David Bradbury (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to thank all the members who have contributed to this debate on the Corporations Amendment (Phoenixing and Other Measures) Bill 2012, in particular those who have spoken on this side of the chamber with such passion about their determination to ensure that workers, in the event that their company fails and workers' entitlements are not available to be paid, have the opportunity to access the publicly available funds through the GEER Scheme.

There have been a number of contributions from those opposite. I am pleased that the member for North Sydney has joined us. The member for North Sydney led the opposition's offensive on this bill, and I have to say that he was pretty sloppy. You were pretty sloppy, Joe. He commenced his contribution with a number of quotes. He quoted Bob Baxt, a very distinguished individual who is the chairman of the Law Committee of the AICD, and Peter Strong, from COSBOA. These men are both very respected individuals. The difficulty was that the quotes he chose to selectively use were actually taken from evidence given by those two individuals to a parliamentary committee investigating two completely separate bills. The member for North Sydney, rather than confront the issues that are at the heart of this bill, came into this place either to mislead the House by engaging in debate about other matters or, through his own sloppiness, to engage in discussion about completely separate bills.

When it comes to the bill that is before the House, those on this side of the chamber have spoken—I think very passionately and forcefully—about the need to remedy an existing deficiency in the law. I would like to speak about some of the specific examples that have been brought to my attention by members of this place of workers in their electorates who have been, firstly, denied access to their entitlements and, secondly, denied access to the GEER Scheme, the publicly funded opportunity to ensure that people do get their workers' entitlements paid.

I will speak firstly about the example that was brought to my attention by the member for Eden-Monaro. He contacted me in relation to a car dealership in Cooma. It was deregistered at the end of 2008 without being put into liquidation. Workers were owed, in some cases, more than 10 years long service leave, redundancy payments and holiday pay. They could not access these payments through the government's GEER Scheme because the company has to be put into liquidation in order to trigger availability of funds in the GEER Scheme. That is precisely the difficulty that this bill is addressed at tackling. Many members who have contributed have made the point that one of the principal characteristics of phoenix activity is that directors abandon the company—they walk away and they leave the company without the assets necessary to fund the payment of workers' entitlements. In that situation, there are very few options are available to an employee, and that is the problem that this bill seeks to address. Employees in this car dealership in Cooma have been left without any capacity to get their entitlements. We want to ensure, by giving ASIC the power to administratively wind up the company, that those workers will have access to their entitlements through the GEER Scheme. It does not seem like a particularly controversial thing to be bringing forward, but, for whatever reason, those on the other side, in their relentless negativity, have come into this place and once again have said no—no to the protection of workers' entitlements and no to giving ASIC the power it needs to ensure that those workers' entitlements are facilitated.

I will mention another example. This one was brought to my attention by the member for New England. This was an exhaust and tyre company in the seat of New England. The owners of the company had closed the business without paying their workers their entitlements. Employees could not access their entitlements under the GEER Scheme because the company, once again, had not been put into liquidation. This is typical of those engaging in phoenix activity.

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