Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is always a pleasure to follow the member for Shortland. She made, as usual, a fine contribution and I know that because I heard those opposite getting irate during it. I wish I could say it is a pleasure to speak on this bill, the Fair Entitlements Guarantee Amendment Bill 2014, but of course it is not a pleasure to speak on a bill that cuts workers entitlements and caps redundancy pay—in this case at 16 weeks. This follows recommendations by the Commission of Audit—not a progressive commission, but a regressive commission—on a whole range of things like the privatisation of Australian Hearing and basically taking us back in time, in relation to the Federation, with big cuts to health and education spending and the like. It was a reactionary Commission of Audit, and you can see that expressed here in legislation by the government following its directions.

This bill will have a particular effect on mature aged workers and on long-serving employees, and particularly for people who have served a long time in industries that are precarious or with employers who hover just on the right side of bankruptcy—or the wrong side, as it were. This is a bill that the whole of Australia should be aware of, should be concerned about and should be worried about because it goes to the issue of fairness in our country. It goes to the issue of fairness and workers' entitlements. One of the ways we mark what kind of society we are is how we treat workers, not just with their wages but also with their entitlements. And for many of the workers I have dealt with during my time as an official of a union, their entitlements constitute a significant part of their savings, other than their superannuation, so it is a very important issue indeed to discuss.

In South Australia, the auto industry has been put to the sword by this government. We all remember how, on 11 December, the Treasurer in the Financial Review, the top financial paper in this country, dared General Motors to leave. Of course General Motors workers have good redundancy provisions in their agreements, but there are many people in the car industry who work for small component manufacturers and we have seen in many cases in the past that those people are reliant on GEERS for their entitlements if their employers liquidate or go to the wall.

For second-tier component suppliers in particular there is a real issue at the moment. Their main hub of the automotive industry has been, in the government's own words, 'dared to leave'. This industry has taken that decision and we now have the closing down of the industry by 2017. For many of the second-tier suppliers, this creates a very typical set of circumstances because, as we will see with a bill later on in the parliament, the Automotive Transformation Scheme bill, the government intends to cut $500 million out of assistance to the automotive industry and that threatens to hasten the closure plans of the industry. That is because directors of these companies have responsibilities to banks and to landlords to not trade when insolvent and the like, and so those directors will obviously have a difficult set of circumstances if this cut to the Automotive Transformation Scheme goes through.

It is just part of the neglect and the malice that is shown by this government to the automotive industry. So anybody who is concerned about those workers, those hard-working Australians—and there are about 10,000 of them in South Australia and another 20,000 in Victoria—should be concerned about this bill. Anybody who is concerned about mature age workers should be concerned about this bill. And anybody who is concerned about long-serving employees should also be concerned about this bill.

It is impossible to discuss this bill without going back in time. I do not know whether you were here, Deputy Speaker Vasta, in the year 2000, but obviously we have to go back to the Howard government, to a time when Tony Abbott was the workplace relations minister, to find the origins of the GEER Scheme. While I do not want to be unnecessarily insensitive or anything like that, when we look at the establishment of the GEER Scheme, it was triggered by what happened at the National Textiles firm. That firm, which had a famous director through his association with the then Prime Minister, had a dramatic effect on the way we discuss entitlements. All of a sudden, there were a hundred or so workers who had lost their entitlements and people put two and two together, I guess, that it should be the government's responsibility to safeguard entitlements of workers. That was the origin of the GEER Scheme.

At the time, we also had the collapse of Ansett. The collapse of Ansett also had a dramatic effect on the community's thinking about entitlements. Up until that point you might have had a local deli close—and in my case I saw a supermarket close in Elizabeth South in my electorate. In those days I was a union official. Those people lost their entitlement but there was no hue and cry, no national media attention, just an attentive union official, but there is only so much you could do against a liquidated firm. So it was really National Textiles on one hand that focused the community's attention—and I think that it focused the government's attention in a very serious way at that time—and the failure of Ansett and, of course, many people of Ansett had longstanding entitlements that extended well beyond 16 weeks.

The government chose in the National Textiles arrangement to make a special arrangement for those workers, one that had not been made for workers in similar situations preceding that.

Mr Briggs interjecting—

We will get to that. In Ansett's case, we had a levy on airline tickets, on consumers, to cover entitlements—a very interesting arrangement. The member for Mayo interjects and wonders what we might do. I am just going through the history of how this scheme originated, that's all, just talking a few facts here. When you talk about this scheme, I will not deny that it was a flaw that Australia, for all those years up until this point, had not talked about securing workers' entitlements in the event of bankruptcy or liquidation. Of course it was a flaw. There is no great secret there. The member for Mayo asked questions.

But when you have the member for Hume in here talking about moral hazard and frothing up there on the backbenches—it must be his audition for Assistant Treasurer, I guess. My money is on Mr Nikolic. I think that he would make a fine Assistant Treasurer. It would get him off the backbench and we would see a bit of fight in the government.

But it is interesting to note that when they came to set up these schemes, in Ansett's case the then government looked at slugging consumers in the first instance, and their second choice was to slug the taxpayer. If people are going to get up in this parliament like the member for Hume—

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