Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

We have just heard from the member opposite a litany of examples of how this government is going about re-regulating the labour market. He says he is proud of it. Unfortunately, that is a record of which he should not be proud.

Today we are here to talk about a Greens bill, the Fair Work Amendment (Better Work/Life Balance) Bill, which has been brought forward under the guise that we are discussing flexibility in the workplace. What we hear from those opposite is effectively a bidding war between the Greens and the Labor Party, who both want to impress upon those in the union movement—who donate very heavily to their campaigns—that they will be at the forefront, at the vanguard, of re-regulating the labour market. But of course we know that this is not the right thing to do; it is not the right thing to do in this place and it is certainly not the right thing to do for the Australian people.

It is very important that we do have flexibility in our workplace; there is no question about that. The eloquent speeches delivered by my colleagues the federal member for Mayo and the federal member for Grey outlined how mutually beneficial it can be when workers and employers sit down together and agree upon arrangements that can ensure something that works both for the employer and for the employee.

What we are talking about here today is far beyond that; it is about re-regulating and it is about enshrining this into legislation rather than leaving it for the employer and the employee to discuss amongst themselves. Why do those opposite need to do that, particularly given that this government has brought into effect individual flexibility agreements? They say that these agreements work for flexibility. Already we have heard from so many people that they do not work in practice, because they only apply for 28 days and they can be terminated, either at the behest of the employer or at the behest of the employee, giving no security and no certainty for either the employer or the employee in these arrangements. So, if the government is really serious about this, surely this should be a focus for the government's attention going forward?

When we talk about flexibility, when we talk about what this means in practice, surely the government needs to look at itself and the fact that it has been making it even harder for working women to get back to work through increasing the cost of child care in this country? I think that is quite frankly a disgrace. Before the last election the government promised that it was going to deliver 260 new childcare centres. Of course, it delivered only 38, then it decided to scrap the scheme. It decided that it was going to reregulate the childcare industry by bringing forward new regulations which it said would help deliver better care for our nation's children. Sure, we all believe that delivering the highest possible care for our nation's children should be paramount. But the government decided to put in place a number of regulations based on nothing much in particular to increase the ratio from one to five to one to four, and it said that this would deliver better outcomes for our children. Yet there is no evidence to say this is the case. The childcare minister said it would only increase the cost of child care by something like 57c a week. Modelling done by the Childcare Alliance has already blown that out of the water and said that in fact it is going to increase the cost of child care by between $30 and $50 a week. The Productivity Commission also backed this up.

So for this government to come into this chamber today and talk about flexibility—to simply talk the talk but not walk the walk—is another demonstration of how they have failed: how they have failed the nation's women and how they have failed all of us.

If the government is serious about doing something about flexibility, it needs to look at the tax and transfer system. At the risk of blowing my own trumpet, here, I would highly recommend a piece that I wrote in the Australian Financial Review that goes to this very point.

Finally, I want to place on the record, in my remaining 20 seconds, that if this government is interested in fairness, flexibility and security, then why did it not, during the Grocon dispute, condemn the illegal action that took place there? Instead it went into hiding and said nothing, which of course means that the government is not interested in fairness, flexibility or the security of our nation's workers. (Time expired)

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