Martin Ferguson (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Transport, Roads and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to address the Committee today on the Building and Construction Industry Improvement Amendment (OHS) Bill 2007. In doing so, I also propose to make a few historical comments about the nature of the building and construction industry, about where we might have been 40 or 50 years ago, as referred to by the member for Corangamite, and about where we are today.

Can I say at the outset that the opposition will support this bill because it seeks to address deficiencies in the drafting of the original bill debated in 2005 and in doing so will make some improvement to occupational health and safety arrangements in the building and construction industry. I totally support that particular objective. But, having said that, I am also going to use this debate to raise some other matters that are not included in the bill and the motivation of the government when it comes to industrial relations, including occupational health and safety provisions.

Firstly, I am totally opposed to any suggestion that occupational health and safety provisions should be linked to broader industrial relations objectives by any party to the industrial relations process. The motivation of the labour movement has historically been and should continue to be genuine improvements in the prevention of workplace injury and illness before all other objectives. People should understand that, when surveys have historically been conducted of workers and their families about the key issues with respect to going to and from work, the No. 1 priority has not been the rate of pay and the conditions of employment. The No. 1 priority amongst ordinary working people has been health and safety at work. All workers want to do is go to work in the morning in the knowledge that they will work in a safe environment and will be able to return home that evening, without fear of being maimed and critically injured at work or—as in many instances, unfortunately, historically in the building and construction industry—killed on the job. So let us be clear at the outset: no-one is suggesting that health and safety be used as a bargaining tool in industrial relations, which is what the Howard government would like the Australian community to think.

We should also have a sharper focus to achieve stronger responsibilities and arrangements for rehabilitation and compensation for work related injury and disease. People should not forget that historically it was building workers who were exposed firsthand, more often than any other workers in the Australian community, to the problems of asbestosis. Only after decades of neglect did we finally start to front up to our responsibilities for what ordinary building workers and their families confronted on a day-to-day basis. For the Howard government to come here and suggest that any section of the Australian community would seek to use health and safety for industrial processes is just simply ignorance and a misunderstanding of the best intentions of all Australian workers and their families.

Having said that, it is about time people also understood that the process of industrial relations in the building and construction industry has been an evolutionary process. I agree with one thing the member for Corangamite said: yes, the building and construction industry has been a battleground for decades—for 50, 60 or 70 years—and why shouldn’t it have been? Let us deal with a few of the issues that building and construction industry workers and their families have had to confront over the history of building and construction in Australia. I might also say that on all international indicators the building and construction industry in Australia has one of the most productive workforces in the world. That is only because over the last 50 to 60 years we resolved some of the fundamental problems that confronted building and construction workers and their families historically. I know that firsthand because of my father. He might have ended up a politician but he actually started out as a bricklayer, having left school at 13.

I will go through some of the things that building and construction workers did not have when I was a child. These led to a campaign over decades to decasualise the building and construction industry, to give building workers and their families the entitlements of every other worker in Australia. Why wouldn’t building and construction workers have, for example, struggled to achieve ‘wet money’ when it rained rather than being stood down without any compensation? It was pretty tough when it rained over extended periods and building workers, without any social security backup, went home, having had to attend at work each day to be told, ‘There’s no work today because it’s raining.’ That made it pretty tough for building workers and their families.

Then there is the question of sick pay. They are regarded as casual workers. Injured workers get very little compensation for sick pay, let alone make-up pay in the case of a very serious long-term injury caused by an accident. Then there is the question of job and finish. Historically, yes, in some instances they did extend the lives of jobs because when a job was coming to completion they had to try and look at where the next start was. They wanted some continuity of income so as to maintain their capacity to put food on the tables for  their families and to educate them.

Members on the other side want to belittle the historical achievements of the Australian trade union movement and the building and construction industry. All I can say is that I am exceptionally proud of the fact that historically they have decasualised the building and construction industry and given building and construction industry workers the same rights that every other worker in Australia had.

Then we go to the issue of holiday pay. There was no holiday pay. If you were not at work, there was no pay. There was no long service leave because you went from one employer to another chasing jobs from month to month and from week to week. We had to achieve a portable long service leave scheme by which, throughout their working lives, they were able to accumulate an entitlement to annual leave and long service leave. We also had to achieve 26 weeks make-up pay in the case of a serious accident on the job.

The crowning achievement over the last 15 to 20 years has been superannuation. Superannuation was the privileged right of only a minority of the Australian community. On 1 July this year we achieved the 15th anniversary of the superannuation guarantee legislation, and the building industry was at the forefront of the campaign to make superannuation a universal right in Australia.

More importantly, not only is superannuation today a universal right of all Australian workers; it has also proven to be the most important savings vehicle ever put in place by any government of any political persuasion. The savings in those industry superannuation funds now represent $1 trillion over a period of 15 years. They are going to grow exponentially because of the capacity of well-managed industry funds to make wise investment decisions, not just to the benefit of their own members but to the benefit of the Australian community. Who do you think owns the privatised airports in Australia at the moment? Who do you think is investing in the BOOT schemes and the public-private partnerships with the New South Wales government to create new school infrastructure? Who do you think is investing in the toll roads that are resolving the problems of urban congestion in Australia? It is the industry superannuation schemes put in place as a result of the leadership of the building industry unions and the ACTU.

I simply want to say on the industrial relations front that it has been a long process of change, but the starting point for changing the culture in the building and construction industry would be giving building workers the entitlements of all other workers in the Australian community. The process of cultural change did not start under the Howard government. It actually started in 1993 under the Hawke and Keating Labor governments. They are the ones who actually put in place a process of workplace reform. Here is one of the booklets issued by the Australian government—a very young Minister for Industrial Relations, Laurie Brereton, appears in that booklet.

It was a program supported by employers. I refer, for example, to an employer of not insignificant standing in the Australian community, currently the Chairman of Queensland Rail. I quote what he said in that book—and I can understand why the member for Corangamite wants to pack up his books and run away now: because he does not like a few facts and a bit of an historical perspective. If he would just listen to what John Prescott said, because all the Howard government has done is build on the reforms that were started under Labor in government—reforms that meant, for example, that the Holmes a Court empire of John Holland was saved when Mr Holmes a Court unfortunately died all of a sudden.

Who put in place the program that built Toyota’s new project at Altona on time and on budget? Who built the second runway at Sydney airport ahead of time? Who built the new ABC headquarters in Melbourne ahead of time and ahead of budget? It was a program of industrial reform, put in place under the umbrella of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, and improvements in productivity that have continued to go from strength to strength over the last 15 to 20 years, because that is what everyone in the building and construction industry wanted.

That is why John Prescott said in this 1993 booklet Creating Productive Partnerships that the key to workplace reform in Australia was not legislation but a cultural change in the workplace. This is what John Prescott said:

I am convinced that effective enterprise agreements will arise from a process of evolution rather than one step of dramatic change.

How right he was. He then went on to state:

We need to be realistic and recognise that achieving fundamental change in people’s attitudes to work, productivity, workplace relationships and so on is a painstaking process.

It is about taking the building industry workforce with you; it is about taking the whole Australian community with you. Belting people up and sending them to jail does not change the culture. That is why the focus of this strategy was about enterprise agreements. It was about a step-by-step approach to actually reduce accidents on the job. Change was vital to the future, as was increasing the size of the skilled workforce—I wish this government had actually focused on that challenge and the unnecessary decline in traditional apprenticeship training in Australia. It was about best practice. It was about flexibility with respect to shiftwork. It was about how much overtime is appropriate. They were all issues that had to be confronted workplace by workplace. The building and construction industry is no longer about industry agreements; it is about project based enterprise agreements producing the results and the productivity.

I raise these issues today because what I believed then is what I believe today. If Labor wins the election, there is no return to centralised wage fixing in Australia. The only central component that would exist is what any decent employer in Australia currently accepts and accepts publicly. We require an industrial relations system which guarantees the weakest in the Australian community a fair set of wages and conditions—a core set of minimum conditions—side by side with a capacity to regularly review the minimum wages paid to those workers, predominantly women employed in industries such as child care, hospitality, cleaning and security. That is the nature of the system. That is because companies have to understand that they will not survive unless they are efficient, flexible and have a high-quality approach to guarantee their capacity to compete in the future.

As I have said, the days of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission setting wages and conditions centrally for all Australian workers are long gone. Labor put that in place. Enterprise bargaining has and will continue to deliver significant productivity gains in the construction industry. There should, appropriately, be minimum wages and conditions for the less well-off in the Australian community, who are predominantly women, and there is a role, as is currently the case, for a central agency to review and set those wages and conditions. Unions should continue to be involved where appropriate in enterprise bargaining—not just about wages and conditions but also about their enterprise being competitive and productive so as to guarantee the future of their employer in what is a very tough domestic and global market.

The issue of health and safety is only one of the issues. There is a multitude of issues that have to be confronted on an enterprise-bargaining front in the building and construction industry. Dare I suggest: the biggest barrier to an efficient building and construction industry in Australia at the moment is not industrial relations; it is actually a shortage of skilled workers. You can go to every city and regional community in Australia at the moment and you can find billions of dollars ready to be invested, but we cannot get the construction crews in place to actually undertake that investment. That is what is holding back Australia at the moment: lack of a skilled workforce because we failed to invest in our future with respect to the traditional trades. For example, in Western Australia at the moment construction costs are going up by about 1.7 per cent to two per cent per month—not because of industrial relations but because of a shortage of skilled labour in Australia.

So, yes, the industrial relations debate is important, but productivity in Australia is far bigger than industrial relations. It is about a range of issues, including how you deliver projects, the nature of the tendering process—whether, for example, you bundle on the Pacific Highway in three or four projects over a distance of 100 kilometres so that you have continuity of delivery and you maintain the same construction crews. It is all there to be done, but it requires a bit of government leadership in Australia.

Where are the Howard government on those practical fundamental issues? Missing in action. All we get is rhetoric about their hatred of the union movement, which has a proper place in the Australian community—the same place everyone else is entitled to in the Australian community, provided you know how to conduct yourself in a fit and proper way. That is what a mature Australian community expects. That is why, in the context of this bill, we say up front that we support improvements in the health and safety regime but also that health and safety should never be used for industrial purposes.

Productivity in the construction industry has come a long way over the last 20 to 30 years, but we can also make further progress if we confront some of the fundamental problems that are a real barrier to investment in building and construction in Australia at the moment—the types of issues that were actually delivered on by Labor in government in its process of construction industry reform Creating productive partnerships. It was that report that set the foundation for the productivity growth of the last 15 to 20 years in the building and construction and civil-engineering industries in Australia. To my way of thinking, this government has squandered the opportunities created by that foundation, and productivity has stalled. The building and construction industry knows it and so does the civil-engineering sector in Australia. Productivity in Australia has stalled since 2005. That is the truth of the matter.

I want to raise these issues because I know my responsibilities as a former President of the ACTU and because I am sick of the tired old rhetoric from the Howard government that every problem in Australia is down to union militancy. The building and construction industry shows that you can make progress if you are prepared to invest in doing the right thing. The projects speak for themselves. All the big projects underway in Australia at the moment have union input into them. They have adopted the culture of enterprise bargaining we put in place. Enterprise bargaining is about safety at work. It is about flexibility at work. It is about improving apprenticeship training at work. It is about how you go out of your way to guarantee a competitive place for the employer that you have the right to go to work for and produce a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

In conclusion, the federal Labor Party has in the past been, and continues to be, absolutely committed to a workplace culture that promotes productivity and competitiveness. In recent times Wal King, as the Chief Executive of Leighton Holdings, has had something to say about industrial relations. All I can say is that he wants to have a look in the mirror with respect to the performance of some of his managers over the years and how they have conducted themselves. Promoting a culture that is focused on long-term improvement in the quality of performance is far more important and enduring than simply appointing a policeman in the form of the Australian building and construction industry commission. I only wish it was so easy. You do not change the culture by having a policeperson standing at the gate each morning. You change the culture by a proper engagement at a workplace level, with people wanting to work together for the right reasons—to guarantee their future and their continuity of employment and a capacity of their employer to get further contracts in the future.

The opposition, I simply say, will support this bill. But I also state very clearly that it falls a long way short of addressing the reform that is necessary in the building and construction industry to put in place the next round of productivity growth that is needed to maintain a vibrant building and construction sector in Australia in order to guarantee the position of the Australian economy for the future. That is the challenge. The next wave of productivity growth in Australia is the only thing that will be the key to Australia’s future—not an industrial police officer but continuing to change the process of workplace reform in Australia by practical engagement, putting in the hard yards to take the community with you. I commend the bill to the House, but I say to the Australian community: confront the real issues, not the side issues based on ideology and hatred. (Time expired)

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