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

Thank you, Deputy Speaker. I am rather grim with the onerous burden you have put on me to perform!

It is always interesting talking about industrial relations in this place because you are always amazed at how short people's memories are. I remember that, when I started out as a union organiser and I worked for the shop assistants' union—so the member for Melbourne will be interested to hear what I have to say—we had two awards. We had the retail industry award and the fast food award in South Australia. The fast food award in South Australia never had any penalty rates in it; it was always a flat rate award.

So it is interesting to hear the member for Melbourne come in here and talk about agreements—talk about agreements at Coles or Hungry Jack's or McDonald's—with no historical analysis behind that. He does not look at the previous two decades of enterprise bargaining, does not look at the state awards system and does not look at the period where Australian workplace agreements were pretty much cutting out every single penalty rate in the retail industry. So it was not the Coles EBA versus some great award; it was the Coles EBA versus an award that was not being updated and was being systematically undermined by the Howard government. Now we have the Turnbull government doing the same thing with awards; we can see that in the penalty rates. So it was not the Coles agreement versus the award; it was the Coles agreement versus an Australian workplace agreement that cut out every single penalty rate. Workers around this country understand that, at that time, enterprise bargaining agreements were their one protection as to wages and conditions.

We now have modern awards in place. But guess who put them in place? Guess whose advocacy put the modern awards in place in the retail industry and the fast food industry? Guess whose advocacy and submissions put those penalty rates in place? It was the shop assistants' union's, the SDA's, advocacy, because we knew exactly what it was to bargain in a situation where conditions were going south, where penalty rates were being removed in their entirety—through an act of legislation, I might add, which the member for Melbourne now tells us is the preferred way forward. So it was a union, the SDA, that put the modern award in place. And now we are being pilloried for it in the Fairfax press and by all these other Johnny-come-latelys. There is this fake union—this made-up union—that has been set up under the Corporations Act. So there are some people in this place with very, very short memories.

I will be honest with you: I do not love enterprise bargaining. It is a tough situation. But the SDA was not the only union that had to operate in that sector. Many other unions had to go through difficult bargaining situations—and sometimes necessary bargaining situations—to ensure that the economy grew and wages grew.

A whole lot of difficult decisions get made when you are sitting down and making enterprise bargaining agreements. No union in the country would not understand that situation. At Holden, when we had the global financial crisis, when we had a downturn in car manufacturing, the workers there made some very difficult choices related to their EBA, to stop people being made redundant.

So let us not have this sort of student-union politics from the member from Melbourne—who, on many other issues on IR, talks pretty good sense. I agree with him about casualisation, particularly of teachers. My mum is a teacher. We are seeing graduate teachers and more experienced teachers constantly forced into the contract system, where they do not know where they are working from one term to the next. So I am not critical of everything the member for Melbourne has to say, but on enterprise bargaining he has a very short memory, and it is all driven by wedge politics.

As I said before, there have been some pretty big changes in the enterprise bargaining system. I do not think those changes have quite been digested. Let's hear what Peter Sams, a Fair Work deputy president, said of the Coles agreement. He said the test was 'clearly not what was intended' by the Fair Work Act. He referred to the act's explanatory memorandum, which said that although each employee must be better off overall, the BOOT does not require the FWC to inquire into each employee's individual circumstances. There is a good reason for this, which is that when you do an enterprise bargaining agreement—surprise, surprise!—enterprises then change their methods of doing things. We have a situation now where we have night fillers aggrieved and thinking that they might be better off under the award. But, if they are put under the award, what is to stop Coles putting them on day shift and having a day fill? I will tell you, Mr Deputy Speaker: nothing at all. I have seen that happen at supermarkets. When it got expensive at night they had people come in and fill during the day. So you have to be very careful in making comparisons.

Enterprise bargaining does benefit employees. That is what it is meant to do. It is also meant to benefit firms. It is meant to make the whole place more efficient, and workers are supposed to share in those efficiencies, in that productivity. That is what enterprise bargaining is supposed to do. There is not a person in the Labor Party who does not believe that we should have a fair safety net that protects workers and, on the other side, an enterprise bargaining system that allows for real wage growth. It is important to remember that workers approve these agreements by ballot—that is, they vote for them. They have two weeks to consider it. They get a document that compares the EBA and the award and they look at things, decide whether they are better or worse off, and vote accordingly. And they have rejected agreements before, many times. We have seen agreements voted down on the basis that there might be a better deal next time round, and people are sent back to the bargaining table. I do fear, though, that some of these decisions coming out of the Fair Work Commission are going to make enterprise bargaining not workable, particularly if they are applying rules so haphazardly—that is, they are applying one rule to retail and different sets of rules to different agreements in other places.

We can have this debate up hill and down dale. We have this weird alliance at the moment between the Greens and George Christensen, betting up on the shoppies, but I would remind them that the idea these agreements are sweetheart deals between big employers and the union is just nonsense. In South Australia we went out of our way to offer a template enterprise bargaining agreement to small business. We copped some criticism for it and we copped a heap of misinformation about it. But here is the rub: the union offered up this template deal to small business, through Business SA, which is the business organisation of choice in South Australia, and do you want to know how many employers took up that supposed sweetheart deal which did such a great job for employers?

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