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

The first paragraph of the explanatory memorandum to the Fair Work Amendment (State Referrals and Other Measures) Bill 2009 advises us:

The Fair Work Amendment (State Referrals and Other Measures) Bill 2009 … amends the Fair Work Act 2009 … to enable States to refer workplace relations matters to the Commonwealth for the purposes of paragraph 51(xxxvii) of the Constitution.

On the face of that bald statement you could say that is making progress. But of course with these issues the devil is in the detail. The Howard government went to a lot of trouble to give people the opportunity, when doing business in one state or across state borders, to participate in a deregulated labour market that had a safety net. At one stage it probably went a bridge too far in terms of not having the usual no-disadvantage test, and I want to come back to that in a minute, but, in recognition that that was going too far, it amended the legislation so that that particular proposal was included. In shifting to the provisions of the legislation, which was national in terms of people under the corporations power having a workable arrangement, people could negotiate directly with their employees and of course they could make concessions that frequently suited the employees in terms of hours of work. I want to make some special points about that later.

That was a national scheme provided you conducted your business or the employment of your staff under some form of corporate structure, otherwise the states retained their opportunity to maintain awards and they applied principally to small business. Most of them would not have national implications anyway. The present government campaigned in opposition and made this the centrepiece of their campaign for election. They had their union mates run, amongst others, some pretty despicable ads. I find it amazing that we members of parliament are now having our correspondence censored to the point where I, as a member of parliament, can no longer transmit the views of one of my constituents who is complaining about some aspect of the Rudd government’s performance that might be affecting them personally. I am not allowed to use a postage stamp paid for from government revenue to forward that information, even to a minister. That ain’t fair—and of course we have just had the member for Blair wanting to talk up a ‘fair’ industrial relations approach. I might say that members of parliament, the one group in Australia that has no workers compensation and of course no union to represent them, have learnt long ago that the no-disadvantage test is ignored completely in terms of how we are dealt with by the government of the day, and I make a generic comment in that regard. That is notwithstanding that if I were on the other side of the House there would be some awful trouble in the caucus when my leader, as it would be, took away my right to communicate with my constituents, as would happen were I a member of the Labor Party—even worse! But that is getting a little bit away from it, notwithstanding that it is a union issue.

What I am saying is that when that campaign was conducted there were a couple of ads that I thought were well below the belt. The point that I want to make is that there are now campaigns around the place saying you should not give donations to political parties, which is a good idea. But I did not think it was a good idea when I picked up one of our Western Australian newspapers the other day to find three full-page ads in it, one from a trade union sticking it up the Premier of Western Australia over some negotiation he was having on behalf of the taxpayers of Western Australia in terms of a wage settlement for a particular group of workers, another one from some environmental group and I cannot remember what the third one was. But how do you prevent that happening? It just depends who your mates are.

If, as you do with this sort of legislation, you entrench the trade union movement as a body that is allowed to collect money from people who do not necessarily want their services, they will have the revenue to promote a political party over another, even if they have stopped making donations. So, if this debate is to go forward, someone had better start talking about a blanket ban on advertising from the date that the election is called, otherwise it will be grossly unfair.

I want to refer to those advertisements. One that I well remember blackguarded the small-business community, which I was involved in. Had I suggested that a woman with two children was to come back to work and leave those two little kids in the house, my wife would have shot me. That would be the situation in most family businesses. I thought, maybe a little belatedly, that when that ad was run with a woman and two kids and the phone rang—‘Come to work or take the sack’—the business community ought to have run a parody of that ad and employed the same actress. At the point of that phone call she should have said: ‘Thank you, Mr Smith. Stick your job,’ as impolitely as she could, ‘because under Work Choices I get two job offers a week. I’ll be ringing one of those people next week. I can get another job.’ I want you to draw your attention to the circumstances that exist today. If she got that phone call, she would probably go to work because she does not know, under the Rudd government, where the next job is.

This is another point. This legislation is opposed because it extends the influence of trade unions; it does not protect the workers. To get access to many workplaces and avoid harassment or, as a private business, to take your hire equipment onto a building site, why do you have to make a financial contribution to a trade union? They would say, ‘We’re the people who tell you what your award rights are.’ We have moved on a bit. The average 10-year-old kid can find that out on internet, and a lot quicker than I could. When the world changes, why does this House keep passing legislation which treats people as though they are a mob of kids who were put in the mines when they were 13 years old and when the role of the trade unions was so important to those people? Why are we still legislating trade union rights over the rights of workers?

As I said, the member for Blair referred to a fair industrial relations system. I thought—and I made this comment once before and the member for Sydney tried to misrepresent what I said—‘What is fair about telling a university student that they’re priced out of the market because people are pulling back on the number of employees they have in the evenings to serve in a restaurant or something—shrinking their workforce—because they’re paying ever-increasing penalty rates to people who might be working their first hour for the week?’ Why is it fair to say to a married woman or a married man, people in a partnership with a couple of children: ‘Look, I understand that you want work on weekends because you have a sharing responsibility for your children. But, of course, you can’t work at my place because I’ve got to pay you time-and-a-half for the first hour worked on Saturday. I lock the door on Friday night—in fact, mid Friday afternoon—and send everybody home.’ There are people who want to start work at that point in time, but for the first hour of the week the gate is locked.

I noticed Wesfarmers, the owners of Coles and Bunnings, in the states bar Western Australia providing a seven-days-a-week service to people who, amongst other things, need to buy their groceries on a Sunday. What was their chief executive, Mr Goyder, saying to shareholders the other day? ‘There’s a big problem under Julia Gillard’s law. Our costs are going to have to go up and our prices will go up with it.’ Anybody who thinks there is altruism within the business community—that they will pay time-and-a-half and not build it into their cost structure and put a profit on it—is living with the fairies. Under an AWA, it might be your choice to work on a weekend. It might be that you, as a young person, prefer going to the beach on a Wednesday, when you can get your surfboard out on the waves and not be run into by the other hundred who are trying to do the same thing or you can spread out on the beach, and you are prepared to work on Saturday as an alternative. What is fair about telling someone they cannot do that because 80 or 90 per cent of the work opportunity ceases on Friday night and does not recommence until Monday morning?

That is what this legislation is about: speaking to the state governments, and to those of the Labor intent to a degree. I am not sure about New South Wales. Western Australia—the resource state, the state that is just about keeping the entire population of New South Wales in a job as it recycles our money, and we can say much the same for Victoria—knows that it is not in the business of shuffling money around in circles. It is in the business of producing primary product—not only minerals. In my electorate wheat is a very costly business—in fact, so costly that farmers bet their farm once a year when they put in a crop. The cost of putting in a crop roughly equals the value of their farm—if not in one year, in two. Two years of bad seasons and you have lost your farm.

They know that, if they cannot operate over a seven-day week, they are not competitive in the international environment. Nobody rings them up from China, Indonesia, India or the Middle East and says, ‘We understand since Julia Gillard, the minister, brought in the legislation that you are doing it tough and you have to pay extra wages, so just put the price of iron ore up a bit.’ The Chinese are going berserk at the moment when the market drives the price of iron ore up. Why is this not something that the Western Australian government should participate in? It will not do it to the extent that it possibly can, and that means that the hundreds of subcontractors that go onto these mining sites and others who work as individual spraying contractors, mulesing contractors and shearing contractors that drive their own trucks and who are not incorporated can have a business that has a wage structure that reflects the needs and the competitive circumstances of those businesses.

The unions got marching in the street the other day in Western Australia. Why? The Western Australian government, under Richard Court, led the situation of legal contracts with individual workers. I think they have mentioned that they would like to do it again. I do not think there is any legislation in the offing. Why should they be roped into a system that was in decline during the Hawke and Keating years? They were the first people to start to tackle it. I often remind this place that even Gough Whitlam made his contribution. He could not legislate to fix up a corrupt and decadent system which was an anachronism of the days of 10-year-olds in the coalmines. What did he do? He lowered the tariff regime by 25 per cent and revalued, as governments did in those days, the currency by 25 per cent. In other words, he changed the competitive circumstances of manufacturers in Australia by 50 per cent in terms of their costs.

That started the process of some common sense in the labour market where, in my living memory, wages were automatically increased by the consumer price index. So you put wages up, which put the consumer price index up, which put wages up—and you wondered why we were going through all those sorts of silly ideas. But I well remember, when things were a little hotter in the labour market than they are now, a milk bar proprietor complaining to me. He thought it was a bit tough to be paying $17 an hour to young people through an AWA. The award at the time, if it was still in existence, was about $5 or $10 an hour. It was probably $10 in this day and age. What are we doing here? The member for Blair had to tell us how many times they have had to go and rewrite one of these new awards. First, they had to do it for the restaurants and then they had to do it for the horticulturalists. It is a mess, but it is typical.

I read in today’s paper that they have had to find another billion dollars for putting in pink batts. For a billion dollars, talking about a debate that is now on in the Senate, you can put out a high-voltage DC line to connect the gas resources of the Pilbara with Western Australia and reduce emissions in that process by about 300,000 tonnes. Where should you be spending the money, more particularly when it is now patently obvious that this system is being rorted and rorted again? I heard of one case where a fella climbed up in his ceiling to see what had happened and in fact the so-called pink batts were newspapers stuffed into plastic bags. There was another who had two jobs, one being half the size of the other, and the contractor gave him a bill for each of them for $1,600. The fellow said, ‘Hang on a minute, one job is only half the size.’ He said, ‘Why should you worry? The government is paying the money.’ Now there is another billion dollars that has got to be found. The Julia Gillard memorial halls business only ran $1.4 billion short, and the computers in schools program ran $2 billion short, but it was all money to be extracted from the taxpayer by the state governments. When is this government going to get anything right? And when should the opposition concur with legislation of this nature which has got very little to do with the welfare of workers but a lot to do with the extension of the power of the trade union movement?

In considering this legislation which we are amending, I picked up the paper the other day and read that those poor old maritime workers who are servicing the drilling rigs are on $100,000 a year for working half the year—six weeks on and six weeks off. I used to fly first class with them when they had control of the coastal shipping and they would be telling me how as soon as they got home they were going to get out on their cray boat. They were not going to take a rest. The point of it is that these blokes say $100,000 is not enough and they are going to do their best to put our export industries in natural gas and other areas at a disadvantage and in danger by asking for more. They are the same people campaigning and trying to take over coastal shipping again so that people have to pay more for the products that come in by container and all those things. The member for Blair said that we never did anything. We took the container lift rate up to double after the wharfies had voted to reduce their workforce by half. Was that good for Australia? I would think it was. Did it reduce the price of flat screen televisions or all the other things people buy in the stores? Of course it did. (Time expired)

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