Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The Fair Work Bill 2008 is among the most important pieces of legislation that will pass by the nation’s 42nd Parliament. The fair work bill establishes a new Australian industrial relations system for the 21st century, a system founded on the great Australian belief in the fair go, a system that protects working families in difficult times with a genuine safety net and a system designed for an economy that creates the jobs of the future and competes on the basis of skills, innovation and productivity.

Throughout Australia’s history one of our greatest achievements is that our nation has provided ordinary working people with a decent standard of living and has sought to avoid the extreme inequalities found in many other nations, yet we have done that mostly without swinging to the other extreme of overregulation. On workplace relations, we are neither America nor Europe. We fashion something else in this land, a uniquely Australian balance. We believe in rewarding hard work and enterprise. We also believe in providing a strong safety net for everyone. Our greatest achievement as a nation is not the triumphs of a few but the prosperity of the many. Our great achievement is that ordinary working people have for generations been able to build a good life in Australia, have a good job with decent pay and conditions, buy a home of their own and build a secure life for themselves and their family. Few other nations have made this kind of dream a reality for ordinary working people, as many who have migrated to our shores will often say. Australia was among the first countries to implement the eight-hour day, to introduce workers compensation laws and to guarantee a living wage for working people. Australia was a pioneer in establishing a legal framework of awards and arbitration that ensured that working people would share in the nation’s growing prosperity. In more recent years Australia has been a world leader in creating a universal scheme of superannuation savings to help give Australian’s financial security in their retirement years.

All this progress has been the result of progressive legislation passed by Commonwealth and state parliaments. With each step along the way this progressive legislation has invariably been opposed by the rolling constellation of conservative forces represented today by those who sit opposite in this chamber. The bill we debate today will finally bury the Work Choices legislation introduced in 2005 by the Howard government. Work Choices was an attempt to tear up the social contract that has helped shape Australia’s history. There was no mention of Work Choices before the 2004 election, but suddenly it became the central ideological obsession for the government’s fourth term once they had won control of the Senate. Just consider all the huge long-term challenges facing Australia at the time: building world-class education, building advanced infrastructure, investing in our hospitals, fixing our Federation, tackling the huge challenges of climate change and tackling the huge challenges of the national water crisis. These challenges were all alive in the year 2005. All these challenges were ignored in 2005, because the Liberals chose to give their highest priority to extreme industrial relations laws—Liberal party ideology unplugged. They got control of the Senate and the nation got to see upfront and personal the real agenda of the Liberal Party at work and at play—the agenda they now seek to conceal from the Australian public. But if they return to the Treasury benches they will return to this agenda as surely as night follows day.

Work Choices was shaped by an extreme ideology: in its simplest terms, the right to dictate employment terms to their workers unconditionally. It is a simple and similar ideology to the one we have seen at work in the extreme capitalism that has been behind the global financial crisis. This form of extremism has no place in Australia. Work Choices sought to rip away from the safety net the basic rights achieved by successive generations of Australian workers: reasonable working hours, penalty rates, overtime pay, protection from unfair dismissal and the right to representation by a union. The current Leader of the Opposition welcomed the Work Choices legislation, saying on 2 November 2005 when it was introduced to parliament that it represented ‘the single most important reform to workplace relations in any of our lifetimes’. The Leader of the Opposition now tells us that Work Choices is dead. I would simply say this: would the real Malcolm Turnbull please stand up—the one who believed in the Work Choices three years ago and voted for it on 27 separate occasions or the one who today says he no longer believes in Work Choices. The reality of his party’s views is reflected in their contribution to the debate on this legislation. The Australian people are not fools. They can spot pretence at a thousand paces. To pretend that the Liberal Party is not ideologically committed to Work Choices is like pretending that the barmy army is going to be back in Australia for next year’s Ashes series.

The reality of most workplaces and something that conservatives have refused to address for 100 years is that employers and employees simply do not have anywhere near to equal bargaining power. A single mum cannot negotiate on equal terms with a telecommunications company. A teenager cannot negotiate on equal terms with a fast-food outlet. A middle-aged tradesman cannot negotiate on equal terms with a national hardware chain. That is why Labor has fought for more than 100 years for decent industrial relations laws for the century that has passed. Yet the 2005 Work Choices legislation reversed this progress, abolishing the no disadvantage test and allowing employers to strip away basic entitlements without any compensation. This was all with the Leader of the Opposition’s strong support—he who says that Work Choices is now dead.

Even after the Australian people rejected Work Choices at last year’s election, the opposition leader said on 10 February this year:

… the major innovation in respect to individual agreements in the WorkChoices legislation was to remove the no-disadvantage test.

Once again, will the real Malcolm Turnbull please stand up: the Malcolm Turnbull who in February praised the major innovation of Work Choices as the abolition of the no disadvantage test but made it possible for people to be put on AWAs to be worse off or the Malcolm Turnbull who nine months later says that he no longer believes in Work Choices, he no longer believes in AWAs.

As I said in a debate in this chamber yesterday, it is important for people in this parliament to stand up for consistency of principle. The member for Bradfield, the previous Leader of the Opposition, has unequivocally stated his support for Work Choices. It reflects his position as a principled conservative. We disagree with the view point, but at least he has the courage to own the viewpoint. The current occupant of the office of Leader of the Opposition believes he can fool the Australian people that he has simply walked away from that to which he was ideologically and personally committed only nine months ago. I think the contrast is clear for all to see.

The facts are these. Eighty-nine per cent of AWAs took away at least one award condition, according to analysis of 1,700 AWAs by the previous government’s Workplace Authority in 2006—an analysis that they never made public. This report also showed that in two-thirds of those contracts the AWAs removed incentive based payments and bonuses, penalty rates and shiftwork loadings. Yet the Liberal Party month after month denied AWAs were undermining Australians’ pay and conditions. Just months before last year’s election they rushed out the so-called fairness test. It was advertised before it had even been developed or legislated. It was an attempt to put some eleventh hour political window-dressing over the top of Work Choices. All politics; no principle and no policy. We see the same script repeated today: the Liberal Party pretending to be something that they are not.

Apart from still being bad for employees, the so-called fairness test created a nightmare for employers. Its introduction caused an almost total breakdown of the industrial relations system, with the backlog of agreements blowing out to 150,000 by the time the Liberals lost office in November last year. The Liberals say they are the friends of small business; the Liberals say they are the friends of business. Some 150,000 applications by business for registration were simply allowed to swing in the breeze as they sought to engage in this five-minute-to-midnight exercise of political camouflage and cover to suggest that they had somehow become worker sensitive. Pigs might fly!

In abolishing Work Choices, the Fair Work Bill establishes a simpler, fairer and more balanced industrial relations system. Even today the Liberal Party still does not know where it stands. The Leader of the Opposition says that he will not oppose the Fair Work Bill, yet he also says that he will not support it. I find that a curious position. His party’s position on individual contracts changes from one day to the next. They say that they will vote for this legislation that rules out statutory individual contracts then they say they want to resurrect the same type of individual contracts. Senior Liberal members of the opposition, such as Senator Minchin, believe Work Choices never went far enough.

In contrast to the Liberal Party, we in the ALP know where we stand on the rights of working families. We took the Forward with Fairness policy to the last election and now we are delivering on it. The Fair Work Bill is the result of months of exhaustive consultation with business, unions and workplace experts. I pay tribute to the enormous efforts of the Deputy Prime Minister, her department and the many organisations that have put so much time and effort into developing this bill. I note as well the very positive feedback we have received from many business organisations, including the Australian Industry Group, whose CEO said last week:

The Government have listened hard to employers … I want to congratulate the Government on a very good process.

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… I think of all the processes I’ve gone through on industrial relations reform—and I’ve been through a few—this would have to be the best one.

The government do not adopt an adversarial approach to industrial relations, as the previous government did. We believe in harmonious workplace relations that maximise productivity. The Fair Work Bill builds on the historic shift to enterprise bargaining made by a previous Labor government in the early 1990s. The bill gives all employees the right to good faith collective bargaining where a majority want it and requires that employees are made better off overall by all agreements.

Within this framework the bill also fosters substantial individual flexibility. Employees earning above around $100,000 will be free to agree their own pay and conditions without reference to awards. All modern awards will include a flexibility term, identifying the award terms that can be varied through an individual flexibility arrangement. Underpinning the system is a program of modern, simplified industrial awards and underpinning these in turn are 10 minimum National Employment Standards.

The principle at work in this reform is to provide proper protection for the weak and support for the strong to negotiate maximum flexibility. That is called doing it the Australian way. It is based on the enduring Australian value of a fair go for all, but it is designed for the competitive global economy of the 21st century as well, by maximising productivity growth through the full range of employment options. Enterprise agreements, common-law agreements, modern awards—each of these options is capable of maximising workplace flexibility and productivity.

The previous government oversaw a long period of declining productivity growth in the Australian economy. Productivity growth averaged 3.3 per cent in the mid-1990s, following the wide-ranging productivity reforms of the Hawke and Keating governments, in particular the shift to enterprise bargaining. In contrast, under the Work Choices regime annual productivity growth averaged less than one per cent. Far from boosting productivity and flexibility, the previous government’s Work Choices regime entangled businesses in an unprecedented level of red tape and bureaucracy.

Under the Fair Work Bill we will reduce the previous government’s seven workplace agencies to a one-stop shop—Fair Work Australia. We have reduced the 1½ thousand pages of Work Choices to 600 pages in the Fair Work Bill and we are working with the states to bring all private sector employees into a single national industrial relations system. The new industrial relations system is an important part of the Australian government’s comprehensive productivity reform agenda, alongside an education revolution across early childhood, schools, vocational programs and universities; investment in nation-building infrastructure for the 21st century; and the COAG reform agenda embracing a program of business deregulation across 27 areas of legislation to help build a seamless national economy. Each of these initiatives is critical to our long-term objective of raising productivity and building long-term prosperity for all Australians.

This is a proud moment for all members of the Australian Labor Party as we deliver for Australia’s working families. With this legislation, Work Choices will be dead and buried. The resurrection of Work Choices is only possible if the Liberal Party returns to government, because, whatever they may say now, Work Choices remains etched deep in the Liberal Party’s soul.

The Fair Work Bill will build a system designed to give everyone a fair go at work so that all Australians can have a decent set of minimum protections, where hard work is rewarded, where businesses and employees can design workplace arrangements that suit their own enterprises. I am proud to join my colleagues in addressing the parliament on this important legislation. I am proud to lead a government that stands in the great tradition of a fair go for all Australians. I am proud that with this legislation we are building a new system for a new century.

In this challenge that we face in the years ahead, as the global financial crisis wreaks its toll across the global economy and that is in turn visited upon the Australian economy as well, one enduring principle must stand by us all—that is, we are all in this together. Business, unions, employers and employees—we are all in this together. If we fight this thing together, we will survive this thing together. If we unite and are not divided, we will see Australia through, and see Australia through in stronger shape. I would say that this bill reflects that very Australian spirit, and with that remark I commend the bill to the House.

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