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

Yes, glacier-like, as the member for Perth reminds me. And yet we could have agreed to this bill in its entirety if 13 of the 14 schedules of the bill had been introduced into this House. But, of course, the government wanted to move on to secondary boycotts and change fundamentally the way they operate in this country. That's interesting, given that the incidence of secondary boycotts is very, very low in this country and by comparison internationally.

Secondary boycotts have a long history in this place. It was the Fraser government who sought to amend the Trade Practices Act 40 years ago this year, in 1977, to introduce significant penalties for unions who engage in any form of sympathy strikes and really move the laws away from the industrial relations regime and into commercial and corporate law, in order to make it harder for unions to organise. If there had been a prevalence of secondary boycott conduct that needed to be reviewed, if wages were going through the roof—oh, if only they were rising, but we have a situation where wages are falling in real terms—

Mr Howarth interjecting—

In your electorate and in mine, Honourable Member, wages have been falling now over a two-year period, and they are at a lower rate of growth than they have been for 20 years. As a result, people are feeling the pinch. Cost-of-living pressures are acute. Of course, it's always difficult to make ends meet for families that struggle on medium and low incomes, but it's always more difficult when wages are falling in real terms, and that hadn't happened for a very long time, until this government took the reins. It hadn't happened for at least 20 years, arguably longer.

So the idea that the government has to use this piece of legislation to recommend increasing penalties on unions for secondary boycotts by—as the shadow Assistant Treasurer reminds me—800 times the current penalty does smack of some excessiveness on behalf of even this government. We just recently had the amendments to the Fair Work Amendment (Protecting Vulnerable Workers) Bill 2017 back from the Senate, where it was passed last night. We made that bill better. It's not a perfect bill. It's not even a good bill. It's just a better bill. But there was even an effort in that legislation that was being proposed by the government to ensure that we would see coercive powers used against workers rather than used against employers who were intentionally underpaying those workers or other workers in the labour market. We limited those coercive powers, I'm happy to say—not with any help from the government, because the government voted against the amendment to limit the coercive powers, which was ostensibly the intended purpose of the bill.

In relation to this bill there are no questions whatsoever with 13 of the 14 schedules of the Harper review. I must say, it is very tardy on behalf of the government and the Treasurer to take this long to actually bring this matter to the parliament. My main concern—and the concern that's reflected in the amendment moved by the shadow Assistant Treasurer, Dr Leigh—is that there is an excessive and extreme approach to secondary boycotts; the idea that you would, for example, propose an increase to the maximum penalty for breaches of secondary boycott provisions from $750,000 to $10 million. For comparison, under the Fair Work Act, penalties related to unprotected industrial relations activity are subject to far less severe penalties of a maximum of 60 penalty units—that is, $12,600. If enacted, the maximum penalty for a secondary boycott would be nearly 800 times higher than the maximum penalty for unprotected industrial action. That is extreme, and 'extreme' is exactly the word we must apply to the way in which this government goes about dealing with workers and unions in this country.

It is relentless in its pursuit of undermining the capacity of working people in the country to organise in workplaces, whether there's a union presence or not. At every turn, in every area of public policy, if it suits them, the government will find a way to attack unions and workers because that is in their DNA. In fact, the only things that seem to unify this government are their attacks on unions and their enmity towards working people generally. It's reflected in one of the schedules of this bill, where they've gone very extreme in increasing penalties for a particular type of industrial action that is, in fact, consistent with International Labour Organization conventions that this country's ratified and extreme insofar as the penalty is concerned—and there is no evidence. Even if you were to agree with the contention that there was a problem and we should deal with this matter in this particular way, there is no evidence of a prevalence of secondary boycotts in the first place to justify—even in the conservative government's mind—that it should take this route. But, indeed, it has chosen to do so, and that's why I rise to support the amendment moved by the opposition in this place.

This has a very long history. This area of public policy is not new. Indeed, as I've mentioned, 40 years ago, the Fraser government introduced secondary boycott provisions into the Trade Practices Act and then again further provisions in 1980. The Hawke government sought to remove those provisions and failed at the time. Finally, the Keating government removed most of the provisions from the Trade Practices Act and referred these matters to where they should be placed—that is, in industrial relations legislation, if they're to be contained at all.

It is Labor's view that, yes, we need to have regulations around industrial action and, yes, we need to have limits and have requirements of employers, unions and workers to be governed within a particular regime. But we need to make sure that people have the democratic right to withdraw their labour pursuant to rules so they're consistent with International Labour Organization principles. Indeed, that includes employers, who have similar rights. We shouldn't be looking to criminalise matters that should be dealt with in the civil jurisdiction. We shouldn't be seeking to refer matters that should be within industrial legislation into the area of corporate law. That is not the view of Labor. It has never led to fewer disputes; in fact, it's led to the escalation of disputes. This sort of thinking goes right back to the HR Nicholls Society and the Institute of Public Affairs, which have a world view that unions should not exist or should be strangled to the extent that they cannot operate effectively in workplaces in this country. They do not believe there's a role for unions in workplaces in this country, and it's reflected in this one provision.

Having said that, and having emphasised that particular problem—and I wanted to do that, if you like, as the shadow employment minister—I want to finish by saying how long overdue these matters are. The review was handed down in March 2015, and 2½ years later the government is responding to its own review. It's very tardy at the very least. We will be voting against the schedule that refers to secondary boycotts and we will do our very best to make sure that this particular part of the bill before us is not enacted into law. It is not fair on working people and it's not fair on unions. For that reason we moved our amendment, and I'll be supporting that amendment when the vote comes up.

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