Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

using procurement to force its ideological predisposition on business. We are about to see the mother of all logjams in the Fair Work Commission. There will be companies out there who are desperate to renegotiate their agreements. We have seen some consequences of that in South Australia. We have heard a lot about power from those opposite—I do not want to go through the power debate in this place on this bill; maybe another time—but SA Power Networks is one company which has been caught up in the red tape of this government. The big hand of government is meddling with a company which has had 12 years of industrial stability and peace in South Australia. It has been 12 years since there has been disputation in SA Power Networks—a fully unionised workforce, unionised because they know the union protects their interests. But they have been informed that SAPN will be a code-covered entity. By virtue of its work in the NBN, it will now become subject to the Building Code, which means that its single enterprise agreement—which is agreed, is in place and gives workers, management and the company a fair set of conditions and stable workplace relations, which is important in the industry—will be split into three different agreements.

It is so serious because workers will face losing guarantees about the use of contractors and guarantees about the use of apprentices. They have a very good apprenticeship scheme running at SAPN, which they should be praised for. Craigmore High School, in my electorate, participates in that. They have a Stobie pole in the school—for those opposite, in South Australia a Stobie pole is an electricity pole—and kids train on it with proper safety harnesses, preparing them for an apprenticeship program. So it is a company that is doing the right thing in many ways. We can have other debates about some of the corporate taxation arrangements and all the rest of it, but in industrial relations, its apprenticeship programs and its relationship with South Australian schools, it is doing a good job. It has had a decade or more of industrial peace, something that those opposite claim they want, and yet they are now going to drag this company, which has industrial peace, into a situation where it has to negotiate three different agreements, disrupt its workforce and disrupt the stable agreements it has around apprenticeships and contractors. That is why the South Australian Treasurer has written to the Minister for Employment requesting an exemption for SAPN.

That is just one little cameo of the damage this bill will do. It is damage done by a government who are, frankly, completely out of control. They have had a leadership change. It has been good for ministers at the table because they have had a promotion, but the disruption and unpredictability that has been caused is a serious problem. We have all heard the Prime Minister's speeches and seen 'bad Malcolm'. We have had the Jack Nicholson from The Shining version of Malcolm come out—'Here's Malcolm!' We have seen him come out and the backbench get all excited, but we know that the government are completely out of control and completely unpredictable. This is pretty much the antithesis of the way you market yourselves to the community. You are supposed to be the force of stability and rationality. That is your market. That is the Menzies pitch: boring but predictable.

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