. That is what we have witnessed over the last 15 months—$55 million of taxpayers’ money telling us how great Work Choices is. And now the government are going to spend millions more saying this time they really mean it. But it was instructive that, in continuing to spend the money, the government had to intrude and effectively say to its call centres assisting people with their industrial relations inquiries that they were not to use the words ‘Work Choices’, although the Prime Minister used to cry ‘Work Choices’ from the rooftops. Call centre employees are now forced not only not to say ‘Work Choices’ but also to deny that they ‘do not know’, when they are asked a question, even if they ‘do not know’ about the legislation. Incrementally, these sorts of things begin to weigh heavily upon the public. I think the public are amazingly tolerant and quite patient, but they will not accept a government that treats them so shabbily and with contempt. I think the government have shown their capacity in that regard, and particularly in the area of industrial relations because of their ideological blind spot.

If you had listened to the government and even if you had read some of the media reports, you would have thought that AWAs covered 95 per cent of employment contracts in Australia, not five per cent. Seriously, if you had listened to or read some of the media commentators’ comments on Labor’s IR policy, and certainly if you had listened to the rhetoric of the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and the Prime Minister, you would have thought that 95 per cent of employment arrangements were made under the instrument of an AWA. But five per cent is the total; 95 per cent is the remainder. Ninety-five per cent, which I would say is an overwhelming majority, are under either collective agreements, union agreements or non-union agreements, which is Labor’s policy, or common law contracts, either intersecting with an award or being above an award. Those are the bulk of the conditions of employment; they are wrapped up in those conditions, not in AWAs. I think the failure of this government is to not understand that in the end the Australian people expect fairness in their workplace. They expect the government to of course run an economy and make sure it is productive, but also to make sure that we all share in that and that our citizens are not treated badly, either in the workplace or beyond the workplace. I think the government has failed at that. I will talk more specifically tomorrow on the bill that has been introduced in the House, but in the end this particular fake fairness test will not convince any member of the Australian public.

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