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

Beyond all the rage and the theatre that we are seeing in the chamber today, beyond this pantomime, I want to remind the Australian people what we are actually here debating at the cost of $1 million a day to the Australian people to keep this parliament here. We are debating in this parliament, in a climate where unemployment is skyrocketing, whether we are to give small business the confidence and the incentive to employ more Australians. That is exactly the issue that we are debating here today. The reality is—and you can ask anyone in small business around the country and they will tell you the same—neither the Deputy Prime Minister nor the Prime Minister, nobody on that side of the House, understands small business. They do not understand the struggles that Australian small business goes through on a daily basis. They do not have that life experience. They do not understand what drives small business to create employment.

There was an article in the Australian this week that said they went to the Deputy Prime Minister’s electorate and down to Main Street, in Altona, I think it was—I am happy to be corrected. They went into the local pizza shop there, apparently one that the Deputy Prime Minister likes to visit. The next time she is there, she might like to ask them how many employees they have on the books. I bet you, if they are a pizza shop that has two shifts a day, which is very realistic, they will have more than 15 employees on their books. That is the reality and that is the reality of small businesses all around the country. The idea that having more than 15 people on your books means that you are no longer a small business is, quite frankly, absurd. We stand for a more realistic definition of ‘small business’. We want that pizza shop in Altona to be classified as a small business, as is appropriate, and we want that to happen so they can have the confidence to employ more people. Nobody in small business believes that this government understands either what small business goes through or what small business is required to do.

The Deputy Prime Minister consistently refers to the mandate that the government received at the election in 2007. Nobody on this side of the House disputes that the Labor Party have a mandate to change Australia’s industrial relations system. What the Labor Party were not elected to do was to come to Canberra and do whatever they liked to the Australian industrial relations system. They had a very detailed policy, which is contained within these two documents I have here.

The Deputy Prime Minister will have you believe that somehow Moses brought these documents down from the mountain—that they cannot possibly be altered, which is why the Labor Party cannot move from a definition of small business being 15 employees. But let us have a look at these documents and see where the Labor Party has trashed its own policy. I refer to the policy release of April 2007—Forward With Fairness: Labor’s Plan for Fairer and More Productive Australian Workplaces—where they talk about agreement making:

Labor’s good faith bargaining rules will not require an employer or employees to sign up to an agreement where they do not agree to the terms.

Yet what we find within the Fair Work Bill is that this has not translated into that bill. Within the bill there is compulsory arbitration, which is totally against the policy that they took to the people at the last election.

In the implementation plan that was released in August 2007—and this is an absolute corker, because it is very simple to understand—this is what Labor said about right of entry:

Labor will maintain the existing right of entry rules.

When that is translated into the Fair Work Bill, what we find is that union right of entry has been massively expanded. Union officials were given the power to go in and seek any employee record—not just those of union members—within a business. They could get access to all sorts of private records.

This is a very simple debate today. It is a debate about giving small business the confidence to employ more Australians. Nobody on that side of the House has any idea of the struggles that are facing small business today. They do not know that small business needs to be given the confidence to do what it does best: create employment. (Time expired)

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