Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

The background to the FEG scheme, as most members would remember, is the GEER Scheme. Following the collapse of Ansett, the Howard government in 2001 initiated the GEER Scheme, the General Employee Entitlements and Redundancy Scheme, to ensure that workers were not placed in the position where, because of the collapse of a corporation, whether or not it was a major corporation, they lost their entitlements accumulated over many years. We will not go into the reasons why Ansett collapsed. Many people would blame the union movement for the featherbedding and the arrangements that they managed to eke out of the executives at Ansett over a very long time, making the airline utterly uneconomic. But rather than returning to that debate, which is now 15 years old, I would point out to the House that the GEER Scheme was the antecedent to the FEG scheme which Labor changed when they came into office.

The 16-week maximum is the community standard that exists now and existed in 2001. It was the accepted standard throughout the period of the Howard government and then through five years of the Labor government. So for five years of the Labor government they thought 16 weeks was perfectly adequate and they kept the FEG scheme, as they renamed it, at a 16-week maximum.

When Mr Shorten, now the Leader of the Opposition, was the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations he decided to get rid of the 16-week cap. That obviously led to a massive cost blowout for the Australian taxpayer. Yet again we see that the shadow minister was living a champagne lifestyle on a beer income. Obviously when you are running surplus budgets you are able to fund a champagne lifestyle on a champagne income, but you cannot keep borrowing money from overseas to pass it back to your union friends, as Mr Shorten did by removing that cap. It is coincidental, many would say, that the Leader of the Opposition was also a former union boss in the Australian Workers Union. Some would say that, in the dying days of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, many of the union's demands to the government of the time were met with the Greens allies in the Senate passing almost every proposal that the Labor Party put up to try and entrench union power. One of the things they did was to get rid of the 16-week cap on the GEER Scheme, which became the FEG scheme, and this government is returning the 16-week cap, which is the community standard. It will save $87.7 million over four years, and I think taxpayers will think that is a very fair use of their money.

Certainly we all want to protect workers who lose their entitlements. They should be protected on what is the community standard. We should not be using government, as the previous government did, to support their union base in order to win votes in a leadership ballot. Therefore, I cannot imagine that the shadow minister's criticisms, while I am sure are probably good-natured, are genuine.

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