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

The minister at the table interjects ‘supports’, but of course they cannot decide whether it is ‘create’ or ‘support’. It used to be ‘create’; now it is ‘support’. Of course, when it comes to the re-regulation of the labour market contained within the Fair Work Bill, the government’s analysis of what that is going to do to the employment market is completely and utterly absent. Indeed, the Prime Minister exempted his minister from having to provide a regulatory analysis as is required under his own legislation. There is a reason for this: the government understands that their changes are going to cost Australians jobs.

The new Fair Work Bill has taken Labor’s pre-election commitments and turned them into a policy that first of all goes beyond those commitments and, secondly, massively expands union rights and discourages employers from creating jobs. I just want to deal with the minister’s pre-election commitments and what has turned up in the Fair Work Bill, because they are two very different things. The minister will stand in this chamber and swear black and blue that the Fair Work Bill is an accurate implementation of the Forward with Fairness policy. Of course that is complete and utter rubbish.

Let us look at union right of entry as perhaps the most grievous example. This is breached in the Fair Work Bill in two ways. Firstly, it allows union officials to have access to the records of non-union members and, secondly, it massively expands the rights of a union to enter a workplace for discussions. Prior to the election, the minister said on 28 August 2007:

We will make sure that current right of entry 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.

It cannot be clearer than that. On 28 May, after they won the election, the minister re-affirmed that: ‘We promise to retain the current right of entry framework and this promise will be kept.’

Within their own policy they explicitly said that there would be no changes to the existing right of entry provisions. In a speech to the Press Club on 7 November 2007—and this is without a doubt my personal favourite—the minister, when asked about proposed changes to the right of entry provisions, said, ‘If I could pledge to resign, if I could take a contract in blood, take a polygraph, give you my mother as a hostage—whatever you like—we will be delivering our policy as we outlined it.’ I am not sure where Ms Gillard Sr resides, but she should be awfully worried because her daughter has grievously breached the commitments that she gave to the people prior to the last election. Union right of entry has been massively expanded in both the areas that I have pointed out. The records of non-union members can be accessed by union officials if they suspect a breach within a workplace. This totally disregards the rights of privacy that employees should have in regard to their own personal information. Employee records are something that are specific to them. They may contain deeply personal information such as medical records or disciplinary action that might have been taken against them. Employees should have a say over whether a union official can access those records.

In regard to the right of entry, a second aspect is the massively expanded access of unions to workplaces. The government promised that under Labor there would be no changes. Yet what we see within the bill is that union officials can enter a workplace under a massively expanded range of circumstances. Similarly, there are changes in the area of compulsory arbitration—something that was explicitly ruled out by Labor in the lead-up to the last election. Indeed, their policy said exactly that: that there would be no compulsory arbitration under Labor’s fair work proposals. Let us just have a look at what the minister said. On 30 May 2007, in a speech to the Press Club, she said that it was ‘completely untrue that Labor’s Fair Work Australia will re-empower union bosses and reintroduce compulsory arbitration’. She went on to say that under Labor’s policy ‘there will be no automatic arbitration of collective agreements’. She continued this insistence beyond the election, right up until about three weeks before this policy was announced and then, lo and behold, we find within the bill compulsory arbitration. Of course, it is just by another name.

Other concerns for the coalition about this bill are about those areas where it will cost Australians jobs—for example, on greenfields agreements. These are the agreements that you make when you are starting a new project. Under the existing arrangements, you can go ahead and make those agreements and you are not required to notify anyone before you do so. Under the Fair Work Bill, you are required to notify every possible union who could represent an employee within that enterprise. So, if you think about the context of starting a mine in my home state of Western Australia, you might be required to notify the AMWU, the CFMEU and up to 10 separate unions or more. They are required to sign off on the employee arrangements before this new project can go ahead. If the workers in this new mine were covered, for instance, by the CFMEU, then in Western Australia you would need to go and get the agreement of Kevin Reynolds and Joe McDonald. They would need to sign off on those employee arrangements before that project could go ahead. If you were to look at that in the context of Victoria—let us say that you had a new building site and that you had electricians on that building site—you would then need to go to Dean Mighell and ask his permission before this new project could go ahead.

Similarly, the new provisions for transmission of business are blatantly anti jobs. Under the present arrangements, if a transmission of business occurs, the employment arrangements are required to be kept for 12 months afterwards. Under the new Fair Work Bill, those arrangements will need to be kept in perpetuity. They cannot possibly change under any circumstances. So if you were to go and purchase a business that is failing—it might be failing, for instance, because it has uncompetitive industrial arrangements—there would be nothing you could do to change that. So you would be faced with two options when you went into that business. You could accept that the existing arrangements were there and that they could not change—something that many businesses obviously would not be able to do if that business was underperforming—or alternatively you could just get rid of all the employees within that business. Why would you possibly do that within this climate? Why would you provide an incentive for employers to get rid of the workforce? Why would you blatantly have such an anti-jobs provision in the teeth of what are the most challenging economic circumstances that we have seen in this country for a generation?

I will move on to unfair dismissal, the sixth area in which the coalition has concerns about the government’s Fair Work Bill. I do not believe that anyone in the government understands what it is like to run a small business. I do not believe that they understand the pressures that small business people face. These changes to the unfair dismissal laws are a reflection of that. They do not understand how difficult it is for a small business to be called up and hauled before Fair Work Australia to have to answer for an unfair dismissal case. They do not understand that it is impossible for that business to find the time to do this, and that it certainly does not have the money to defend itself from these sorts of claims. So what will happen under the government’s new proposals is what has happened in the past: you will see go-away money because the small business does not have the capacity to defend itself from claims—some of which, of course, may be completely and utterly arbitrary.

This side of the House stands for jobs. The other side of the House has no understanding about what creates jobs. They have no understanding of what sustains jobs. That is very clear from the policies that they pursue—in particular, their changes to the industrial relations system. They have not shared with the Australian people the effect that those changes will have on employment. The minister and the Prime Minister cannot guarantee that it will not cost Australians jobs, and that is why we will move an amendment in the Senate to protect Australians from the spectre of unemployment.

See this speech in context