Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

The minister might like to talk about these unfair contract provisions and try to assert that Labor did nothing when in government, when in fact it was Labor that introduced a national law to regulate unfair contract terms between individuals, consumers and businesses. This was introduced in 2010 under the reforms underpinning the Australian Consumer Law. While the government might like to conveniently forget that, they also might like to conveniently forget some of the words of Senator Cormann in this very debate. These are his words:

We have said that a certain category of transactions—transactions of up to $100,000 in value for contracts of 12 months or less or up to $250,000 in value for a period of more than 12 months—will come within the scope of this extended protection, which historically has been available only to consumers. We are making that available to small business, consistent with the commitments we made in the lead-up to the last election.

…   …   …

In the end, when you put in this additional regulatory mechanism, you have to draw the line somewhere. We have made judgement, based on consultation, having considered all of the outcomes of that consultation very carefully. … All I would say is that the government is very confident that we have got this right.

Then they ended up voting against these provisions. They come in here today and say that they will support the very things they voted against in the other place.

I am very happy that these provisions are going ahead. They cannot figure out what they are doing. They are still divided over myriad issues to do with big business versus small business and franchises versus employers. Bring back Bruce to give some certainty to this portfolio!

I will point out that we have a government that does not quite know what it is doing here. We know they are having an internal argument about some very key issues that are a very significant concern to the sector, including matters such as reform of competition law. We will let them have all those bun fights internally. But, since the minister rose to speak on this issue and stated they have gotten this right, it is a sorry timeline that has led to this over the last couple of months. I look, for example, at some of the comments of the independent contractors and their peak group, the ICA. It points to the hypocrisy of this government, which likes to talk big on small business but, when it comes to actually making decisions that are in the interest of small businesses, but they have to be dragged kicking and screaming by Labor, the Greens and a number of crossbenchers. I am happy for them to be dragged to this point, but we need to get some facts on the table. Have a look at the views of the independent contractors on 26 August. The ICA said:

Since 2010 ICA has campaigned hard for the unfair contract protections available to consumers to be extended to small business people. The Abbott Coalition promised to do this when in opposition and again repeated the promise on winning government.

The Bill is now in Parliament. Yet we’re opposing it! It’s been sent to a Senate Committee for review. Here’s our detailed submission to the Committee.

Our grounds for opposition?

This part is important:

There’s been a simple ‘trick’ inserted into the Bill: the protections against unfair contracts are limited to contracts under $100,000.

This theme of sneaky behaviour and trickery is one that permeates these comments by the independent contractors. On 2 September they stated:

Politics works like this. You make big election promises. Then, once in government, appear to deliver the promises. But in the detail kill off the promise. The suckers in the electorate won’t notice!

That’s the situation with the Coalition’s key promise to small business people to extend consumer unfair contract protections to them. We expressed our shock last week.

They quote a commentator who is not usually kind to our ilk of politics, Grace Collier. These are Grace Collier's words in TheWeekend Australian:

This bill was supposed to extend some basic rules about commercial contracts (for small businesses) … the government put an exemption in, which pretty much exempts everyone and makes the bill meaningless.

Where has the minister gone? Speaking of trickery, she has left the chamber.

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