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

I rise to speak on the Mutual Recognition Amendment Bill 2021. The bill seeks to introduce a uniform scheme of automatic mutual recognition. Automatic mutual recognition will allow workers to move across states or territories and bring with them their accreditation to work in their trade or profession. This legislation is backed by an intergovernmental agreement for automatic mutual recognition with all states and territories consenting to the bill. But, as we have heard, there are major concerns with this bill as it stands. Labor's position here is clear. We support the principle of allowing workers to move around the country in pursuit of work and have their qualifications recognised via a mutual recognition scheme. However, the Labor Party will initiate two mechanisms to make this legislation better.

We intend to refer this bill to a Senate inquiry. Stakeholders have noted some concerns with the legislation, including issues with differing compliance and regulatory responsibilities in each jurisdiction and the possibility that this legislation may well remove the incentive for jurisdictions to introduce uniform work place standards. As we've heard here this morning, the last thing we want is a race to the bottom when it comes to standards. A Senate inquiry will allow for these concerns to be discussed and add changes that can make the bill better.

The shadow minister will move a substantive amendment, which seeks to exclude electrical and construction workers from this bill. This is a sensible amendment that can be done right now. The bill doesn't remove differences in standards between the electrical and construction industries in different states. It just ignores those differences as if they're not there and treats all states the same, but, despite that, the differences still exist. Mutual recognition has existed since the early nineties. There is already mutual recognition for many occupations and moving to automatic mutual recognition for many occupations does make sense. Many different industries have worked hard to standardise the laws for their particular occupations since mutual recognition laws commenced. Getting as many occupations in Australia as possible to that same position is good policy and is something we need to see states and territories working towards. Regrettably, that national standard has not been achieved for some occupations. The electrical occupations are one of those. If you want to standardise occupational outcomes in the country, the first thing that needs to happen is that state and territory rules have to be standardised across those occupations. That is the first step. You have to lift all state and territories to the highest possible standard, one that's recognised and endorsed by the industry. When I say 'industry', I mean all representations of the industry—that is, employers, unions and their members, government and even the training institutions who train people to meet those standards. Instead, what we see here is an attempt by the government to bypass all that hard work and bypass what is going to make standardisation across the country possible to then take that last step of automatic mutual recognition. The government calls all of that hard work, all of this trouble, red tape. They pooh-pooh it. I call it blue ribbon. This is blue ribbon that wraps around working people to make sure they come home safe at the end of each day and to make sure the consumers are also wrapped around and kept safe.

For those industries that have already achieved this level of standardisation, making mutual recognition automatic makes perfect sense. My profession, the nursing profession, has gone through this process. It took years. The industry, as I described before, worked together. We set standards right across the board. In fact, the trade union, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, of which I was national secretary and of which I am still a very proud member, played a very leading role in that process. It took years and years to actually write the standards that levelled across the whole country the requirements for someone to practice as a nurse. Once we did that hard work—and I'm proud to say the ANMF actually owned the copyright on those standards and the bill of ethics and the code of conduct for a long time—that was then handed over to the national body. All that work was given to the national body and all those individual nurses boards became one under Ahpra.

That is the proper way to do this. For those industries that have already achieved that level, automatic mutual recognition absolutely makes sense. But you have to do that work first. For a small number of occupations, this work hasn't been done. This bill means there could be very dangerous outcomes for consumers. There could be unacceptable safety risks for workers and it could put members of the public in danger. Those occupations that have achieved this standardisation, as I said, followed a very clear path. The automatic mutual recognition proposal, as it is here, does the opposite for some occupations to what I just described. It ignores all the very significant differences that currently exist between states and territories—differences in qualifications and training, differences in licences, differences in laws that they practice under, differences in standards that need to be achieved to get a qualification and differences in industry application. These are important things. They're not just things that you can ignore and hope go away because you've introduced a bill that says, 'Hey, there's mutual recognition across the country now; let's forget about all those differences.'

This bill says: 'Regardless of what you need to know, just go and do what you want in each place and we're not going to do the work behind it that is going to make it safe for you to do your job. By the way, if you do step in there not knowing what the rules are, not knowing what the regulations are and not knowing what the requirements are, and something goes wrong, it's all your fault.' It is all very well for the previous member to say, 'But the minister can stop you working there if they think it is not going to be right,' but this bill doesn't allow, in any way, for people working in different states to even know that.

The fact is electrical occupations already have a mutual recognition system in place, and it's working. It's a system that maximises portability of skills but balances that portability against the risks that come from not having standards set across states and territories. The government's proposal removes the existing system of balancing those risks for electrical occupations and replaces it with a scheme that ignores them. It's interesting to watch this process unfold here with the government's bill, because there really is no recognition from the government that unions have an important role to play in all these issues.

The ETU, the Electrical Trades Union, is playing an exceptionally sensible role here. I thank them for their hard work in highlighting the problems with this bill. They want to unite the trades across the country. They want to develop the best universal standards that they can to protect their workers and consumers and develop the best outcomes for all. They are at the coalface. Their members are the ones working on these sites. Their members have an intricate knowledge of the issues at hand.

Labor seeks to be cooperative on any measure that makes it easier for Australians to secure good jobs, including giving workers the opportunity to move around the country and maintain the ability to work in their chosen trade or profession; however, we must ensure that any new legislation has no unintended consequences that would negatively impact workers or standards, and we are concerned that this bill will do just that. The amendments are sensible, and I ask the House to support them.

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