Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

This is a reform whose time has come, because it is clear that in Australia at the moment there is a mismatch between the hours that people actually work and the hours that they want to work. We know that just over half of all workers in this country say that they work more than half a day—more than four hours—more or less than they would prefer to, even taking into account the effect this might have on their income if they worked less. A third of women who work full time would also like to work less, despite the large proportion of working women who already do. Almost half of all fathers living in coupled households work more than they would prefer.

This position, as those statistics indicate, is especially acute for those who have caring responsibilities—not just a limited focus of caring responsibilities as it is currently defined in the Fair Work Act but caring responsibilities more broadly. Increasingly now it is not just the children that one has to look after but also the grandchildren and the parents or even the grandparents. What this also shows is that flexibility that we have seen in our workplace laws has been, by and large, over the last couple of decades a one-way street. Employers have benefited enormously from being able to tailor the hours that people work to the needs of their business but that flexibility has not been met by flexibility from below.

Flexibility needs to become a two-way street. People need to have more control over the hours they work, the location they work in and the arrangement of those working hours. The key to that is to do what this bill proposes and give employees across the board, who have served an appropriate length of time with their employer, an enforceable right to request arrangements that will deliver a better work-life balance. Of course, this must be balanced against legitimate operational needs of employers and that is exactly what this bill will do. It will provide a test that would be easier for carers to meet the bar of but would still nonetheless allow any disputes to be resolved in Fair Work Australia by an independent umpire. This proposal is actually quite a modest proposal by international standards and brings us into line with many other countries. The United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany have been doing this for a number of years and their experience is illustrative.

I have no doubt that those who speak against this bill will say it is another layer of regulation for employers and will involve Fair Work overseeing every decision they make. That has not been the international experience. The international experience is that once the laws and the framework change then most employers and employees work these issues out at the workplace themselves. In the Netherlands and Germany, for example, fewer than 30 requests in each of those countries resulted in court action. We are talking about Germany, with a population four times as big as ours. One could quite reasonably expect that if this bill passes we would only end up with a handful of matters going to Fair Work Australia, and that is because most employers and employees will work these matters out themselves.

At the moment, people do not have an enforceable right. At the moment, under Labor's Fair Work Act, you can request a change to your working hours but if the employer says 'no' illegitimately then there is nowhere for you to go. There is no point in having an unenforceable right. That was a point that the ACTU very strongly endorsed during the course of the House Standing Committee on Education and Employment inquiry into this bill. Ultimately, I am pleased to report, the majority of the committee stated in the advisory report that they support the principle embodied in the bill that the right to request flexible working arrangements should be extended to classes of employees other than carers, particularly those affected by domestic and family violence. The committee urged the House to consider this bill once the Fair Work Act review was handed down—that review has been handed down and it made no adverse comments about these proposals—and also after the government's response was released. We are still awaiting the government's response.

It is my hope that, when the government respond, they take into account some of the suggested amendments from the committee and we put into place a reform that will give people greater control over their working lives.

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