Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I might just directly respond to that. I thank the member for his input. It is very true to say that the working-group process that you've mentioned was not something that was part of an election agenda. Neither were JobKeeper or a range of things which were consequent upon the pandemic, which we obviously didn't anticipate. The working-group process is very much a response to the pandemic. You asked for a guarantee that no worker would be worse off from anything that occurs through the working-group process. It's certainly designed to effect increases in employment and job growth and, in that respect, to put longer-term upward pressure on wages growth. We have had 150 hours of consultative, cooperative meetings between representatives of the union movement, who have been quite excellent in their contribution, and peak bodies representing the employers. I've not sat through all of those 150 hours, but I have sat through many of those meetings, a great number of those 150 hours.

How does that dovetail into the bills that you mentioned, such as the ensuring integrity bill and the workers entitlement fund bill? I might relay a story to you. During the height of the pandemic, when I think everyone in this chamber, as well as the union movement and every business owner in Australia, was shocked to see upwards of 400,000 people become unemployed in a very, very short period of time, I picked up the phone and did something that I hadn't anticipated happening in this term of government, and I rang the senior leadership of the CFMMEU and spoke to them directly. The essential substance of those phone calls was the concern around keeping construction open and acting—as it always has done with mining in Australia—as a natural stabiliser to downswings in broader employment. The importance of keeping construction open appeared to me, as the Minister for Industrial Relations, and to the government to supersede every other single priority. In those conversations, we discussed the prospect of the ensuring integrity bill no longer being pursued and being withdrawn from parliament if we could work on a cooperative basis to ensure the maximum ability for construction to stay operational during the pandemic. That wasn't just a matter of cooperation between the federal government and the CFMMEU and the MBA. We will all recall that there was a fateful 48 hours when it looked quite possible that, rather than having a blacklist system during the peak lockdown, where we would nominate the things that needed to be closed and assume that everything else was open, we were going to have a white-out system that assumed everything was closed, including construction. The senior leadership of the CFMMEU, in their efforts with us, in their efforts with state governments, in their efforts to make their workplaces COVID safe, did a massive positive service to this country in playing a significant role in keeping construction going even during the height of the lockdowns. So I praise the leadership of the CFMMEU for that, and the MBA and others. In my observation, that was one of several critical occurrences during the pandemic.

The lesson that we took from that was that, if we could do things like that in direct cooperation with the CFMMEU, if we could design a JobKeeper system by enlisting the assistance and consultation of the ACTU, and those cooperative outcomes and processes saved jobs, then it might just be possible to engage in cooperative processes to create jobs and grow jobs as we try and grind our way out of the worst economic shock that we've had in essentially 100 years, since the Great Depression. The working-group process acknowledges that the ensuring integrity bill has been removed from this parliament, as a matter of goodwill and good faith. Member, we have been discussing issues such as those that you've raised, issues that arise because of the decision in the WorkPac matter, which, yes, we have intervened on, issues around wages growth. I will deal with two of those issues that you've raised directly. In the Workpac case, one way or the other, there has to be a settled position at either the common law or in statute as to what the definition of a casual worker is. Without being overly critical of the previous Labor government that designed the Fair Work Act, because it is proving a very sensitive process to try and work out how you precisely would design a casual worker— (Time expired)

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