Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, I will. But I am not going to be bossed around by people in this place who only turned up the other day. The facts of life are that there are a number of circumstances that I think need to be drawn to the attention of people out there who need to know these things, because they were suckered into an argument that their kids would be better off under this Labor government. But their kids cannot get jobs. We have a mass of young people out in country areas, where work is intensely seasonal, who, by exploiting this process and working 12 hours a day during those seasonal peaks, were able to accumulate $19,000 over a 12-month period, which made them eligible for the youth allowance, going onwards to university and maybe bringing those skills back to their own communities as science teachers or something like that. Those people have just, by another foul stroke of this parliament, been told they are no longer eligible for that assistance unless they work 30 hours a week. It sounds simple. There are not 30 hours a week for every week of the year available in their areas—too bad. You just say to them: ‘You can’t go to university. Your parents, whatever their income, can’t afford to run two households. You stay home and take some other form of employment.’

These are the sorts of things that I take exception to because they are silly. I am not talking about overtime—in other words, the person that works for five days and then is asked to work additional time. I am quite happy with that penalty being applied. What is more, let me hope that it might engage the employment of a second person. But, if you have worked your five days and the boss wants someone on Saturday, it is cheaper for him to pay you overtime than some of the silly penalty rates that will be applicable under these arrangements.

The member for Braddon went for this old chestnut of employers getting up in the morning and deciding, to use his words, to sack good workers. Good workers are recognised by good employers as the basic asset of their business. They do not get up in the morning and sack them any more than a typical worker looking across the staff he employs would ring up a woman with two children and tell her to come to work. I expect that his wife would have something to say about that if he tried. Yes, somewhere out there in the real world someone believes a woman with such low standards would do that. There are not very many—no more than there are people who justify this.

Let me say what the outcome of the new arrangements is going to be. It is going to be the 11-month work contract. To protect themselves from the abuses of unfair dismissal, employers are going to say: ‘Here’s your contract. Yes, it’s all according to Julia Gillard’s award, the minister’s award, for 11 months. At the end of 11 months, you have agreed that you complete your work with me.’ All that worker then has to do, of course, is take the obvious payments for holiday pay and everything else, go away for a month and, presumably—wink, wink, nod, nod—come back after that month’s ‘holiday’ and reapply for the job. I do not know if there is anything in the legislation that says you cannot do that. The minute you say, ‘Well, that’s it. They get 11 months work and someone else starts on the beginning of the 12th month,’  then that job is terminated. Nobody would suggest that unfair dismissal was not grossly exploited and egged on by trade union bureaucrats who should have known better.

I will give an example of people dismissing employees for the most proper reasons. They dismissed two staff after 12 months employment in an exercise that just was not working. There was nothing wrong with the people; it was just that nobody was buying the service. They paid them double their entitlement. The employees left with that money and both applied for unfair dismissal at $10,000 each. When the employer rang his employment agency and said, ‘I’m going to take these people to the High Court,’ the bloke said, ‘How much do they want?’ He said, ‘$10,000.’ The agent said: ‘Pay them. You’ll win your case, but it’ll cost you more than $10,000 each.’ That is the system. That is the exploitation that occurs.

People deliberately apply for jobs for which they are not qualified so that they can get sacked. A manager of a hotel in Alice Springs did not bank any takings on behalf of the owners, who were overseas on a holiday, and when they came back he refused to say what had happened to the money. When he was sacked, he immediately sued them for unfair dismissal and got $40,000. Why? Because the police had failed by that stage to prove that he had stolen it. If that is your idea of fairness, I hope the next speaker gets up and tells us so.

There is no need for this. Furthermore, you cannot legislate to make a job. I predict therefore that these sorts of reactions to this particular situation will not deliver outcomes. What is more, there are government initiatives in place whereby it is simpler for an employer to buy new equipment than to hire new people.

There will be massive amounts of LNG equipment being moved into Australia on heavy lift ships—whole buildings, Meccano sets. Why? Because the CFMEU is going to get control of those workplaces again. But, if they do what I recollect them doing during the early days of the Pilbara, they will disrupt exports. They so disrupted exports last time that the Japanese went and started iron ore mines in Brazil. They are going to now buy 400,000-tonne ships. Why? To overcome their freight disadvantage. You will only have to blink up there and the phones will start ringing in Brazil. Tell me how many jobs that will create.

All this silliness, all this industrial relations law, defies these simple laws: there is no such thing as a free lunch, action and reaction are equal and, more particularly, you cannot force an employer to create a new job. I leave it to history to judge this particular move. It defies common sense and it defies the needs of Australians. Now they want trading seven days a week. Why? Because a lot of them work five days, and other people have to be employed to supply them. Do you think that Woolworths and Coles do not set their prices on that account? Of course they do. And who pays it? The very working families which this government was elected to protect.

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