David Fawcett (Wakefield, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Even now, as I am speaking, the opposition are interjecting and trying to cut off the opportunity for this debate. I will use the words ‘work choices’ because Work Choices is legislation that this government brought in to benefit Australian families, Australian workers and the Australian economy. It is disappointing that, despite the many benefits of these changes, there has been such a negative fear campaign focused on only one or two elements of them. What people do not recognise through these fear campaigns is the broad structural changes that have given us a national system of industrial relations. It is a system that has given us choice. Unlike the Labor Party, this legislation actually provides for freedom of association. It offers a choice of AWAs, union collective agreements, non-union collective agreements, union greenfields agreements or employer greenfields agreements. It enables unions to be parties to collective agreements. It enables union officials to be bargaining agents for employees. It maintains the rights of union officials to enter workplaces and it maintains the rights for unions to take lawful industrial action. I have to tell you, not all of those choices and not all of those rights exist under what is being proposed by the opposition.

Some of the commentary that is appearing in the media now highlights that the broad structural changes and the details about even these areas in question are benefiting Australian society in terms of the number of jobs created and the number of long-term unemployed who are now able to move into the workplace. That is because employers, for the first time in a long time, have the confidence to say, ‘We’ll give this person a shot, we’ll give them a chance at a job, because we know if it doesn’t work out that we can make other arrangements,’ as opposed to leaving that person in the long-term unemployment queue for even longer.

So what is this fairness test? The fairness test is a structure that we are putting in place basically to reassure people that the vast majority of employers are doing the right thing. It means that there will be an independent umpire who reviews workplace agreements to make sure that employees receive fair compensation whenever that agreement removes or modifies protected award conditions, such as penalty rates or overtime loadings—which have been the focus of much of the fear campaign that has been put out there. The starting point would generally be monetary compensation, and that would equate to things like the agreement I spoke about earlier, at the subsidiary of Lufthansa, which put in place a bonus scheme where, under the AWA, people in fact had the potential to earn significantly more money than they did under their collective agreement.

But it is not necessarily just monetary things that people are looking for. I alluded before to the example of those people of Wakefield who I know have been happy to say, ‘I’ll work under conditions that don’t have overtime payments, on a weekend, because that gives me flexibility during the week.’ If they are happy to sign up for something like that and say to the independent umpire, ‘Yes, if the flexibility means being able to balance my work and family life, being able to pick up my children from school or sport or to care for my elderly relatives, I’m happy to work on a weekend with no overtime,’ then that is an agreement that they should be able to make with their employer without a third party coming in and saying that that is unfair. The Workplace Authority will be able to conduct the fairness test and say, ‘This has been offered, you’ve accepted, and we recognise that that is fair,’ even though the monetary advantage is not there.

The fairness test will cover employees with a base salary of under $75,000 on an Australian workplace agreement and it will cover all collective agreements. This also gives some certainty to people who come in to work for the larger chain stores, for example. People often talk about the fast food industry, concerned about what might be offered to young people. Because the agreements will have to be certified as fair, there is higher degree of certainty that what will be offered to a young person is not going to disadvantage them.

This fairness test is really the government saying that what we have put in place has provided advantage to the whole Australian economy—more jobs, more people in work. We recognise and we hear that there is concern in the community because of the fear campaign that has been put out there. So this test is us responding to that in an appropriate way—not to limit freedom, not to limit the endeavours of small businesses who have often gone out on a limb and invested their own time and money to create the opportunity for other people to work. We are addressing this fear and concern by putting in place a framework that guarantees these conditions so that we will get the benefits that were the intent and, in practice, the outcomes of the Work Choices legislation. We are putting in place a framework to address the fear that has arisen in much of the Australian public because of the very misleading campaign that has been run by the ACTU and the Labor Party.

That brings me to my last point, on choice. Who do the Australian people want to choose to be speaking here? Who do they want to choose to run the country in the future? A government that is prepared to take the hard decisions that have made a significant difference. For example, GST—that was a significant decision, a significant change in the way that Australia collected revenue, and it was criticised by members opposite who said it was a day that would go down in history as being the undoing of modern Australian society. Yet now there is not a state government in this country that would seek to reverse the GST system because of the significant growth and revenue base it has given them to deliver things like health care, education and policing under the state system. So, despite the criticisms that this government has received, it has been prepared to take those hard decisions.

This industrial relations decision recognises the fact that, in the private sector workforce, some 85 per cent of people are not members of a union. They have recognised in practice that they can negotiate with their employer, they can be an independent contractor and the majority of employers are looking to do the right thing, particularly with the ageing of the population, as we face a shortage of not only skilled workers but even unskilled workers. In the area of Virginia and in the manufacturing areas of Elizabeth and Salisbury in South Australia, I am speaking to employers who are looking for more workers. I passed a packing shed the other day in Virginia and they had a sign out the front saying: ‘Stop! Workers required.’ Now, these employers are going to do the right thing by their workers because they need them. If you are a market gardener, you cannot actually plant a crop if you do not know whether you will have workers to harvest the crop, particularly crops that are time sensitive; for example, some of the organically certified crops are very time sensitive for harvesting. So those employers will do the right thing by their employees.

So this government is seeking to empower the majority of Australian people, who are fair and decent people, both employers and employees, to get on with running their businesses and growing the wealth of this nation which enables us to fund the health and education systems we have as well as balance work and family. We are not seeking to impose the view of a very small group—and I note again that union membership in the private sector is only 15 per cent, yet they dominate the Australian Labor Party. Later this year, if the Australian public choose the Australian Labor Party to govern this country, they are in essence going to be choosing the union movement to govern this country again, with all of the thuggery that goes along with that, with the restriction of choice and the lack of freedoms that have extended well into our history and that have caused some of the worst disputation and loss of productivity we have seen. I support this bill and I commend it to the House.

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