Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Minister for Workforce Participation) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the amendments be agreed to.

I would like to thank the honourable members of the House and the Senate for their input in the debate on the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007. For the information of the opposition, all of the government is 100 per cent behind this bill, and any one of us would stand here and pass these amendments. I am pleased to note that this bill as amended in the Senate was returned to the House today for this place’s approval. In addition to parliamentary debates, this bill was the subject of a Senate standing committee inquiry, and the final report was handed down last week. I also thank the committee for their work. During the debates we have heard a range of views about a matter that is at the heart of Australian work values: fairness.

The members of the opposition whom we have heard from cannot accept that workers and their bosses can make agreements themselves without union involvement. We happen to think that they can. We have heard much comment that fairness is obtuse and too hard to understand. Quite obviously we do not agree. We have heard that, without reams of prescriptive detail, workers and their bosses will find it impossible to inject fairness into their own agreements. Quite obviously that is patent nonsense. And yet, when the government moved amendments to strengthen the information requirements so that the Workplace Authority Director must gazette a fact sheet about such things as the standard and protected award conditions, the opposition voted against them.

This government is serious about providing genuine protections and ensuring that everybody knows where they stand. Therefore, the bill leaves no doubt about what constitutes fairness and that the overriding consideration in determining fairness is the value of compensation provided to employees. Importantly, it does so in a way that maintains the flexibility for workers and businesses to reach agreements that suit their particular needs. Flexibility in the workplace is going to see our participation rise and allow all Australians to have their family-work balance needs met.

This bill reflects the fact that the government is listening to the community. We have responded to concerns about the treatment of award conditions in agreement making. We have also been prepared to address technical issues raised during the Senate inquiry. The government moved amendments in the Senate to clarify that employees in industries or occupations that were traditionally covered by state awards also have the benefit of the fairness test. The amendments also clarify what must be taken into account when calculating compensation where agreements fail the fairness test. Government amendments made in the Senate also set out how the fairness test operates when there is a transmission of a business. This means that if a workplace agreement has been lodged and has commenced then the Workplace Authority Director must still apply the fairness test, regardless of a subsequent transmission of business.

The government also accepted amendments moved by Senator Fielding. These amendments extend the length of the period of preservation of redundancy entitlements where an agreement is unilaterally terminated by the employer from 12 months to 24 months. I would like to remind the House that we amended the legislation late last year to ensure that redundancy provisions in agreements were preserved for a period of 12 months after such agreements were unilaterally terminated by employers. These amendments were not supported by the Labor Party. This bill provides important protections for employees in agreement making while ensuring that the fundamentals of the government’s workplace relations reforms remain in place.

Before finishing, I would just like to return once more to the fact sheets, which have caused Labor so much excitement and interest. When you consider ALP policy, you can see that the statements made by the opposition are in fact completely hypocritical. Under Labor’s national employment standards—in fact, on page 8, under ‘Forward and fairness’—employers will be obliged to provide all new employees with a fair work information statement, which contains prescribed information about the employee’s rights and entitlements at work, including the right of the employee to choose whether to be or not to be a member of a union and where to go for information and assistance. It is quite explicit. It is one of the minimum legislative standards that they would put in place if they were in government. The idea is that employers must supply their employees with an information statement. Our concern about that, though, is that it is in fact a disguised effort to make sure that employees end up with a lot of information about how to join a union. We would be concerned about the pressure that would go along with all of that if it was once again a union dominated workplace. I strongly recommend these amendments to the Workplace Relations Amendment (A Stronger Safety Net) Bill 2007. I commend the amendments to the House. (Time expired)

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