Chris Trevor (Flynn, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today I express my support for the Fair Work Amendment (State Referrals and Other Measures) Bill 2009another step towards ending the tyranny that was introduced by the former coalition government. By this legislation we intend to continue to deliver to hardworking men and women, the backbone of our country and the lifeblood of our nation, the people who invest their hearts and souls into their local communities, our business owners. These people create thousands of jobs and opportunities through their businesses and are a most integral part of regional communities, such as those dispersed throughout my electorate of Flynn.

They have battled long and hard since the inception of the former government’s laws, for with these laws came great confusion and complications that became a minefield for these businesses, particularly small businesses. Without large financial stock, some of these businesses have been unable to seek the legal advice required to understand and implement the laws. The former coalition government left these hardworking people confused, uncertain and oppressed by the financial and time-consuming burden that was the competing federal and state workplace relations systems and the aggravation imposed on them by that insidious piece of legislation, Work Choices.

The amendments proposed in this bill will eradicate this complicated system and provide a fairer, more balanced arrangement that will provide certainty and confidence for business owners. The changes will remove the complexity surrounding workplace relations by providing scope for cooperation between state and federal governments and, with it, the removal of the shackles that have long oppressed private business—large, medium and small—and their employees through confusion and uncertainty caused by the conflicting systems currently operated by the state and federal governments independently.

Our government is an inclusive government not an exclusive government and we as a government have not taken this step without the consideration of its implications for all the parties involved, having conducted extensive consultations with all stakeholders, including the states, the business community and unions. It was through this consultation process that a number of important amendments in this bill were identified. The changes will allow the Commonwealth government to extend the Fair Work Act in referring states to cover unincorporated employers and their employees and outworker entities and to extend the operation of the general protections.

It will amend the Fair Work Act so that it will apply uniformly to referring states and establish arrangements for the transition of referral employees and employers from state industrial or workplace relations systems to the new national system. With this in mind, the Fair Work Amendment (State Referrals and Other Measures) Bill 2009 has been designed to provide a fair, uniform national workplace relations system for the private sector, with exclusions relating to state public sector and local government employment.

The amendments proposed in the Fair Work Amendment (State Referrals and Other Measures) Bill 2009 aim to promote efficiency and to answer the many calls made by businesses in my electorate of Flynn and across our nation to simplify and eradicate this problem and the associated confusion. We have been given an opportunity to further modernise resource-consuming systems and solve a problem that has spanned many years and provided a longstanding headache for businesses and employees. This is a problem that the former government not only failed to address but worsened by adding to the complexity. Today we have been granted an opportunity to right these wrongs and fix this problem. I feel this is an opportunity that we cannot pass up.

In these harsh economic times we as a government should be working to create certainty for businesses. There is no denying that small businesses are the backbone of our country, particularly in regional areas such as Flynn. We should be implementing strategies and systems that create confidence and simplify expansion. That is what the Rudd government and this bill are trying to achieve. By allowing state governments to refer their workplace relations powers to the Commonwealth government, we can provide a simplified unification of the laws and systems, removing the duplications and corresponding costs and complications.

Under the proposed laws, businesses and employees will for the first time be subject to the same laws, tribunals, minimum conditions, rights and entitlements as their counterparts doing the same work, regardless of their geographical location within Australia or whether they are trading as a corporation, sole trader or in partnership. Information will be much easier to locate, increasing efficiency for businesses trying to find it and, subject to associated state referrals, will provide a single point of access for all private sector workplace relations services in Australia.

It is anticipated that the economic benefits of this proposed national workplace relations system will be for not only employers and employees but also the wider community as a result of significant government efficiencies caused by a fairer, simpler national system. By implementing the amendments in this bill, we can revolutionise the workplace relations system and eradicate forever the dilemmas it has caused through its complexity. For small business owners, the bill will deliver more time without the worry of trying to comply with multiple laws and systems regulating the same thing. They will have more time to focus on running their business, more time to grow and expand and, ultimately, more time to give back to their local communities and families.

I firmly believe that we as a government must not miss this opportunity to resolve an issue that has been a longstanding problem. We must act today to remove the complicated multiplicity of an issue that can be so simple. I am a firm believer in promoting effective efficiency. Unnecessary duplication is costly and it is something that I feel all people should strive to remove from their life. It does little more than promote the waste of the most valuable resource we have at our disposal—time. By operating multiple workplace relations systems in Australia this is exactly what we are doing: promoting and allowing waste to flourish. The former coalition government’s costly and time-consuming abyss, Work Choices, exacerbated this waste of resources by complicating the matter further, particularly for small business, which could least afford the expense of legal expertise required to understand the laws.

The major problem faced by businesses and employees alike is the excessive regulation of the current workplace relations legislation which is caused by the duplication and overlap of state and federal workplace relations systems. This problem was aggravated by the former coalition government’s refusal to work with the states, which resulted in both grossly unfair laws and an unwieldy system characterised by legal complexity and uncertainty. The competing systems which overlap in workplaces throughout my electorate of Flynn and the rest of Australia as a result of separate legislation from state and federal governments have made it quite treacherous and costly for businesses to navigate and understand which laws apply to their specific circumstances. For example, there are two businesses providing the exact same ancillary service on an industrial site in my electorate of Flynn, the industrial and economic powerhouse of our nation. One of these businesses is incorporated and the other is operating as a sole trader. This simple difference in structure means one is in the federal system and the other is in the state system. So, despite the fact that they are providing the same services in the same place, they are operating on different awards. This example, which is quite common across Australia, clearly demonstrates the costly confusion and complexity of the perverse overlapping systems.

As I said earlier, the problems are because of the separate workplace relations systems that are maintained by the Commonwealth and five of the six states in Australia. As the examples I mentioned have shown, the multiplicity of systems causes great confusion because of their competing nature, making it excessively difficult and costly for businesses and employees to determine what workplace arrangements they are under. According to ABS data, one in five employees are not sure what workplace relations arrangements they are under, and according to the Business Council of Australia, in some instances the regulatory burden is sufficiently large to make businesses think twice and forgo or defer expansion. These systems are in place to regulate workplace relations systems, not act as a smokescreen concealing the laws and causing confusion to such an extent that people simply do not know what arrangements they are under and invoking such fear in businesses that they are too afraid to expand interstate.

I support the Fair Work Amendment (State Referrals and Other Measures) Bill 2009 and I commend it to the House.

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