Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to talk on the Fair Work Bill 2008. As the Leader of the Opposition said last week, the coalition will not oppose the government’s Fair Work Bill 2008 as we believe the Rudd-Swan government has achieved a mandate for its industrial relations reforms. However, we do have concerns with the consistency of the government’s message over the last two years and the government’s ability to implement this legislation in the current context of a global financial crisis, given its current poor record of economic management.

Industrial relations has always been a controversial topic in Australian politics and has often been associated with tit-for-tat responses by alternate governments. On 20 November 2007, the Prime Minister, then the opposition leader, said that working families hated Work Choices and AWAs and they wanted to get rid of them. This was a view replicated by Gary Dunbier of the New South Wales Teachers Federation, who said, ‘The Howard government’s Work Choices represents the most pernicious legislation we have ever encountered.’ However, on this day, last year, Ross Gittens wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that economists ‘will be sorry to see the retreat from Work Choices’. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald on 25 November stated:

Meanwhile, the mining industry is already railing against the draft workplace laws.

Miners say the legislation is more about resuscitating an ailing union movement, not improving business conditions and job prospects for ordinary Australians.

A paper prepared by Michael Thompson and the CSIRO in August 2002 entitled A history of recent industrial relations events in the Australian building and construction industry also showed the controversy surrounding industrial relations. Michael Thompson’s report shows a transformative period in industrial relations between 1974 and 1987. During that period the BLF was deregistered under Commonwealth legislation and consequently amalgamated into the state branches of the CFMEU. The accord agreement required union leaders to deliver wage restraint, to hold back excessive rises in wages and to maintain historical relatives, consequently holding down inflation. The ACTU’s amalgamation policy was based upon the idea that there would be 20 superunions covering broad categories based on industries. This is close to what we see today, with large unions that cover entire industries such as the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, the metal workers union and the Maritime Union of Australia.

Legislative provisions in the Industrial Relations Act 1988 diminished the role of awards and allowed for enterprise bargaining agreements. However, very few agreements were certified under this system because of the infrequent approval of agreements by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. During the late 1980s, unions began developing collective agreements as part of a rationalisation of industrial relations in the building and construction sector. The period from 1990 to 2002 saw a shift in industrial relations with the Workplace Relations and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 1996. The bill limited the award system to a safety net of minimum wages and conditions, allowing individual businesses and workers to negotiate everything over and above that safety net. The bill protected freedom of association and included provision for individual agreements. To get the bill passed through the Senate much of the content was watered down, but the substance of the bill was largely preserved in the act.

The coalition accepts that the Rudd-Swan government have a mandate for workplace relations change following the federal election last year. However, that mandate is conditional on the election manifesto that the ALP sold to the Australian people. The failure to meet election promises has been a disappointing if not entirely unexpected characteristic of the government, and the Fair Work Bill 2008 is no different. It is important that the Australian people understand the reason why the Rudd-Swan government have deviated from their election policies—that is, to appease the union movement. The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts was obviously accurate when he said during the election campaign last year that the Labor Party would change it all if they were elected. The Labor Party were elected, and this bill demonstrates that they have changed it all.

The Deputy Prime Minister consistently assured the Australian people that a Rudd-Swan government would not bring back compulsory arbitration. In a speech on 30 May 2007, the Deputy Prime Minister said:

Under Labor’s policy there is no automatic arbitration of collective agreements. Our policy clearly states that no one will be forced to sign up to an agreement where they do not agree to the terms.

Yet this bill legislates for a return to compulsory arbitration. The Deputy Prime Minister also assured the Australian people there would be no pattern bargaining under a Rudd-Swan government. On 30 May 2007, the member for Lalor said:

Pattern bargaining is a term used to describe bargaining across the whole industry. That’s not what Labor’s policy is about.

On 9 November 2007, the Deputy Prime Minister made the ALP pledge clear and said:

Under our system, there will be no pattern bargaining.

Yet this bill subtly provides for pattern bargaining. We were also promised before the election that there would be no change to the rules that governed how union officials could gain entry to workplaces. On 28 August 2007, the Deputy Prime Minister said:

We will make sure that current right of provisions stay. We understand that entering on the premises of an employer needs to happen in an orderly way. We will keep the right of entry provisions.

Again there has been a subtle change. As the Member for Stirling said in his speech, unions will now be able to gain access to non-union-member records, get a privileged seat at the bargaining table and enter a vastly expanded number of workplaces. This legislation will allow unions to re-enter workplaces where employers and employees have previously agreed that unions were unwelcome. The Rudd government have shown themselves incapable of restraining the union influence in their party and incapable of keeping their election promises to the Australian people. The coalition will not prevent the Rudd government from implementing the policy they took to the election in 2007. However, the Senate will carefully consider this bill and the coalition will propose sensible and productive amendments. I want to put on record that I am very concerned about the impact of this bill on jobs and job creation in the midst of the global economic crisis.

Between March 1996 and November 2007, the Howard government created more than 2.2 million jobs—1.2 million of these jobs created were full time and almost 950,000 were part time. The unemployment rate in Australia was 4.3 per cent in October 2007, a 33-year low. In the year to February 1991, the retrenchment rate was 6.5 per cent, falling to 4.6 per cent in the year to February 1996 under the Labor government. The retrenchment rate fell to 2.2 per cent in the year to February 2006. It is important to remember the economic situation before the coalition government. In December 1992, under Labor, the unemployment rate peaked at 10.9 per cent, leaving almost one million Australians unemployed. Not one of the 77 ABS regions recorded a double-digit unemployment rate in June 2007; in March 1996 there were 24 that did. We will take no lectures in economic management from the Labor Party. These statistics remind us that Labor governments invariably preside over economic disasters. The Labor Party’s poor response to the global financial crisis makes me concerned that they are not capable of implementing industrial relations legislation and safeguarding Australian jobs.

On 25 November, Julia Gillard, the Deputy Prime Minister, rose in this place to speak on the Fair Work Bill 2008. In her speech the Deputy Prime Minister mentioned that the Rudd Labor government was delivering on the promises Labor made to the Australian people during the 2007 election campaign. As the Deputy Prime Minister stated, Labor delivers on its promises—but it also goes further. The bill deviates from the election promise in order to appease those to whom Labor owes its biggest election debt—the unions. The Deputy Prime Minister promised no compulsory arbitration, but now we have seen it introduced. It is not part of the mandate. The Deputy Prime Minister promised no pattern bargaining. Now that is also back in—again, not part of the mandate. This has been stealthily snuck in through the back door, and the Deputy Prime Minister hoped no-one would notice.

It was promised that rules for unions getting entry into our workplaces would stay the same—another sham, and again we have seen the sleight-of-hand approach taken. Unions get access to non-union-member records and a privileged seat at the bargaining table. They can even enter workplaces where the employer and employees have previously agreed that they do not want unions. They can come strolling back in as this legislation unlocks the doors of virtually all our workplaces. I heard the member for Leichhardt state that businesses are confused. Well, they will be when the unions start jackbooting their way through the door. Whatever happened to the expectation of privacy of both the individual and the employer? In the case of an employee not wanting his records viewed by the unions, the employee cannot request this. His privacy rights are overridden by the fact that the union can view his records to prove that there is no discrimination in the workplace. The union supposedly cannot use the information gathered for any other purpose than what it gathered the information for, but I am sure they will come up with a list of as many items as they see fit and then use that information as they like. The Workplace Ombudsman, who is there to protect employees from misuse of their information, would have a hard time proving misuse by the unions. This is just another free kick for union power and increasing their stranglehold over the workplace. I remind you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that this was not in the election promises.

The Deputy Prime Minister goes on to talk about the Harvester judgment with reference to fairness in industrial relations and states that this was part of the new Australian Federation that would make Australia different to other nations such as the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Our new Federation would ensure that we did not have the wide social inequalities that the Deputy Prime Minister insinuates exist in the countries previously mentioned. What the Deputy Prime Minister failed to mention is that, as stated by Ray Evans in the Age on 15 November 2007, there are a number of points that need to be made about the Harvester judgment. He started his article by saying:

JULIA Gillard’s comments at the centenary celebrations of the Harvester judgment of 1907, handed down by the then president of the Arbitration Commission, Henry Bournes Higgins, and Paul Keating’s spray in The Age on 13 November 2007 show that it is difficult for Labor politicians to understand just how much long-term damage was wrought by H.B. Higgins, Alfred Deakin and Billy Hughes, as they combined wage regulation with tariff protection in the Arbitration Act of 1904 and the Tariff Act of 1906.

But here we have our Deputy Prime Minister applauding this judgment, along with ALP members who have mentioned the Harvester judgment in their speeches previously. The points that Evans made were that the Harvest judgment ‘decreed a minimum wage of 42 shillings a week for unskilled labourers’ and that the judgment:

… was soon overturned by the High Court, which found that the Excise Tariff Act of 1906, which Higgins had presumed gave him the legal authority to make his award, was constitutionally invalid.

The High Court’s intervention was indeed for-tunate for the unskilled worker upon whom Higgins had bestowed a huge mandatory increase—

of 27 per cent. Evans goes on to say:

If that increase had remained a legal requirement in 1907, then a sharp increase in unemployment, particularly among the unskilled, would have followed soon after; just as we saw a sudden and disastrous increase in unemployment that followed the 1981-82 increases of similar magnitudes in the metal trades awards.

If there is one thing history teaches us, besides the fact that there is no such thing as a temporary deficit under a Labor government, it is that Labor will make decisions on ideology and let the Australian public bear the consequences, which are often not thought out. Ray Evans went on to say:

But whether regulation is to be imposed by Ms Gillard … or by trade union officials, is a second-order effect. The—

primary—

problem is the innate incapacity of the regulators to stop regulating. And every time a new regulation is promulgated, the capacity of free individuals to make decisions in their own best interests is diminished, and the huge social benefits that come from such unregulated activity are lost.

The collapse of the Soviet Union should have made it clear to everyone that centralised planning and control do not work.

At the end of the day the judgment of this bill will come from the flow-on effects of this new legislation on employment—or should I say unemployment? The small business owners of Australia will vote with employment statistics, and the workers of Australia will line up at Centrelink. This legislation will not improve employment, but I think we will see a decline in the employment of people by small business in Australia. As I said in a previous speech, the small business people of Australia will do what they always do when anti-job regulations are foisted upon them—they will do what they are great at—and that is that they will work harder and longer. I invite all businesses in my electorate of Swan to provide feedback to my office on the effects of this legislation on their businesses as it comes into effect.

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