Ross Hart (Bass, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about the plight of workers who are caught in between two legislative schemes. These workers have not received their fair and just entitlements, as their co-workers have, with respect to the insolvency of the company ACL Bearings.

There is often injustice surrounding insolvency. The rules regarding insolvency—in particular priorities in insolvency—are designed in some measure to redress some of that injustice by allocating priority to certain creditors. These employees were paid their priority entitlements under the old General Employee Entitlements and Redundancy Scheme. Because of when these employees were terminated, they received less of their entitlements than some of their co-workers who had the benefit of the new fair entitlements scheme.

The Gillard Labor government introduced the new legislation which created the Fair Entitlements Guarantee. The operation of that scheme was prospective and not retrospective. There is a ministerial discretion available to enlarge the payment available to these workers. That has been partially successful, in that eight weeks additional redundancy was made available to those made redundant prior to 2011.

This company continued to trade, as it was part of the essential supply chain for the Australian automotive industry. A shutdown of ACL Bearings would have created chaos, with losses of tens of thousands of jobs. The formal legal process of receivership and liquidation is now approaching completion. All of the assets have been or will be distributed. Fairness demands, now the liquidation receivership of ACL is complete, that these workers are treated the same as those who worked on.

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