Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Last month was the hottest March on record. But does the government bring us back here, summoning everyone from across the country for a special sitting of parliament, to debate the threat of climate change? No. People have lost their houses because rogue banks have been giving them advice that was actually in the bank's interest but not in the individual's interest. Does the government bring us back here asking, 'What can we do to make sure that people around this country are not getting ripped off by the banks?' No.

The government says we must all come back for a special sitting of parliament, using a section of the Constitution that has not been used many times at all, because it wants to attack people's rights at work and the unions who represent people when they are in work. First up, it says that it so concerned about so-called corruption, but it does not want to establish a national federal independent commission against corruption or a national anticorruption watchdog; it would like a body that is able to look at one side of the political fence in one industry. And it says that we have to come back to debate the Australian Building and Construction Commission legislation. Then, because it realises that that is actually a bit thin and that most people around the country, if you asked them, would not accept the proposition that the only place that wrongdoing and corruption exists in our society is there, it wants a national watchdog that looks into politicians and public servants, and looks into employers as well as, including employers like the company that bribed Saddam Hussein's regime.

Instead, they come back in and say, 'Well, no. The next piece of legislation we want to pat out the agenda is one that will make our roads less safe and will remove people's rights at work when their workplace is the roads that we all share.

What is this legislation that we are debating? What is it that we are being asked to repeal? We are being asked to repeal legislation that enshrines a pretty simple proposition: if you are working on our roads, which we all share, as a truck driver, then there should be minimum rates of pay that apply across the board and that do not just apply if you are an employee but they also apply if you are an owner-driver. There is a reason for that: if you look back over study after study, we know in an industry like this, like many others, that are characterised by lots of intermediate contracting chains, where there is often a large distance between the person who might receive the delivery or contract—they might be a supermarket, they might be Coles or Woolworths—and the person down the bottom who actually does the work. What happens is that every time you take a step down that contracting chain, the money and the reward goes up, and the risk and the pressure flows down. It ends up being the case that the person at the bottom of the chain is the one who is under the most pressure and told, 'I'll give you this job, but you have to deliver it in 12 hours time. I can't promise you that you won't be waiting a couple of hours before the job is loaded. But it's going to be your responsibility to get it there on time and, if you don't do it well, we're going to impose a penalty or you might not get paid at all.'

What does that do? We know what it does. In this industry, there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time waiting without any payment at all for their goods to be loaded so that they can then do the delivery. What we know is that some of that waiting might stretch for as long as a whole shift of work and they do not get paid for it. But they are expected at the end of that long period of unpaid waiting time to be as bright as a button and deliver the load in what might be less time than they originally thought they might have to deliver it.

What happens when you put that kind of pressure on people? When you put that kind of pressure on people, you don't have to be Einstein to work out that when someone takes to the road in a B-Double, a semitrailer—who is are not well rested, is under extraordinary pressure to deliver on time and is told by the person who is one step up the contracting chain, 'Well, if you don't do it, I'm sure I can find someone else who will'—people take risks that put themselves and other road users at risk. We know that, because study after study of Australian drivers has told us that. One 2001 study found that drivers who are paid in terms of the amount of work they did—at piece rates; so not being raid hourly rates—reported fatigue more often than drivers who are paid for the time that they were working.

Another Australian study that was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2007 said:

… the strongest predictors of drug use were payment based on the amount of work completed and fatigue reported as a major problem … The strong association of payment by results and low pay with drug use among Australian long-distance truck drivers is consistent with other research suggesting that economic factors are an important influence on health and safety in the workplace.

Just to underline that:

…economic factors are an important influence on health and safety in the workplace.

That is why in response to that, legislation was passed through the last parliament which the Greens supported, because it makes our roads safer. There will be less pressure on people to drive when they are tired, less pressure on people to drive when they are on drugs and less pressure on people to drive when they are not well rested, if they are paid properly and there is a uniform floor that applies across the sector so it applies whether you are an employee or an owner-driver. That has been part of the problem up to now: for constitutional reasons, we have had the ability to regulate what employees do but we have not had, until this piece of legislation, the ability to regulate owner-drivers in the same way.

If you have a floor underneath industries that are characterised by high levels of contracting out, like the cleaning industry or the textile industry, it means you cannot have a race to the bottom on the amount that people get paid. At the end of the day, that is what is the variable factor in a lot of these contracts that get signed. When you put a floor in, you stop that.

There has been a lot of complaints where people have said: 'The people who are paying me aren't going to be able to afford this.'. To what extent have people asked and to what extent has there been an across-the-country push, including from the government, to say, 'It's the law and now we have to comply with it'? No, the government has not gone out and said, 'This is the law of the land now, and people are just going to have to work out how to incorporate this cost and potentially pass it onto consumers or customers at the end of the day. But there is going to be an increased cost as a result of increased wages—of course there has to be; you have to work out how to do it.' No. They have allowed—in fact, encouraged—people to come up here and, effectively, blackmail by saying, 'I'm told that I'm not going to get the contract, so you should repeal the legislation.'

If there are problems with the order that the tribunal has made, if there are some legitimate concerns—and I have heard some concerns expressed, for example, that it applies the same rate of pay if you are delivering a full load as if you are delivering a half load. There is a simple solution to that: go back to the tribunal and ask them to fix the order. That is something the government could have done on any occasion. On any occasion the government could have gone back to the tribunal and said, 'We need to fix this, because there are some unintended consequences.' Instead, what we have is the government standing up in this place saying, 'Oh my word—did you realise there are several truck drivers out the front protesting? We should listen to them.' They do not tell the parliament that it was the employment minister, Senator Cash, who encouraged them to come up in the first place—who said, 'Come up and take industrial action. Come up to parliament. I know what the government would be saying if other people clocked off work to come up here and protest out the front of parliament—but this was one that was actually encouraged by the government itself.

It is not well thought that there is a long history of partnership between Greens and truck drivers. I have not met many truck drivers who have been prepared to go to the barricades for their right to vote Greens. It is not a natural partnership, one might think. But this is a bill that we are prepared to defend because it is about the safety of those truck drivers. And, crucially, something we have to recognise is that roads are something that we all share. I would suggest that most people, if they are driving along the highway late at night, when all they can see are the headlights, and a truck is doing 100 kilometres an hour down the other side of the highway—and it might not be a dual carriageway; you might not be separated by that much at all—would want to know that that person driving the truck has been well rested. You want to know that that person is not under pressure to cut corners for the sake of a dollar but that they have safety as their paramount consideration. When you are taking the kids home from school and you are in a suburban street and there is a B-double next to you, as often happens in my electorate of Melbourne, you want to know that the person who is driving it has not been forced to wait 14 or 15 hours, unpaid waiting time, and then they have just got this load and have been forced to go and deliver it.

It is good legislation that should stay. If there is a problem with the order, go back to the tribunal and ask them to fix it. The fact that the government's first response is to come here and abolish the legislation in toto tells you everything that you need to know about what we are going to see over the next few months. This government has never seen a right at work it did not want to strip away. And here we are being brought back again, and what is on the agenda? Not the big economic matters of this country, not the climate challenges that we are facing and not the social issues that many people want resolved, but union bashing, pure and simple—and expect to see a lot more of it. But, when it comes to protecting people's safety at work and protecting the safety of our roads, the Greens will stand steadfast, and so we oppose this bill.

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