Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I actually thought that the government might have said something more to defend their intransigence over these Senate amendments, but astonishingly they seem to have run out of argument. The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and Deputy Prime Minister has consistently repeated the importance of the intergovernmental agreement, yet in her own legislation she has failed to include some of the provisions that were negotiated in this intergovernmental agreement. Apparently she is so wedded to this idea of the intergovernmental agreement—and she is using that as a further reason for refusing to even look at these sensible Senate amendments—yet once we take a closer look at her implementation of the intergovernmental agreement into legislation in this place it is revealed that she has failed to follow the intergovernmental agreement in a number of areas. The Deputy Prime Minister has failed to include in the legislation a requirement to provide the parliament with an annual report on the progress and the achievements of the new authority. The Deputy Prime Minister comes into this place, announces that it is impossible for this parliament to change the intergovernmental agreement and yet we find that she herself has not even followed it in preparing her own legislation.

It is outrageous arrogance for this government to come in and just expect the parliament to rubber stamp whatever it has decided in consultation with fellow state Labor governments. It is outrageous arrogance to think that the Senate or this House has no role to play in improving legislation. Why even have the Senate if the government is just going to sit down with its state Labor mates—with the exception of Western Australia—hammer out an agreement and then come back to this place and say, ‘You have to accept this agreement or the whole process stalls’, even though the government has not even accepted all of the intergovernmental agreement in preparing its own legislation.

The Safe Work Australia Bill 2008 is fundamentally flawed. It is fundamentally flawed because it refuses to outline the objects of the new body, it refuses to grant independence to the social partners—in this case the ACTU and ACCI—and it refuses to give them any leeway to nominate their own representatives to this body. The amendments restore effective levels of representation to employers and employees and they introduce a balanced voting process which is designed to engage the very people who need to be engaged when it comes to occupational health and safety—that is, the people who actually occupy workplaces in Australia. It is workers and employers, not people who sit around in legislatures, who are not at the front line of this. We cannot legislate for safety in Australian workplaces ad nauseam without buying in from employers and employees. These amendments also ensure that workers and industry are effectively and ably represented. They free these bodies from unnecessary ministerial interference and they free the CEO from unnecessary interference also. They establish an audit committee to examine the finances and the expenditure of Safe Work Australia, something that you would think this government, which talks about accountability, might support—but, no, apparently not in this instance. The Deputy Prime Minister just continues to hide behind her commitment to this intergovernmental agreement as some sort of catch-all for the fact that this parliament apparently has no role whatsoever in the legislative process.

When you have an alliance between the opposition, the Greens and the Independents in the Senate and when they are supported in what they have decided to do by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Australian Council of Trade Unions—a body not necessarily noted for its friendliness towards the Liberal and National parties in this country—then it takes a particular kind of arrogance and a particular stubbornness just to say: ‘We will not even entertain any of these amendments. We refuse to go back to the states and talk to them about this even though we have information that the states might not necessarily mind. All we will do is come in here, insist that we are right and that the rest of the world is wrong and we will refuse to countenance these sensible amendments’—amendments that make the Deputy Prime Minister’s legislation better.

See this speech in context