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

I am not impugning anybody's motives. I am just saying that if you are going to get up and raise moral hazard in the House as an argument then you cannot say—

Mr Nikolic interjecting—

You can reflect on government decisions. You cannot erase history. The member for Bass wants to erase history. You would be interested to hear what Peter Reith said at the time about the creation of this scheme. The Age on 11 July 2012 reported:

Peter Reith, who preceded Mr Abbott as federal workplace minister, said the scheme was always fraught with moral hazard—a tendency to take undue risks when someone else is bearing the cost.

''The government went into it with its eyes open,'' Mr Reith said. ''I was a party to it, but I wouldn't describe it as my best moment.''

He takes responsibility in that instance for the creation of GEERS. He was the minister preceding Mr Abbott—

Mr Briggs interjecting—

Really? So there you go. In any event, what we have is a system that was created by those opposite. So when the member for Hume comes in here and talks about moral hazard and points the finger at the Labor Party, you are left a bit perplexed. He must be the only Rhodes scholar who has the memory span of a goldfish. He has gone around the bowl a couple of times and has forgotten exactly whose creation this was. The Labor Party at the time had a very, very different approach to dealing with this issue, an approach that did not have those moral hazard implications.

Labor opposes the reduction in these schemes, but you do have to be concerned, I guess, about the behaviour of some employers. On 14 July this year, the Age reported how a Wangaratta textile maker had restructured their corporate arrangements so as to shift assets around to avoid paying the entitlements of employees, in effect, sending a dollar bill shelf company to the wall. That left the taxpayer holding the bag, as it were. It left GEERS holding those entitlements. We should be concerned about that sort of corporate behaviour and we need to be cognisant of it if we are to have the taxpayer paying these entitlements. But let us not have any humbug in this House. Let us not have those opposite try and erase history and come in here and talk about moral hazard.

Ultimately this is a policy that is born of, in the first instance, indifference to workers and, in the second instance, hypersensitivity to politics—and those opposite know it; they may shrug their heads, but that is the case. If there are flaws in the scheme then do not sheet them home to workers. Do not get stuck in to some mature-age worker who has got all of their savings locked up in their entitlements—annual leave and the redundancy payments that they might get—and will have trouble getting another job in what is a very difficult job market. Do not blame them or cap their entitlements. Have a look yourself, the way you make decisions and the way you set these things up.

The member for Mayo, opposite, is relaxing back. When he designed Work Choices, it was coherent. You could see it. It was all about cutting people's wages. It was all about little Billy. Was it little Billy who lost his penalty rates? Well, here we have Billy's dad losing his entitlements. That is the reality of this bill. Labor always sought to make this scheme fairer. We always sought to make it more just. We will oppose this attack on workers' entitlements as we should. No amount of airbrushing by the member for Bass, no amount of points of order and shaking of heads by those opposite, will change that fact. Labor will oppose this bill because it is bad policy.

See this speech in context