Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on behalf of the opposition to reflect on the amendments that have been moved in the Senate. The fact is that this bill is nothing like the bill that was put to the Australian people in the double dissolution election. This is a fundamentally different bill. It would have been easier for the government just to amend the title of the Fair Work building commission and just call it the ABCC, because the very significant amendments that were moved and accepted in the Senate have altered, fundamentally, this regulator, and I will go to some of those, if I may.

Firstly, the government backflipped on the reverse onus on workers to raise health and safety matters. They backflipped on judicial review. They backflipped on the oversight required for coercive powers to be used. And indeed they backflipped to some extent on retrospectivity for the industry in relation to how the Building Code will apply.

Of course this does not go to the Building Code. The instrument that has yet to be issued by the minister will lie on the table in the Senate, and Labor will be seeking to disallow that instrument because that instrument fundamentally changes the working conditions of construction workers. It is, in many respects, Work Choices coming into the building industry. And that is why we will be opposing it.

But, as for the regulator, of course the biggest furphy in this debate was that this was about fighting crime. This is a civil regulator. It is not a crime-fighting agency. If there is crime in the building industry, or the banking industry or any industry, we would want crime-fighting agencies to deal with those issues. This is a civil regulator.

We cannot support the bill, amended or otherwise, because it fundamentally offends the values of Labor. It removes entitlements: the right to silence and the right to have a lawyer. There are fundamental issues that are still of concern to Labor. But the subtext of this debate—the real motive of this government—has always been about cutting the conditions of employment of construction workers in this country.

There are now two sets of employment conditions in the construction sector. There are those conditions that apply to enterprise agreements that were entered into prior to the introduction of this bill, and there will be a new set of conditions of employment for any subsequent enterprise agreement entered into by employers and their workforce and unions. Mark my words: this will create instability and uncertainty in the construction sector. There will be two sets of rules for different employers.

Also, I have been made aware that many employers feel very let down by the Prime Minister conceding on these amendments. In fact, those companies who have yet to enter into agreements with the union are very disappointed that the Prime Minister and the government backslid and backflipped their way to this result. And, for that reason, this bill is of such a different character from the bill that was put before the Australian people during the double dissolution election.

Whatever we might say of the Prime Minister's predecessor, Tony Abbott, there is no way that Tony Abbott would have actually supported—

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