Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This government is delivering a new fair and balanced workplace relations system in a very sensible and measured way. It is designed to provide certainty. The bills that have been debated today will achieve the full implementation of the government’s election promises as set out in the policy Forward With Fairness. The new system will ensure that Australia is competitive and prosperous without compromising the workplace and will also provide guaranteed minimum standards. You will find that I, like the other members on this side of the House, am delighted to be standing here to support the Fair Work (Transitional Provisions and Consequential Amendments) Bill 2009. This is the first of two bills which will make the transition and consequential provisions in relation to the new federal workplace relations system set out in Fair Work Australia Act 2009. In particular, this bill will repeal the Workplace Relations Act 1996 and rename it the Fair Work (Registered Organisation) Act 2009 to reflect the remaining content. It makes provisions to move employers, employees and organisations from the old Workplace Relations Act to the new system. It makes consequential amendments to the Commonwealth legislation necessary for them operation of the fair work bill itself.

The second Fair Work (State Referral and Consequential and Other Amendments) Bill 2009 will deal with the consequential amendments to all other Commonwealth legislation, which, although I have not read it, I understand involves amendments to about another 70 Commonwealth acts. These two bills before us today complement the Fair Work Act 2009 and are one of the more significant steps in abolishing the Howard government’s unfair, unjust and hugely unpopular Work Choices laws. We all know that people suffered grievously under the Howard government’s Work Choices laws. The Australian population got it right when they threw out the government based on the government’s extreme industrial relations laws.

By the way, they brought in these laws without any mandate, without going before the general population and without canvassing anything. They brought these laws in as soon as they had a majority in the Senate. These laws were foisted on the Australian public unannounced, and for the opposition to come along today and to think that this bill—rendering fairness and decency in the workplace—is an inappropriate stance on our part is just hypocrisy.

After my time in opposition I doubt if there are many in this House that would be unaware of my absolute objection to those extreme industrial relations laws. As members would recall, I opposed them at every step, I spoke in every debate in this House, I voted against them and I will continue to oppose them until these Work Choices laws are effectively replaced in the workplace by something which is now considered fair and decent.

When I heard the contribution of the shadow industrial relations spokesperson, the member for Stirling, today it took me back a little. He tried to lay the foundations to an argument that this is not the right time, given the economic situation, to produce these laws and it is not the right time in terms of its consequences on employment. Let us consider the ‘right time’ that they brought Work Choices in. As the Treasurer indicated, over that period, when it was raining gold bars, they brought in legislation that allowed employers to cut workers’ pay and conditions and for the first time in this country make it legal to pay people below the minimum award rates. And that was the right time to bring in Work Choices! If people were going to be stripped of their wages and conditions when it was raining gold bars in the midst of an economic boom period—which was all squandered, by the way—and employers were allowed to do that at that stage, and the government brought in laws to facilitate that, what would happen in times of economic constraint? For the member for Stirling to actually come here today and say that this is not the right time to do something fair and decent for working men and women and their families just indicates that the people that we face off against is, and always will be, the party of Work Choices.

The member for Stirling also actually got it wrong. It was reported in the papers yesterday that the member for Stirling was going to seek an amendment to allow for a five-year transition period to the new simplified award system. He should do his homework a little better because the member for Stirling failed to realise that there is already a five-year transition period available, as well as provisions in these bills that allow employers to seek exemptions from the minimum pay rates when they do not have the capacity to pay.

Those provisions are there. By the way, they have been replicated from years past, as you well know, Madam Deputy Speaker Burke. Where there was genuine incapacity to pay, there was a system that existed to allow for that; it was rendered obsolete in the immediate former industrial relations legislation. But these things will be tested. It is not sufficient just to put your hand up and say, ‘I don’t want to pay people.’ It is a matter of applying the appropriate test. These tests have now been introduced in this legislation so that, where there is genuine hardship, that genuine hardship can be addressed.

Not only did the Rudd government legislate for the five-year transition period; the Liberal opposition actually voted against it when this was introduced in March 2008. The opposition flagged these so-called amendments despite their failure to pass even one of their amendments to the Fair Work Act; they did not deliver one amendment to the Fair Work Act when it was in the Senate earlier this year.

In my own community, Werriwa—in the south-west of Sydney, as you are aware, Madam Deputy Speaker—under the previous government’s extreme industrial relations laws, workers had never been worse off. I know it is a bit trite, but some might classify my area as a working-class area. Recent statistics show that 98 per cent of the people in my area earn less than $100,000; therefore, the economic stimulus package had a significant impact for working families out there. That just paints a bit of a picture of the demographics of that area.

You will recall, Madam Deputy Speaker, that in the lead-up to the debates on Work Choices I raised in this parliament cases like that of Reinaldo Martinez. This fellow came to my electorate office; he had been sacked by mobile phone while travelling in his car to a family picnic, with his family in the vehicle with him. He was sacked by his employer over the telephone, and when he inquired as to why the employer said, ‘I can do it under this legislation.’ He did not want to give a reason. Mr Martinez was actually sacked over the telephone in front of his wife and kids.

Reynaldo Cortez, a father of five who came to one of my street meetings, worked for a local pharmaceutical company. He was actually on a collective agreement. Anyway, the employer brought down an AWA and wanted him to sign it and indicated to him: ‘If you don’t sign it, there’ll be plenty of other people who will.’ Here is this father of five, paying off his mortgage and living at Bow Bowing. If he had signed it, our calculations—which I presented to the then Prime Minister, Mr Howard—were that he would have been up to $200 a week worse off. When I approached one of the directors of this company, a person with a very public profile, he did not know about it and undertook to go and find out for me why they did this. With some embarrassment, he told me a couple of weeks later: ‘The legal advice that the CEO got is that we can do it. It wasn’t that we needed to do it or anything else but that we could do this.’ So these cuts were being made to working men and women. This bloke living at Bow Bowing, which is just near Minto, had a family that would very much be considered working class. The mother did not work, and there were five kids. No wonder this bloke was crying when he turned up at my street meeting!

I also pay regard to the courageous efforts of people like Warren Small and David Rojas. People around this place will remember the Esselte dispute that occurred at Minto. These people were absolutely on minimum rates, with no over-award component. They were on strike for three months. The reason why they were on strike was that they demanded the ability to negotiate with their employer; that is all they wanted. They were told by this employer: ‘With these new industrial relations laws, we don’t have to do it.’ This was not a trumped up union claim. Ninety-nine per cent of these people were migrants. They were sitting out there, down the road from where I live, day in, day out, for three months, fighting for the right to be able to negotiate. As one of them said to me—they were not very good at English, which was a second language for them—‘How do we go and negotiate with our employer? We want to go as a group.’ That is all they wanted to do. They were denied that. Julia Gillard, now the Deputy Prime Minister, went down there, as did Brendan O’Connor and others, to spend time with these people. It was very much a home-grown, localised fight. You could see and hear on any day the people who travelled in and around Campbelltown, honking horns, with school buses going by and flags flying. These people became local heroes because they stood up for what they believed in, a fair go for ordinary people.

Under John Howard’s industrial relations system, fairness and decency were stripped away at a time of so-called economic prosperity. I wonder what would have been the case if Work Choices had been in existence here and now. Consider this company that took advice that it could reduce this man’s money by $200 a week. What do you think would happen in boardrooms around the country? Would they just have a sudden burst of conscience or would they look at the raw bottom line? I tell you what, Madam Deputy Speaker: you would not have to go too far before people would start looking at what they are legally entitled to do. If they can get away with cutting wages and conditions, they will do so. I have seen firsthand in my own electorate office people coming in, real families, to whom this has happened. If it happens there, it could happen anywhere. If it happened in good times, imagine what would happen in times of economic strain such as we currently find ourselves in.

These laws bring back fairness and balance in industrial relations. It is also fair to say that it was not always just those who were at the front line or had their wages and conditions affected who were concerned. When I went out before an election, as everybody else does, to visit railway stations at six o’clock in the morning, for all these people who came back and saw me it was not about them. Ordinarily, it was either mums and dads worried about the workplace environment that their kids were about to inherit or had already been in or, more regularly, grandparents worried about the industrial relations environment that was now being bequeathed to the next generation.

If the mob on the other side think that they can sit around and play with industrial relations and work out who they have got to appeal to for their next round of political fundraising, they are playing a very dangerous game because it is the ordinary men and women out there who made decisions on this. These people made decisions not in terms of unions or collective agreements or individual contracts but on which organisation and which political party was going to stand up for fairness and decency. You only have to look at the scoreboard; it was not over there.

These bills will complement the Fair Work Act 2009 to bring in to operation the final stages of legislation to underpin fairness and decency. It will provide adjustments to the 70 other Commonwealth laws to recognise the new body and to allow for a proper transition to the new scheme.

The government’s fair and balanced workplace relations system, which is underpinned by enterprise bargaining—that is at its heart—will help drive productivity in this country. Our law is about bargaining in good faith underpinned by a fair and decent safety net of employment conditions. It is good for employers, it is good for employees and it is certainly good for the economy of this country.

In these troubled economic times, all Australians will benefit from the certainty and the fairness that are enshrined in these new workplace relations laws. Significantly, they are designed for the good economic times as well as the bad. They will return balance and fairness to the industrial relations system. We must transform our society and our economy to meet these very challenging times, and this piece of legislation does that. It encourages enterprise bargaining and it encourages employers and their employees to work jointly to meet the challenges of the future while, at the same time, underpinning and protecting those core industrial standards which are so essential and which we saw attacked under the former regime.

These bills provide a transition and consequential change to ensure a smooth, simple and fair transition to the new system while providing certainty in employment arrangements. The provisions and consequential changes provided for in these two bills are now under consideration. I commend both bills to the House and, once again, say how proud I am to be part of the party that has now stripped Work Choices from this nation’s psyche.

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