Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

As the member for Lindsay says, then jobs go. Of course they do. That's even fewer people to spend et cetera. This is a cycle that this government seems very happy to turbocharge with the policies it is bringing into this parliament.

This particular bill is an interesting case study. The government went to a double-dissolution election some time ago now because they had such urgency to deal with the union movement under their ideological obsession and hatred. This bill comes, according to the government, from recommendations from the Heydon royal commission, which was quite some time ago. So it sat somewhere on the backburner in spite of this urgency the government had when it went to a double dissolution. It was introduced into the parliament on Thursday last week, 19 October, and we're debating it today. It's not usual for bills to be presented in the parliament on the Thursday and debated the following week. Usually they hang around for a couple of weeks because it's important that stakeholders can actually give some feedback. Even if there isn't an official inquiry, it's important that members of parliament can actually know what they're voting on.

This bill has five schedules, runs to 80 pages and amends five pieces of legislation. It amends the Fair Work Act of 2009, the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Act 2009, the Fringe Benefits Tax Assessment Act of 1986, the Income Tax Assessment Act of 1997 and the Taxation Administration Act of 1953. If anyone who is listening to this has never seen what these sorts of amendments look like, they say things like, 'In section 3.6, remove this and replace this.' You can't just read them. They require an incredible amount of effort to work out exactly what is going on. On this side of the House we've had Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday—as most of us work the weekends—Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and here we are debating it today. Actually we started debating it yesterday. So suddenly there is a level of urgency about this that makes it more important than all of the other things sitting on the table for this government—more important than cost of living and more important than doing anything about stopping cuts to penalty rates. The private member's bill on that has been sitting on the table for a long time. We could debate that. There is the rising cost of housing, the extraordinary lack of affordability of housing and the fact that young people are being completely priced out of the market. Unemployment rates for young people have gone through the roof. There are the effects of climate change, for example, on our health and wellbeing and eventually on the economy. That doesn't seem to be a priority.

This seems to be a government that can let the important things slide because the most important thing to it is this ideological obsession with and hatred for the union movement. This is quite absurd. I would love to be able to go through the 10 recommendations from the Heydon royal commission and match them up with what this government says this bill does. I actually care about this. I don't come from the union movement, by the way. I don't. I was a union member for 15 years before I joined the Labor Party because I think you kind of need to be and because I came from an industry that had never been industrialised. We were the original gig economy in the arts. So we needed unions to take care of us when we worked in pubs because it was so easy for workers to be ripped off. The businesses that required artists to do well needed unions to do that as well. Record companies needed their artists to earn an appropriate living for the work they did when they weren't working for them. The whole sector needed this voice to speak for all of us as individuals who were out there doing our gigs. We needed unions. So I've been a member since I was about 15 when I first started working in the sector.

But I've never worked for a union. In fact, my professional work was on the other side. I managed a trade association. I managed an employer association. I have been an employer virtually all my life. So I come from the other side. But this is actually an important matter because, as the rest of the workforce moves towards the gig economy, you can see the loss of full-time work and the increasing use of subcontractors. You can already see it in industries like construction. They're starting to move into what I call the gig economy, where they do this job and that job; they don't get holiday pay and they don't get sick benefits, because they're subcontractors and they don't have any of that. What you start seeing in industries like that, right around the world, is various organisations finding ways to assemble those workers in some form of mutual cooperation.

In Belgium you see SMart, which is a commercial organisation that does the invoicing and collection of payments for artists—about 80,000 of them. It essentially pays artists a regular wage; it does all of the invoicing, collects all their money, averages it out and pays them a regular wage. You can see Broodfonds, which collect groups of 50 sole traders together to insure each other against illness. You get these kinds of ways that people assemble themselves to provide the protections that full-time workers get.

My staff get a lot of these things these enterprise funds provide. My staff get counselling and assistance with difficult clients. They get all sorts of things that these sorts of enterprise funds provide. They get them because they're employed full time in big companies. But, if you're in the gig economy or you're a subcontractor, that's not the case. We would expect, at this time in the history of the change to workplaces, that you would find unions that care about their workers trying to find ways to cushion workers with the kinds of mechanisms they had when they were fully employed. So you find these funds that cover sickness benefits, termination benefits and death benefits. You find these funds like MATES in Construction that assist people in their worst times. Members contribute to them and they are there when a person needs them, because they're injured, suffering from mental illness or whatever it is. You'd expect those things to happen.

I want to have a look at this because I want to see whether these enterprise funds, as they're called, are actually starting to do the kinds of things that we will need our communities to do as the workforce changes. These are forerunners of something that should grow, not be banned. It's actually a forerunner of something that fills an incredibly important role, a role that we've just got used to having because we had full-time work. But remember that full-time work wasn't dignified when it was first invented. When it was first invented at the beginning of the industrial age, it was hell. Six-year-olds did it; they worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week. That was civilised. The entire full-time work was civilised by the union movement. As we move out of full-time work, past casualisation into the gig economy, we are going to need our union movement to civilise that too. That is what these funds actually do. They attempt to replace some of the things, the safety nets, that you take for granted if you're in full-time work. They replace them with these funds for casuals and subcontractors.

It's the beginning of something that should grow. I would like the opportunity in this place to actually have time to look at this bill and see its detail to see whether it genuinely is stopping something incredibly important from happening.

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