Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

HOGAN (—) (): I stand to second the motion. This is an important suspension and a very important motion to refer this bill to a joint select committee. What the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill 2022is about—let's make no mistake about this—is the Labour Party paying their union piper. This is about them paying back the money that the union movement has paid to the Labor Party, the fact that the union movement funds Labor Party members into their positions. This is about paying the piper. We know that the unions control the factions of the Labor Party, we know that the unions control preselections of everyone within the Labor Party, so the unions now control the Labor government. That's the basic fact of what we're talking about.

I don't have a problem with unions. I think unions play a very important role in our economy and the workforce. But unions represent 14 per cent of the workforce. Over there, everyone is basically part of the union movement, or they won't get their job, so this new government is not reflective of the workforce in Australia just because they are looking through the prism of how 14 per cent of the workforce operate. What this legislation is about is they're paying their puppetmasters. This legislation is one of the first pieces of legislation they moved. As the Manager of Opposition Business said, this is a piece of priority legislation they want to get through because they have to pay the puppetmasters. They are paying the piper, and that's what this is about.

The disturbing thing about this is that this is going to take us back to pre-Hawke and Keating days. Hawke and Keating weren't run by the union movement; they were standalone Labor operatives who knew that the unions occasionally had to be reined in. Keating wasn't taking his tune from the union movement. But with this legislation we're reversing some of the reforms that were implemented by the Hawke-Keating government. What does that mean? What don't they see? When you are only reflecting 14 per cent of the workforce, what no-one over on that side of the House understands—and we've said this many times in the past—is what it's like to run a small business. They have never run a small business. They've never been in private enterprise where they've had to go: 'You know what, I've got to pay someone else's salary. I have to work out how to run my balance sheet. How do I run the business to make sure that I can pay people back?' There might be one or two who claim they have, but I would like to see the proof for it.

That is why they do not see through a wider prism of how an economy and the workforce operate. They still have the mentality—it's almost like a 1950s mentality—that everything is one versus the other. They view it as Labor versus capital, but that's not how the world operates anymore. Any small business and any large business operator will tell you the most important asset they have, the most important people in their enterprise, are their staff, and that's how they treat them. The vast majority of employers treat their staff well and give them incentives to stay because they know they are the most important people they have. They know their business will only survive if they have good staff. But these guys and these ladies don't understand that, thinking it's all about labour versus capital. The union movement always says, 'They're the bad ones, and we're the good people.' That is how this legislation is drafted, so this is going to give us a big power imbalance.

As the Manager for Opposition Business said, it means we're going to get more militancy in workplaces. We're going to have more strikes, and what does that mean? Unfortunately, the worst affect of this legislation will be on the workers. What will happen is that it will make us uncompetitive, it will make us unproductive. As a community we saw that Keating and Hawke led this charge with workplace relations reform because they saw that we needed to become more competitive and more productive as a country that is operating within a global economy. We have to compete with everyone else, and this legislation unfortunately takes us back to the seventies. But no surprises because we know what this is about: they are paying the puppetmaster.

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