Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I remember 26 June 2013 for a different reason compared to what so many in this place and so many Australians remember it for. It was the last time before I was elected as the member for Bendigo that I had to attend a site meeting to speak with some very stressed workers and union members about their entitlements. This type of meeting is something that union organisers quite often go to. For me it was because a company, Swan Cleaning, had gone into receivership, it had gone bankrupt.

When you are in these meetings, what you fall back on for these workers is this particular guarantee and this particular piece of legislation—the Fair Entitlements Guarantee Act. Yes, it improves GEERS. I can remember speaking about GEERS and the importance of GEERS to workers in their workplaces. But as the previous speaker, the member for Rankin, said it was not enshrined in legislation. That is a very important note to make.

On this particular day I was discussing the Fair Entitlements Guarantee with these workers. And let us just for a moment acknowledge what happens when a company goes bankrupt. Quite often it happens at short notice and the employees are the last to find out. Quite often in the industries I used to represent, the workers I supported would not receive their last couple of pay cheques; they would not have their super paid; they are owed sick leave, holiday leave and quite often long service leave entitlements. I remember Robbie in this particular case. Robbie has worked at the Bendigo Marketplace since it opened, so we are talking 15 years that she has been a cleaner there. In that time she has worked for several companies—in fact, three of them have gone bankrupt, which speaks to the nature of the cleaning industry and contract cleaning and broader problems that we have—but what Robbie has consistently lost in that time is her continuity of service, her long service leave and her superannuation entitlements. But at least one of the things that Robbie has been guaranteed more recently is the fact that she would get paid her wages.

That speaks to the very nature of why the Fair Entitlements Guarantee legislation is so important. It ensures that workers who have done the right thing, who have turned up and worked hard, are not disadvantaged and do not go without because their company has not been able to manage the books properly. In most industries, and in the cleaning industry in particular, businesses go bankrupt because competition has driven down contract prices and companies take on contracts that they cannot afford to pay people properly. That is one reason. Another reason is because we do have some shonky people in the industry who literally rip their workers off and go bankrupt, and then they go into the phoenixing arrangements. That is another reason why companies go bankrupt, and largely it is through their own fault. Another reason is what we have going on in industries like the automotive industry at the moment—that is, because of bad government policy, because of a set of global circumstances, there is pressure on those firms and some of them may, unfortunately, have to file for bankruptcy because they literally are not able to keep operating because their markets have been lost.

What is wrong with the Fair Entitlements Guarantee Amendment Bill 2014 is that it seeks to cap the assistance for redundancy pay and entitlements to a threshold of 16 weeks' pay and seeks to align it with the maximum payout under the national employment standards. In other words it is a cut: it is changing from a maximum of four weeks per year of service to a maximum of 16 weeks in total, so it does not take into consideration at all the length of time some workers have served with their employers. And as the previous speaker said, the extra pay and the extra time would allow them to retrain, to reskill and to re-enter the workforce and to not become another person in the unemployment queue. That is the point that this government is missing: if you support workers who have been made redundant, if you support workers who have lost their jobs, if you help them in the early days and the early weeks to retrain, then they are more likely to re-enter the workforce. The statistics prove that if you can get somebody back to work within their first six months of unemployment, then they are more likely to stay in that job for longer. Whether it be cutting young people's unemployment benefits entirely, making it almost impossible for them to get to their job interviews, to get to their job training because they have no support to live on, or whether it be cutting back this entitlement, the government seeks to punish workers who find themselves without work.

It is particularly disappointing that the government are changing this legislation at the same time they are also overseeing the dismantling of the automotive sector. These changes would spell disaster for workers in the automotive sector, as well as other workers in other parts of the manufacturing industry. I do note at this point there are lots of speakers from this side of the House listed to speak on this bill, but there are very few speakers listed from the other side of the House. The coalition's marginal seat members, who may have lots of auto workers living in their electorates, are not speaking on this. They are not putting their names to this bill so that people who are made redundant in their electorates cannot put their names to this government cutting this entitlement. It comes back to priorities, and this government have demonstrated over and over again twisted priorities: they are not willing to invest in workers who find themselves being made redundant; they are not willing to support those workers. Instead, their twisted priority is, as we have heard today, lots of debate around corporate tax and not ensuring that big companies pay their fair share of corporate tax.

What else is going to hurt the automotive sector, apart from these changes to the Fair Entitlements Guarantee, is the fact that the government is cutting funding to the Automotive Transformation Scheme. That fund was established to encourage competitive investment and innovation within the automotive industry. Yes, we know that Ford is pulling out; yes, we know that Holden is leaving; and, yes, we know that Toyota has now made the decision to go. But there could have been a chance for some of the component suppliers to these major car manufacturers.

The former Labor government established a fund to help invest in that, to try to create new jobs and save the jobs we had in the automotive industry and see if there was a way that some of that work could be done for new industries. Just one local example of that is in Bendigo where we manufacture the Bushmaster. Some of the supply chain is through local small manufacturers who previously supplied the automotive industry. They are looking at talking to Thales about investing and innovating to see if there is a way they can switch some of their work from the automotive industry into supplying parts not just for the Bushmaster but also, hopefully, the Hawkei.

Potentially, they would have been able to apply for some funding to ensure that that innovation occurred. But what we have seen in the budget is a cut of $200 million over the next two years. In many ways this will only speed up the closure of our manufacturing in the automotive industry because we are taking away the government investment that would have helped the industry transition. That is another bill that is due to be debated today and, again, I note that the members who have manufacturing workers in their electorates are currently not scheduled to speak on that bill.

There is a third way in which the automotive industry is facing a huge attack, one where you could see, again, the early shutdown of the automotive industry. This is an industry which employs upwards of 50,000 people when you put all the jobs in the component sector and the major manufacturers like Holden and Ford and Toyota together, and the threat, of course, will be the impact of KAFTA, the Korea-Australia Free Trade Agreement. Yes, the agreement hopes to create agricultural jobs, but these jobs are going to be at the cost of manufacturing jobs in the car manufacturing sector. This will lead to high-skilled jobs being lost to our local economy, high-skilled, high-paid jobs, to relatively low-paid jobs in the agricultural sector. That is just another problem with the shifting of jobs that is going on.

This agreement will contribute to the loss of Australia's most advanced manufacturing industry, the car manufacturing industry, and cost tens of thousands of jobs. So at a time when a KAFTA agreement will speed up the loss of jobs in manufacturing, at a time when the government is cutting funding to the automotive transitional scheme, we are now seeing the government attack those workers who will be made redundant by reducing their entitlements guarantee to 16 weeks—capping their entitlements at 16 weeks redundancy, reducing them from the current arrangement of four weeks for every year of service. One of the deep concerns that has been raised by stakeholders in the industry is that these changes could be an incentive to vulnerable auto component manufacturers who will close their doors early to ensure that their employees remain covered by the current arrangements.

This government is creating a crisis within the automotive sector. Rather than a transitional situation where automotive manufacturing is slowly phased out, multiple policy and legislative decisions by this government are speeding up these job losses. It is a decision that has been deliberately made by this government not in the interests of these workers and not in the interests of these local economies, but in the interests of a budget quick-fix. The decision has been made in the interests of people that are not looking to protect Australian jobs but on looking overseas and trying to make product overseas at the expense of Australian jobs. So we are facing a crisis within the automotive industry on these particular levels and we are seeing a government that does not believe in investing in those workers to ensure that they have the skills to go on to the next job.

This is another example of a lie. The then shadow employment minister Eric Abetz said that 'you can be satisfied there is no risk to your entitlements'. This is what he put in writing to people working in the sector. It was just a blatant lie. He has not guaranteed their entitlements. One of the first acts he has done in his first year as the minister for the sector is to reintroduce an attack, an individual agreement, which is like bringing back Work Choices. He has gone after their Fair Entitlements Guarantee scheme, which he said he would not do, and then he has cut funding to a sector, innovation funding that could have seen a transition towards industry and jobs.

That is the gist of it. This government has no plan for jobs. They are creating more and more insecurity within the industry, within workplaces and within our community. They have got no ability to work with industry to create the jobs of the future, jobs that you can count on. The NUW's campaign calling for jobs that you can count on highlights how this government just lacks innovation and ingenuity. I am proud to stand with the NUW and working Australians to say that we need a government with a policy to create jobs that you can count on. Australia has the second highest rate of casualisation and insecure work in the world particularly within some industries like food processing. So if we are serious about creating jobs in the agricultural industry, then we need to be serious about creating jobs we can count on. This bill is a bad bill. It goes after workers who will be made redundant because of bad policy. It is a bill that everybody should be voting down.

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