Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It may come as a surprise to the government, but sometimes people like to use their money to help other people. Not everything is about profit. Some might say, 'Well, you can come together collectively as a group of people, get in a community group, or a workers' group; you might want to pool your money and then use that to help out people who might be doing it a bit tough.' In many industries, like the construction industry and the electrical industry, that's something that workers have to deal with quite regularly because they are industries where a lot of people work for a short period of time when there is building going on, a piece of construction, and then they might find themselves without a job for the next little while. They will spend their whole lives going through many, many employers. Over the years in those industries the workers, with the agreement of employers, have managed to set up funds that the employers pay some money into, under an agreement with the workers, and those funds then sit there to be available to people when they fall on hard times—when they are out of a job for an extended period, for example, or when they find themselves injured or they get sick when they are off the job and are not covered by WorkCover. They might get income protection insurance at below market rates, for example. This happens because people have pooled their money together and said, 'We recognise that this is the nature of our industry and we want to look after each other.' This has worked very well in looking after people. Unless the government is going to say, 'We want to tighten up the unfair dismissal laws in the construction industry and the redundancy laws so that no-one ever gets sacked,' then it is going to be a feature of life in construction or in the electrical and plumbing trades that people will go through periods of work and not having work, and they will have to look for support in those times when they don't have work.

So we've got these funds around the country that look after people in these industries, and they look after them in a number of ways. One is that they provide access to things like insurance at rates that are cheaper than they would be if you went to the market and got them yourself. A second thing they do—one of the main reasons for their existence—is to provide redundancy and income support for those periods when you're not working. And there are other services that they don't provide at a cost but because they're good things to do. For example, they provide counselling. We know that the suicide rates in the construction industry, in part because of the hours people work, are higher than average. What has happened over the years through people chipping in a little bit, a couple of dollars a week, and that money adding up is that there's now a fund, managed by workers and employers alike, to look after people in the industry. It means, for example, that if you find yourself doing it really tough then not only do you have access to financial support but there is someone to get on the phone to who will provide counselling—and you don't have to pay for it. That's not something that's done because they went out to tender, went to the market, and said, 'Who can give us the best possible rate?' No; it was seen as a good to look after the people in their community.

So we've got schemes that currently do this, in Victoria and right around the country, and they're serving their members very, very well. They can do it because they're run on a cooperative model. When they don't have to run everything at a profit they can do things like subsidise insurance, which they might not otherwise be able to do, and offer free counselling, which they wouldn't be able to do if they had to pay for everything at market rates. There is a basic understanding that if everyone pitches in a little bit to a central pool, and that central pool is managed properly—not like a corporation as a profit-making entity but with the money going back to the members in the industry—then everyone benefits. It allows these funds, for example, to make grants to training organisations to train people up so that there's safety in the workplace and people increase their skills.

Bear in mind that very often these funds are run by an equal mix of employer and union people. When funds go off to these training organisations it's not done because they're running things like a company, working out how they can make a profit, but to benefit everyone in the industry. It means that training can be offered in a way that doesn't impose additional costs on employers. Many of these training centres run without having to charge the people who front up, which means that employers get a benefit as well. They train people in aspects of construction, they train people in plumbing—not far from my electorate of Melbourne—and they do it right around the country. They can do this because when they get money from the workers they invest it, and when they get returns they can use them for these purposes that improve the lives of everyone in the industry.

This government looks at that and it hates it. It says, 'That should not be allowed, because these are not commercial, market-length transactions where we open up everything to the private sector.' It's the equivalent of saying: 'You can't go and join the RACV and pitch in your money and run things on a cooperative basis. Every time your car breaks down you have to go out to tender and find someone to come and look after it for you. If it costs you a bit more, so be it.' No. People have the right to come together and put their money into cooperative ventures, and that's exactly what is happening here. But the government wants to break it apart.

We saw a version of this with the Kennett government when they got their hands on local councils in Victoria and said: 'Councils aren't allowed to run things not for profit anymore. You have to contract everything out to the private sector.' Rates have gone up and, as a result, many councils are trying to pull things back in. They have council-run providers running a lot of their services. What we've learned in Victoria is that the whole process, which is embodied in this bill, of saying we have to do everything at market rates and make a profit out of it results in people getting fewer services but paying through the nose for them. We've seen it with electricity, we've seen it with councils and now the government is ideologically trying to do it to unions as well. It will mean that when the central fund, one of the funds governed by this legislation, says, 'We'd actually like to give a grant for some training to be run in the industry on a zero-cost or not-for-profit basis,' they won't be allowed to do it anymore. They won't be allowed to do it anymore under this bill because everything has to be paid for at market value. If you want to offer a bit of counselling to people, on my reading of this bill you won't be able to do that for free anymore because using money from the fund to pay for a service can only be done if you are giving it to someone offering the service at market value and at arm's length. It goes on and on.

It's typical of the government to give us an 80-page bill and say, 'Pass it now.' In the short time we've had it available to us to read, the bill has made us go, 'Hang on; this will actually make life very, very difficult for a number of services at the moment that are actually making people's lives better, only because they're not being run at a profit.' The government, for purely ideological reasons want to come in and say, 'You've got to reconstitute your board and you've got to rewrite your contracts,' without asking the first question of, 'Is the system actually working at the moment?' If the government actually ask that they will probably find that, by and large, it is. If there is a case for making some improvements, you would probably find some willing participants within the sector who'd say, 'We are happy to sit down and discuss improvements.' But that's not the government's approach. The government's approach is to bring in a bill that could grind to a halt the operations of some very worthwhile services and to say: 'Pass it. We are going to give you a couple of days to look at it.'

That suggests that the government's purpose is not at all to improve governance in the sector. Yet again this is purely an ideological stick to beat up people with. That's all it is. They say, 'We've had a royal commission that has recommended it.' It was a royal commission headed by someone who was going to go and speak at a Liberal Party fundraiser until he got found out. The government are quite happy to say, 'We'll have a royal commission into unions and particularly unions we don't like because they sit on a certain side of the political fence,' but, when there are allegations that Crown Casino have been tampering with pokie machines and causing people to lose money, they say, 'We couldn't possibly have an investigation into that.' That tells you everything about this government's priorities. So, pardon me, government, if, when you whack an 80-page bill on the table and say, 'Trust us; it's all about improving governance,' I don't believe you.

They have the gall to come in here and say, 'We want to improve the rule of law in areas like the construction industry.' I'm still waiting for the explanation from this government about why they appointed someone to head up the ABCC, the Australian Building and Construction Commission, who has just had to resign because he broke the law that he was meant to enforce. He has admitted this in court. He knowingly went out and said to people: 'I know that the law gives people certain rights to meet their unions to discuss things like safety and so on in the lunch rooms, but I don't want you to tell anyone that. In fact, I want you to tell them the opposite.' He got his organisation to publish misleading information to workers and builders in the sector to say, 'No, you're not allowed to have these meetings,' when in fact, by law, they were allowed to. He got found out and he had to resign. All the while, it turns out the minister knew these allegations were hanging over his head. The same minister who is bringing this bill to us and saying, 'It's all about improving good governance,' has not given an explanation at all about why she appointed someone to head up the construction industry watchdog who broke the law that he was meant to enforce.

Meanwhile, if you look around the country at the moment, if you want to focus on something in industrial relations or fix up issues in the workplace, there's plenty to do. We've got a youth unemployment crisis in this country. Youth unemployment is always higher than general unemployment. Historically, every time we have a downturn, we know that young people get hit hard and youth unemployment spikes up. But what you usually find is that a couple of years after that the lines come back into sync and youth unemployment comes back to its normal levels—still higher than general unemployment, but the two lines come back into sync. What we found in this country since the GFC, though, was that youth unemployment spiked and stayed high. The lines haven't come back together. In other words, we have a situation where, when it comes to the workplace—which the government is telling us they're concerned about in this bill—there are now young people who, since the GFC, have never been able to find a job, and the unemployment rate for them has not come back to its historical norm. We've abolished entry-level jobs in this country to a large extent. They just don't exist anymore in the way that they used to, and young people are suffering. As a result, we have the stats of five young people applying for every one job advertisement, with youth unemployment at historical highs and no jobs for them to go into.

If the government were seriously concerned about addressing issues in the workforce, it would be dropping everything to deal with this youth unemployment crisis, because it is worse than it has been for several decades. I'm still waiting for the government to come up with a bill that tells us how they're going to address that—what nation-building infrastructure they're going to invest in to find jobs for young people or how we're going to make sure young people can work. But not a week goes by that they don't come up with another bill that attacks people's rights at work and disrupts services and systems that are working perfectly well. So, pardon me if we don't take you on trust, government, and if we don't accept that this is all just about tidying up some loose ends. When you're serious about dealing with some of the issues that are facing people at work, when you're serious about dealing with the fact that wage growth is at historic lows because you've spent the last three decades, often with Labor's support, changing the industrial laws so that people can't bargain—when you're serious about addressing that—come back with some proposals, and we'll take you seriously.

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