David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of the Fair Work Amendment (Supporting Australia's Jobs and Economic Recovery) Bill 2020. This is one of the most important bills before this parliament. Reform of our industrial relations system is really long overdue, and there are so many common sense provisions in this bill that I'm surprised people on the other side are objecting to it across the board. They say that they're protecting workers' rights, but we have just been through, and are starting to recover from, the worst economic recession, brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it accentuates the importance of us reforming things that have really clogged up the works in terms of employing Australians.

Before I came into this parliament, as many of you know, I was a medical practitioner, but I was also a major employer in my region in the health space. Because of the lack of development in certain areas of the medical spectrum, we actually built from scratch and ran for 13 years a day hospital. We treated over 20,000 people in that time. It ended up being taken over by a major healthcare organisation. But I learnt the hard way how complicated our industrial relations system is. It is absolutely bamboozling, and you need full-time consultants if you're a small employer to guide you through the maze of the Fair Work Act. It's all good in intention, but, if you're living the life of being an employer, you need a lot of specialist support.

Fortunately, there are employer organisations that can help you, but when I read the explanatory memorandum for this I thought: 'Yes! Finally, common sense is coming into the equation.' Any time any reform is made in the industrial relations space, it's like clockwork: the members of the opposition go off on their robotic-like objection to everything, twisting it to make out that it's the worst thing ever and that these evil people like entrepreneurs and employers, who create opportunities for employment, are the big bad bogeymen or big bad bogeywomen. It's an absolute disappointment to hear members of the other side object to common sense reforms.

This bill is all the more important because we have to make our economy as efficient as possible, make it as easy as possible for people to get back to paid employment and allow small and large businesses to flourish. We want to give casual employees, any employees, a fair go under systems that mean they get a fair deal and the employer gets a fair deal. I know, in my time, many of my colleagues in the business chamber and around town were afraid to put people on because they were worried about all the consequences if full-time or part-time permanent employees didn't work out. You're all probably familiar with the sayings 'go away money' and 'unfair dismissal claims'. It was a nightmare for people. While that's not specifically addressed in this bill, this bill addresses quite a few very sensible things, and I'll just go through some of them.

First of all, the public interest exception, which is temporarily in place because of COVID-19, which allows for exceptions to section 189 of the Fair Work Act, would become permanent. It also, as I mentioned, addresses a lot of the concerns about casual employees and their status. These include whether there will be a long-term hindrance on employment from the current system and the judgements that indicate that long-term casual employees, even though they've been paid extra loadings on an hourly rate because they don't get holiday pay and all those other entitlements, would then be entitled to double-dip once they become permanent employees.

Flexibility is also a very important principle. We need to make it simpler. We need to get flexibility within our Fair Work Act, and we're addressing that and also the timing related to making agreements. A lot has been said about the better off overall test. Sure, that is a good principle, but how can you define that if someone hasn't got a job but you can get them into a job with an enterprise agreement with a lot more flexibility and much more productivity? On average, most enterprise agreements, in my experience and in the data I've read, are far better than award wages. We want to make it so that employees get a better deal, with a defined pathway to go from long-term casual into either permanent part-time or full-time employment.

Some of the stories I've heard from employers about the so-called double dipping provisions that were enabled by arbitration decisions put a shiver up the spine of many employers in my area. A lot of people who are long-term casuals prefer that, funnily enough. Many of them would prefer to have permanent part-time or full-time employment because it's a lot easier to get a loan or a mortgage on a house. When you go to a bank or other financial institution and they ask about your employment and it's regarded as casual, it does make borrowing a lot harder. As I said, we're not trying to harm employees; we're trying to give them a pathway whereby they can get a better deal so that, if they're in a permanent casual situation and they want to change, that will be possible.

There is another really good initiative I can see in this legislation. Many people are casual or part time, and, if you give them more work, you end up having to pay them overtime rather than paying them the same rate that they're already on for their part-time work. Sure, if you're doing more than a full day's work, you should get overtime. But, if you're only doing, say, 12 hours a week and the business gets busy and there is a requirement for another day's work or another half shift, all of a sudden this person is getting penalty rates when it's really less than 37½ hours work a week or less than seven or eight hours a day. So that's a brake on employing that person, and this bill is going to make it possible for those conversations to be had. It is such common sense.

The other thing is that these changes are based on the genuine principles of sending a letter of offer to a potential employee, outlining what they will get and having them accept the offer. So it would all be transparent, but it means there would be a pathway so that long-term casuals could, through the system, be put onto a more permanent basis, either permanent part time or full time.

The other thing about these enterprise agreements that has slowed down the growth of employment is, as I said, the complexity and the length of time it takes to get an enterprise agreement or changes to conditions through the Fair Work Commission. When a business wants to grow and wants to give an offer of employment and it knows that it might be looking at three months before it can put the person on, often the opportunity for the business to grow is held up because of that. People have to have a fair and reasonable appreciation of what it's like on the other side.

Employers, particularly small businesses, put their house up as collateral for their business, in many cases. They are the last person to get paid. They sometimes have to take second mortgages on businesses to make sure, in downturns of cash flows in a business, their employees get paid on time. If you make it too hard for them, many employers think: 'I'm out of here. We'll shut the business down and go find an employee position somewhere.' That's really disappointing, because small businesses are great businesses. Small businesses are adept. They usually know their product better than big businesses. We want Australian small businesses and big businesses to flourish.

One of the things I've observed in the last couple of years is huge organisations, with all sorts of human resources people and specialist lawyers with all the requisite skills to make sure that people are paid the right amount—big employers like these and the supermarket chains—are being found, under the Fair Work Act, to have underpaid people. So what chance does a small business have to cope with all the complexity and time it takes to get an enterprise agreement or even just the right pay and conditions? The Fair Work Commission, in this transition of people from casual to part-time work, will be able to assess the better off overall test. Even though it may not be what the person thought, if it's better off as a general principle and if you take into regard all the non-monetary benefits for it and whether the other option of not going forward with the new arrangement is that the position vanishes, that is definitely better off overall. These businesses that have lost their income stream and customers because of the COVID-19 situation are really keen to get up and going, but they need that flexibility. They need a bit of leeway. It will mean that these decisions have to be reached within 21 days, and people will get some certainty. They'll know if they can take that person on, and that person will know what they will get.

I was reading some of the data; most enterprise agreements are better off by about 46 per cent. So what's the reluctance to have more enterprise agreements? It's all well and good to have an award as a baseline, but, if a business can make it work for both the employee and the business and there are huge productivity gains as a result, why not? I'm really encouraged by this.

The other thing we have learnt from the current situation is that our supply chains, for so many parts of the Australian economy, rely on overseas manufacturing and supply lines. Greenfield sites are sometimes a feeding frenzy for our members' masters in the union movement. They see a big greenfield project coming down the line and they try to ramp up the terms and conditions to get a short-term agreement and then they come back in the middle of construction down the track. This is a great impediment to taking on big projects. I'll tell you what, I see the pressure that our oil refineries are under. If we don't get some investment in a new megarefinery that is really hyperefficient, on the scale that we need to make and refine petroleum products—because our economy still runs on it—we will be in a very sad position.

With changes to the approval process for greenfield agreements, to specify a nominal expiry date to give them some certainty for up to eight years, a lot of these big companies will take on these megaprojects and there'll be employment for so many more people in Australia. Like I said, this is a really good bill. There are a lot of commonsense provisions in it. It's nothing evil or sinister. We just want our economy to grow. We want casual workers to have a pathway to permanent part-time or full-time work, if they want it. It means big business will be able to do great stuff for the country. (Time expired)

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