Chris Hayes (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the Fair Entitlements Guarantee Amendment Bill 2014 but, unlike the previous speaker, I oppose this bill. I oppose the amendments to the Fair Entitlements Guarantee Act of 2012 and what this bill seeks to do.

The Fair Entitlements Guarantee is a legislative safety net. It is there to protect workers who, through no fault of their own, lose their jobs through the bankruptcy or liquidation of companies. The Fair Entitlements Guarantee is a scheme designed to ensure fairness for working people. One of the things I have a degree of understanding of, having an electorate with a very high degree of unemployment and also having family members who have lost their jobs principally through the liquidation of the company, is how this impacts on families. I know how a family member can go to work only to be told with no notice that there is no further job, that for financial reasons liquidation is necessary: 'Please remove all your belongings, files and any other personal effects and exit the premises.' That happened to my son. I know how devastating it was for him and his family. They had a mortgage and school fees to pay. It had an absolutely huge impact. If you multiply that electorate wide, it is easy to understand the importance of having safety-net legislation.

Members opposite, cast your minds back. We did not always have a safety net. Remember, back in the year 2000, there was the unfortunate and unexpected liquidation of a particular company called National Textiles. The then Prime Minister's brother happened to be on the board of directors of that company. As a consequence of this, and to the considerable embarrassment of the other side, the General Employee Entitlement Redundancy Scheme, the GEERS legislation, came into effect in 2001. Whether it due to embarrassment or simply feeling it was the right thing to do, it was under the circumstances the right thing to do—not because it was the Prime Minister's brother's company, but because this was one company among many which took the soft way out and liquidated for corporate reasons. This is not something we should be shying away from. It is certainly not, as the previous speaker said, that sometimes these entitlements are so inflated that it amounts to corporate spending. This is about trying to do something for people's lives when their company goes into bankruptcy or, more than likely, into liquidation. That is certainly no fault of the employees.

This is an important bill the government is bringing forward because it seeks to undermine the very basis upon which we are trying to protect the entitlements of those employees. The bill will impose caps in terms of payments of entitlements; these will be capped at 16 weeks. The other significant part of this bill will ensure that, as opposed to getting paid at your average rate of pay, you will be paid at the level of average weekly earnings. That is a vastly different figure. I understand the speaker opposite, the member for Hume, said it is possible for some people who are earning $100,000 to receive this payment. Yes, it is. It is not a matter of whether they contributed by negligence to bringing down the company; they lost their jobs like anybody else. To simply use the figure of average weekly earnings as the yardstick for this will have a huge impact on those people unfortunate enough to have to make a claim on this fund.

The bill will also progress three technical amendments that have already been spoken about. It will also amend issues as to whether a person has reasonably pursued the debt off an employer. It has provisions allowing the cost of appeals to the AAT to be drawn from special appropriations. But I cannot get away from the fact that, like many other pieces of legislation we are seeing at the moment coming from the government benches, this is actually going to undermine workers' entitlements. As I said, this is a legislative safety net, and what do they want to do? They want to wind it back. They want to make sure that you can only get a maximum of 16 weeks, as opposed to four weeks per year of service. They want to make sure that, as opposed to getting your real rate of pay, it is wound back to average weekly earnings.

It is extraordinary the lengths this government will go, I would not say to attack workers but certainly to undermine workers' conditions. I know that during the campaign leading up to the last election the government made it very clear that it was not their intention to move on Work Choices—at least not during the term of this government. But what we have seen is a never-ending pattern of going out and undermining workers' entitlements and workers' conditions. As the member for Hume said, people should not get used to being in an environment of spending. I agree with that. But is it only the workers who we are going to take the stick to when we want to curtail spending?

I was reading over the weekend about what is happening in corporate taxation. Gee, that is a first. The government certainly does not want to get too close to this body. I suspect that many of the companies that have been cited here are principal donors to the Liberal Party. This report, Who pays for our common wealth?, says that a third of Australia's largest companies pay less than 10c in the dollar in corporate tax. Ten cents in the dollar! That is a long way behind what they expect employees to pay. The report also found that 84 per cent of Australia's top 200 companies listed on the Australian stock exchange pay less than 30c in the dollar, which is the corporate tax rate.

On one hand, the government want to take every opportunity to wind back workers' conditions and to wind back protections that do nothing more than protect employees and their families—particularly in this case, where through no fault of their own a company goes into liquidation or bankruptcy. But, on the other hand, they certainly do not want to move with any great haste to do anything about corporate taxation. When you look at the top 200 companies, it works out that, if they paid the corporate taxation rate, the budget would gain $8.4 billion or more a year in revenue. That is almost the total savings that the government expects to make by slashing pensions, by bringing in the new GP tax and by cutting programs to Indigenous Australians. They certainly have their priorities very much skewed when it comes to this. I suspect there is a reason for it. They have a philosophical reason for winding back the entitlements for employees.

It is with regret that we find that we need to oppose this. I would have thought that those opposite would have had some regard for the whole concept emanating out of events such as the falling over of National Textiles, whether by embarrassment or otherwise. John Howard brought in the GEERS legislation back in 2001. Sure, that was a capped piece of legislation, but it was not restricted in terms of the earning rates. But they are simply winding back what we have now, what is provided under GEERS, to 16 weeks. They are also putting an extra imposition on, meaning that any worker who has not been able to gain their entitlements under a failed company going through liquidation or bankruptcy must make very attempt to pursue a company—which, unless workers have a trade union to go through, would be a litigious route and would probably be pretty expensive. The government is ensuring that those workers do not get payments based on their rate of pay but on average weekly earnings.

I will go back to where I started from: this is going to impact on lots and lots of people. I have the experience of seeing my own family go through a liquidation and a forced redundancy, with no knowledge of it occurring other than the fact of being escorted to a gate and being locked out, along with every other employee who lost their job. This has a devastating impact on families and family welfare, and it allows no opportunity for people to plan.

This is very, very retrograde. I am proud to be part of a party that saw fit in 2007 to bring about the fair entitlement guarantee legislation and I am proud of the fact that, since 2007, more than $852 million has been paid out of that scheme, to the benefit of 70,000 Australian workers and their families. I oppose this legislation. I think it is wrong in principle. I think it takes a stick to workers and their families at a time when what they need most is protection. This government has turned its back on them.

See this speech in context