Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

It won't surprise people to know that the government is opposing the resolution in front of us, but I think that, given the comments just made, it's important to explain why in the view of the government we are pressing the time lines on this. It's important given that this has been raised, and I pay respect to the Manager for Opposition Business; this is absolutely an appropriate use of a suspension. This is not just to blow up the parliament. It's an argument about delay that those opposite have put publicly and are now putting within the parliament.

A few things were said, so I want to explain why the government does have a timetable where we want to get this in front of the Senate when the Senate returns. To be able to do that means it going through the House this week. This resolution, if carried, obviously means it wouldn't go through the House this week and, in fact, couldn't go through the House at all this year. The contributions just made had a few references to the reforms of the Hawke and Keating years. When those opposite talk about those years, they often only talk about the beginning of that time, with the accord where you effectively had the trade-off of wages in return for the social wage. What those opposite rarely talk about—it certainly didn't come up in their contributions—was what happened in the latter part of that period in terms of enterprise bargaining, because it was at that moment that you had a way for wages to move forward and productivity to move forward. The trade-off concept of wages versus social wage no longer had to occur, and you had a serious shift to get wages moving in enterprise agreement. The 14 per cent figure that they refer to is not the 14 per cent figure that I'm really mindful of. The 14 per cent figure that I'm really mindful of is the percentage of the workforce that is on enterprise agreements that are currently in date. That is a huge part of the story of low wage growth over the last 10 years.

There have been attempts, and those opposite have said they introduced legislation to try to get agreements moving, and that's true; in the omnibus bill they did do something that would have potentially caused more agreements. But their way of getting more agreements was to suspend for two years the better-off-overall test. Their way of getting more agreements was to keep the productivity dividend and get rid of the wages part of the equation, allowing wages to go backwards in order to get more agreements. That was never a sensible way, and it simply would have made of the problem that Australians face right now so much worse if the one way of getting wages above awards became a pathway for wages in fact to be below award levels. That was their approach to getting more agreements.

Our approach to getting more agreements is to do a couple of things that make a fundamental difference. The first is to reform how the better-off-overall test works. That's in this bill. Business has been calling for this for a long time. Had this been the only thing the government had put in the omnibus bill when that came through last time, they would have had legislation that could have been supported, because they would have had legislation that in no way drove wages down. But, effectively, what is in this bill in terms of the rejigging of the better-off-overall test is a way of making sure that, if someone is found to fall below it, the commission has the power to fix it for that individual rather than blow up the whole agreement. The reality that you could end up with a whole agreement being blown up has been a key reason why a whole lot of employers have said, 'This system is too complex' and have walked away from it. As they've walked away from it, the productivity benefits haven't been made available for them, and, at the same time that the productivity benefits haven't been made available, the wage rises haven't happened either.

It was amusing, as someone from a small-business family who has run his own small business, being told as I sat there that nobody on this side has run their own business. I was sitting there having run my own business and sitting beside someone who has run his own business. But I will tell you one thing I will never forget that a manager at Kmart told me at one point. He was going through the Kmart agreement and saying to me how good it was to have an agreement that took out all the rubbish in the award that was irrelevant to their workplace and was just a document where every paragraph was relevant. I remember hearing that conversation and thinking that, for the businesses I used to run—and certainly for the business my dad used to run—we never had a chance that simplicity, because we never had an HR department and we never had a chance of an HR department and the only way you would have a pathway to that simplicity is if similar businesses could just hire the one consultant and bargain together. It's the only chance you would ever have of getting a document that will work in those ways.

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