Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Skills) Share this | Hansard source

I'm incredibly pleased to second this motion, and I will not resort to such tripe as the member for Fisher has by denigrating this important anniversary of the International Labour Organization on 29 October. At the Lowy Institute, the Prime Minister said that sovereign nations need to eschew an 'unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy' and the world needs to avoid 'negative globalisation'. He'd be surprised to hear the member for Fisher singing the praises of the ILO, one of those negative, globalist institutionalist bureaucracies. Maybe the Prime Minister needs to listen to the member for Fisher.

It is international globalisation and solidarity that have delivered some of the most significant social protections and advances, over a long period of time. This is true of the ILO, which was formed in 1919. As my friend the member for Kingsford-Smith, who moved this great motion, let us know, it was formed out of the wreckage of the First World War. It then ran smack bang into the turmoil of the Great Depression, fascism and the resulting Second World War. In the midst of that war in 1944, the US and other allies had the foresight to recognise that the ILO would be a key part in building a more prosperous and peaceful world. In 1944, the countries that could gathered together as the ILO issued the Philadelphia declaration. The declaration formed a series of key principles to embody the work of the ILO:

(a) labour is not a commodity;

(b) freedom of expression and of association are essential to sustained

progress;

(c) poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere;

(d) the war against want requires … unrelenting vigour—

for the

… promotion of the common welfare.

Over the last 73 years, the governing body of the ILO, the annual International Labour Conference, ILO committees and ILO expert bodies—which I have proudly been a part of—have played a major role in making us think about global standards for workplace rights and safety, fair jobs and social protections. The remarkable thing about the ILO is that it is tripartite—the only United Nations organisation so structured. One half of the votes are the participating nations, one quarter are representatives of employers and one quarter are representatives of workers organisations—unions. This means that, when conventions and recommendations are adopted, they've been carefully worked through to achieve an outcome that most tripartite partners are comfortable with.

The other remarkable thing is that, unlike the mythology about UN organisations, no outcome is imposed on any country. Apart from the core eight conventions, it's up to individual countries themselves to adopt and ratify conventions and their recommendations. However, the foundation of the ILO is a recognition that isolationism by wealthy countries will be to the detriment of every country. That is because unless you lift living standards and workers' entitlements then we all know that poverty and inequality within and between countries will lead to conflict and that low wages and low living standards will see capital and jobs move from one country to another. That is even more true today than it was in 1919 or 1944.

In the modern world, the ILO has an enormous amount of work to do to ensure that we consider and understand the future of work, consider the effects of mass migration of labour and consider the behaviour and responsibilities of transnational corporations. In a world where many of them have bigger budgets than many small countries, it has been the ILO that has done such important work in the last two decades—in Burma, after democracy was restored; in Bangladesh, after Rana Plaza; and in Cambodia. The ILO assists developing countries to build modern regulatory systems, and it would be to our detriment and to the detriment of millions of workers around the world if we did not have these standards.

Many of the problems that face workers today are age-old in nature. To name just a few, there is modern slavery, sex discrimination and lack of social support. I'm honoured to have been part of the ILO process and, in particular, the Protocol of 2014 to the Forced Labour Convention. I actually pay tribute to the then Liberal IR minister, Eric Abetz, who ensured that it was ratified by Australia. There is the Domestic Workers Convention. There is the Violence and Harassment Convention, which absolutely outlines that employers and workplaces have a role in dealing with family and domestic violence.

Coalition governments over the last six years have not fulsomely funded Australian ILO participation or the work of the ILO. On the occasion of the ILO's 100th anniversary, we should recognise it as one of the most enduring, important and successful of all the United Nations bodies. We should all recommit, in a bipartisan way, to supporting the ILO in its important work and to funding it accordingly. I say today: happy birthday to the ILO, and thank goodness we have it.

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